I Hate That I Still Want Her

Chapter4

Chapter 4: Page Forty

Ethan did not sleep. He spent the hours between Sophie's call and sunrise sitting at his dining table with the joint venture contract spread across the polished wood in front of him, a highlighter in one hand and a growing, cold fury building in his chest with every clause he reread. His legal team had reviewed this document for three weeks. He had reviewed it himself twice. Somewhere in that process, buried under forty one pages of standard language about tariffs, insurance liabilities, and construction timelines, a single paragraph on page forty had slipped past every set of trained eyes in his organization, written in the kind of deliberately bloodless legal language designed specifically to be skimmed rather than read.

He found it at four in the morning, his eyes burning, his coffee gone cold beside him. A trigger clause, tucked into a subsection about capital restructuring contingencies, granting the majority shareholder of a jointly held escrow entity, referenced only by a numbered designation rather than a name, the right to force a full merger of all parties within one hundred and eighty days of any material change in either company's board composition. It was elegant. It was patient. And according to the shareholder registry Sophie had sent him at two in the morning with a single line of text that read I found this, I'm sorry, attached to a PDF that made his stomach drop, the numbered entity in question was ninety one percent owned by Marcus Vale.

Ethan sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time, doing the math on exactly how long a person would need to plan something like this. Years, he realized. Not months. Years of quietly accumulating shares in two competing family companies through shell structures complicated enough to survive a cursory audit, years of positioning himself as a trusted friend to one heartbroken man and a convenient old acquaintance to one guarded, grieving woman, years of waiting for the exact right moment to bring both companies into the same room under the same signature.

He thought about the years right after the breakup, the way Marcus had been the one to call him that first terrible week, the one to take him out drinking, the one to tell him, again and again, that Amelia had never deserved him, that he was better off, that men like them did not need women who could not appreciate what they were building. At the time it had felt like friendship. Looking at the spreadsheet Sophie had sent, it looked instead like a man carefully tending a wound to make sure it never fully closed, keeping Ethan bitter and unattached exactly long enough for a plan five years in the making to finally reach maturity.

He thought of Marcus's easy smile in the conference room the night before, the warmth in his voice when he'd said here she is now, as though introducing two old friends rather than detonating a bomb he had spent half a decade constructing. He thought of the terrace, five years ago, and the calm, unbothered way Marcus had let himself be used as the other man in Amelia's staged betrayal, never once, in five years, correcting the public record, never once telling Ethan the truth even in the drunken, confessional moments men sometimes allow themselves with old friends. He had let Ethan believe a lie for five years because the lie was useful to him.

By six in the morning Ethan had made two decisions. The first was that he would not confront Marcus yet, not until he understood the full architecture of what he was dealing with, because a man patient enough to wait five years for this exact moment was not a man who would panic simply because Ethan Reyes finally noticed the trap. The second decision took longer to reach, and cost him considerably more, because it meant walking back into the one kind of danger he had spent five years training himself to avoid entirely.

He needed to see Amelia. Not because of the contract, though the contract gave him a reason he could say out loud to anyone who asked. He needed to see her because somewhere between Sophie's confession and the gray light now creeping over the harbor outside his window, the architecture of his own heart had quietly rearranged itself around a single, unbearable fact: the woman he had spent five years hating for breaking him had, in fact, spent those same five years fighting for her life while he was busy hating her for it.

Cross Designs occupied four floors of a converted warehouse near the old waterfront, all exposed brick and enormous windows, the kind of building Amelia's father had renovated himself two decades earlier as a passion project before it became the firm's headquarters. Ethan had not set foot inside it in five years. Walking through the front doors at nine in the morning felt like walking into a museum built entirely out of a life he used to have.

The receptionist, a young woman who clearly had no idea who he was, asked if he had an appointment. He did not. He gave his name anyway, watched her eyes widen slightly with recognition a half second later, and waited in a lobby full of framed renderings of buildings that did not yet exist while she made a call he could not hear.

Amelia appeared at the top of the open staircase four minutes later, and even from a distance, even across a lobby full of strangers, Ethan felt the same physical jolt he had felt in that conference room the night before, the specific, humiliating helplessness of a body that had never fully unlearned wanting her.

She did not look pleased to see him. What are you doing here, she said, once she had descended close enough to keep her voice low, arms crossed over a cream colored blouse that made her look, in the honest daylight, even thinner than she had looked under the conference room's flattering evening light. This is a workplace, Ethan, not a parking garage. You don't get to ambush me here either.

