I Hate That I Still Want Her

Chapter2

Chapter 2: What Is Wrong With You

The words hung between them in the concrete garage, bouncing off the low ceiling, off the row of gleaming cars, off five years of silence neither of them had ever properly buried.

What is wrong with you? Amelia said again, louder this time, her voice cracking down the middle like ice under too much weight. After everything I did to you, Ethan. After the way I humiliated you in front of your entire family. After I told you, to your face, that you were never enough. Why can't you just hate me like a normal person?

Ethan felt something in his chest twist violently, half fury, half something far more dangerous. Because I tried, he said. Believe me, Amelia, I have tried for five years. I dated women I didn't care about because at least then I couldn't be disappointed. I moved twice. I sold the apartment we picked out together because I couldn't walk past the kitchen without remembering you burning grilled cheese on a Sunday morning. I built a company out of spite just so I would have something to feel besides missing you. I tried everything a person can try, and none of it worked, so forgive me if five years of failure doesn't just evaporate because you'd prefer it to.

Her jaw trembled. Then you're an i***t, she whispered, and the word had none of the venom she was clearly trying to load into it. It came out broken instead, small.

Probably, he agreed quietly.

For a moment neither of them moved. The garage hummed with fluorescent light and the distant echo of another elevator somewhere on a different bank, and Ethan watched Amelia's carefully constructed composure fight a losing battle against whatever was happening behind her eyes.

You should hate me, she said finally, quieter now, almost pleading. I need you to hate me, Ethan. It would be so much easier if you just hated me.

Why, he asked, and this time it wasn't accusation, it was something closer to desperation. Why does it matter so much to you whether I hate you or not? You made your choice five years ago. You got exactly what you wanted. Why does my hating you matter now?

Something flickered across her face, panic, grief, the ghost of a decision made long ago that she had never once been allowed to explain. It matters, she said, voice barely audible, because it's the only thing that ever made sense of what I did.

Before he could ask what that meant, a car alarm chirped somewhere behind them, and Amelia flinched like she had been struck, blinking hard, visibly hauling herself back behind the wall she had built brick by brick for half a decade.

You don't get to do that, she said, shaking her head slowly, as though trying to physically dislodge the words he had spoken from where they had lodged somewhere behind her ribs. You don't get to stand there after five years and hand me a sentence like that like it costs you nothing. Do you have any idea what you're asking me to survive by saying it out loud in a parking garage like it's small talk?

I'm not asking you to survive anything, he said. I'm telling you the truth, because I'm tired of the version of it I've been telling myself for five years.

Amelia let out a short, humorless laugh that cracked in the middle. The truth. You want to talk about the truth. Fine. Here's a truth for you, Ethan. The version of me you fell in love with on that rooftop doesn't exist anymore. She hasn't existed in a very long time. You'd be wanting a ghost.

Then let me decide that for myself, he said, taking one step closer, close enough now that he could see the faint tremor along her jaw, the effort it took her to hold his gaze instead of looking away. You don't get to make that call for me twice.

Something raw flickered across her face, gone before he could name it, replaced almost instantly by the same brittle composure she had worn like a second skin all night. Twice, she repeated softly, and for a moment it sounded less like an accusation and more like a confession she had not meant to let slip. She caught herself immediately, the way she might catch a glass tipping off a counter, and the sudden, controlled blankness that replaced whatever had almost surfaced told him more than any admission could have. There was a decision behind that word, buried and specific, and he understood with sudden, cold clarity that whatever it was, she had already made it once before, five years ago, in a coat room that still occasionally visited him in dreams he never told anyone about.

This conversation is over, she said, straightening her spine, smoothing invisible wrinkles from her jacket with hands that were not quite steady. We have a professional relationship now, Ethan. That's all this can be. I suggest you remember that the next time you decide to ambush me in a parking garage with declarations you don't mean.

I mean every word, he said.

Then you're a bigger fool than I remember, she snapped, and walked away toward a sleek black sedan parked near the exit ramp, heels clicking sharp and fast against concrete, shoulders rigid with the effort of not running. He watched her go, watched the way her hand shook slightly as she fumbled for her keys, watched her drop them once against the pavement and snatch them back up before he could offer to help, as though accepting even that small kindness from him might be the thing that finally broke her composure entirely.