I found something in the contract, he said, keeping his own voice level, professional, a tone he hoped would buy him five uninterrupted minutes before she found a reason to throw him out. Something you need to see. It involves both our companies, and I don't think either of us understood what we actually signed last night.

That, at least, earned him a flicker of genuine attention instead of practiced hostility. She studied him for a long moment, some old, familiar calculation moving behind her eyes, the same expression she used to wear negotiating vendor contracts for her father's firm back when she was barely out of college, and finally exhaled sharply through her nose. Fine. My office. Ten minutes. And then you leave.

Her office occupied a corner of the third floor, glass walled, overlooking the water, decorated with the kind of understated confidence that told him she had built this entire firm herself rather than inheriting it fully formed. He noticed, despite himself, a small watercolor propped on a shelf behind her desk, unmistakably her own work, unmistakably a rooftop skyline that looked disturbingly similar to the one where he had once proposed to her under string lights. She saw him notice it and moved, almost imperceptibly, to angle her body between him and the shelf.

He laid the contract on her desk, flipped to page forty, and watched her read the clause he had highlighted in bright, accusing yellow. He watched her face change as she reached the same conclusion he had reached four hours earlier, watched the color drain slightly from cheeks that had already looked too pale to begin with.

This can't be right, she said quietly, reading it a second time. This would mean.

It would mean Marcus can force a full merger of both companies under terms he controls, Ethan said, if either of our boards changes composition within the next six months. Which, given that your father passed and my father passed and both our companies have gone through leadership transitions in the last five years, is a condition that could arguably already be considered met, depending on how aggressively his lawyers want to interpret it.

Amelia sat down slowly in her chair, staring at the page as though it might rearrange itself into something less catastrophic if she looked at it long enough. He's owned shares in both our companies for years, she said, very quietly, more to herself than to him. I knew he had a stake in Cross Designs. My father brought him in as an investor before I even took over. I never thought.

She stopped herself, jaw tightening, and Ethan watched her physically decide not to finish that sentence, watched her fold whatever admission had almost escaped back into the same locked drawer where she apparently kept everything that actually mattered.

Amelia, he said carefully. I know about the diagnosis.

The office went absolutely silent. Amelia's head came up slowly, and the expression on her face was not the fury he had braced for. It was something far more devastating, a kind of naked, exposed terror he had never once seen on her in the entire time he had known her, not even the day she destroyed him at the engagement party.

What did you say, she whispered.

Sophie told me, he said. Last night, after I saw you in the garage. She told me everything, Amelia. The diagnosis, the staging, why you did what you did five years ago. I know you weren't cruel. I know you were dying, and you thought hating you was the only mercy you had left to give me.

Amelia stood up so fast her chair rolled backward and hit the window behind her with a sharp c***k of contact that made them both flinch. Get out, she said, voice shaking violently now, all pretense of professional composure gone entirely. Get out of my office right now.

Amelia.

Five years, she said, and now she was crying, openly, furiously, swiping at her own face like the tears themselves were a betrayal she refused to permit. Five years I let you hate me so you could have a life, Ethan, a real life, not one wasted sitting in waiting rooms wondering if I was going to survive the week. Sophie had no right. No right at all.

She protected you for five years and it nearly broke her doing it, Ethan said, his own voice rising now, unable to stay calm in the face of watching her fall apart in front of him. She's exhausted, Amelia. She's terrified. And so am I, because I just found out the woman I never stopped loving almost died and never let me be there for her, and now some patient, calculating predator has spent five years positioning himself to take everything from both of us the moment he decides the timing is right.

The fight seemed to go out of her all at once, her shoulders collapsing inward, one hand braced against the edge of her desk as though her legs had suddenly become unreliable. I need you to leave, she said, quieter now, barely audible. Please, Ethan. I can't do this right now. I have a scan tomorrow morning and I cannot fall apart today, I need to hold it together, I need.

She stopped. Her hand tightened on the desk. And then, with no warning at all, the color simply drained out of her face entirely, her knees buckled, and Ethan crossed the distance between them in half a second, catching her before she hit the floor, her full weight suddenly and terrifyingly slight in his arms.

Amelia. Amelia, look at me.

Her eyes fluttered, unfocused, her breathing shallow and too fast, and somewhere behind him he heard the office door burst open, heard someone shouting for water, for help, for someone to call an ambulance, and Ethan knelt on the floor of her office holding the only woman he had ever truly loved while her eyes rolled back and her bo

dy went limp against his chest.