He almost went after her. His body actually leaned in that direction, some old, well worn instinct dragging him two full steps before his mind caught up and reminded him that he had no right, not anymore, not after everything, to chase a woman who had spent an entire ballroom full of witnesses making sure he understood exactly how little he meant to her. And yet the instinct did not fully release him even after his feet stopped moving. It stayed lodged somewhere under his sternum, a low, insistent pressure that felt disturbingly like hope, which was the one emotion he had promised himself, five years ago in that same coat room, he would never again allow her to provoke in him.

Ethan did not follow her. He stood there long after her taillights disappeared up the ramp, replaying the strange, wrong note in her voice when she said it matters, because it's the only thing that ever made sense of what I did, turning the sentence over and over like a coin he could not quite read the face of.

It made no sense. Cruelty did not require justification five years after the fact. Unless, some traitorous corner of his mind whispered, there had been a reason all along that he had simply never been given.

He thought back, unwillingly, to the weeks before the engagement party, searching his memory the way a man searches a house he thought he knew perfectly for a room he has somehow never noticed before. Amelia had been quieter that summer, he remembered now, quieter and thinner, though he had told himself at the time it was wedding stress, the ordinary exhaustion of a young woman planning a future with two families breathing down her neck. She had cancelled two dinners with vague headaches. She had started wearing scarves even in warm weather, claiming she ran cold. She had cried once, unexpectedly, at a movie that was not sad enough to justify it, and when he asked what was wrong she had kissed him until the question dissolved and he had, like a fool, let it dissolve.

He had noticed the pieces. He simply had never assembled them into a picture, because the picture that finally suggested itself now, standing alone in his penthouse with a drink he still had not touched, was too enormous, too impossible, too late by five entire years to reconcile with the story he had spent that time convincing himself was true.

He thought of her hand at the elevator, thinner than he remembered, cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of a parking garage in early autumn. He thought of the hollows beneath her eyes that no amount of expensive concealer had quite managed to erase. He thought of the flinch, the genuine, unguarded flinch, when he told her he still wanted her, a reaction that had made no sense for a woman who was supposed to have felt nothing for him in half a decade.

He drove home in silence, skipping the radio entirely, some instinct warning him that any lyric at all would feel like it had been written specifically to gut him tonight. His penthouse, when he arrived, felt colder and larger than usual, all glass and steel and expensive emptiness, the kind of place designed to be photographed rather than lived in. He poured a scotch he did not drink and stood at the window overlooking the harbor, the same harbor his family's ships had crossed for three generations, and let himself, for the first time in five years, actually think about her instead of flinching away from the thought.

It's the only thing that ever made sense of what I did.

What did that mean. What had she done that required justification beyond simple boredom, simple cruelty, simple nineteen year old selfishness. He had spent five years assuming the answer was nothing, that she was exactly as shallow and careless as her own words had painted her that night in the coat room. But something about tonight, the hollows in her cheeks, the tremor in her hands, the flinch at a car alarm, the strange, haunted phrasing of it matters, suggested a woman carrying something far heavier than boredom.

His phone buzzed on the counter. A text from his assistant, confirming the signed joint venture paperwork had been filed, followed a moment later by a second message that made his stomach clench for reasons that had nothing to do with contracts.

Sophie Cross just called the office asking for your private line. Says it's urgent, regarding her sister. Should I give her your number?

Ethan stared at the screen for a long moment. Sophie. Amelia's younger sister, the one who used to make him laugh until his ribs hurt at family dinners, the one he had not spoken to in five years because speaking to her had felt like reopening a wound that never fully closed. Sophie, who had stopped answering his calls the week after the engagement party and had never explained why, simply vanishing from his life along with her sister as though the entire Cross family had made a unified, silent decision to erase him.

Give her the number, he typed back, and then sat down heavily on the edge of his couch, phone clutched in one hand, heart hammering with a dread he could not quite name.

The call came eleven minutes later. He answered before the first ring finished.

Ethan, said Sophie's voice, thinner and older than he remembered, threaded with an exhaustion that sounded bone deep. I need you to listen to me, and I need you to not ask questions until I'm finished, because if I stop talking I don't think I'll be able to start again.

Sophie, what's going on.

Please, Ethan. Just listen.

He closed his eyes, gripping the phone hard enough that his knuckles went pale. Okay. I'm listening.

There was a long, ragged breath on the other end of the line, the sound of someone gathering the courage to detonate something they had been carrying for a very long time.

Five years ago, Sophie said, my sister wasn't cheating on you.

Ethan'

s entire body went cold.

She was dying.