In bed with Havoc

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

AVA

I opened the file.

The first entry was dated five years ago, three weeks after I left for college, and it started mid-thought like he'd been having a conversation in his head for so long that writing it down was just the overflow.

“I saw your name in the campus paper. A small article of barely two hundred words, about the university's handling of a noise complaint. You made it read sound like they were not doing anything about the noise because those kids were from rich homes. So bold, I loved it. I read it four times.”

I stared at the screen and blinked. What the hell?

Why did he watch me when he was the one who chased me away?

I kept reading.

The entries came in clusters, sometimes three in a week, sometimes nothing for two months, and the gaps told their own story, the times he'd been able to stay away and the times he hadn't. He wrote about my first major byline, a piece on city council corruption that ran on page three of a paper nobody outside the industry cared about, and he wrote about it like it was the front page of everything.

“I bought a physical copy. I don't know why. I don't normally keep things butI kept that.”

My hands were not entirely steady at this point but I kept going.

He wrote about a gala in DC three years ago, a political fundraiser I'd attended to chase a source. I remembered that night, the overcrowded room, the bad champagne and the senator who'd kept trying to redirect my questions but I had not once, not for a single second, thought Ryder Kane was anywhere near that building.

“You were in the corner by the east entrance for most of the night. In a green dress, hair up. You had your recorder in your left hand and your phone in your right and you were watching the room with a look that suggested that you were already writing the piece in your head. I stayed on the opposite side all evening. You almost saw me twice but I moved both times.”

I pressed my fingers against my mouth to hold in the sound that threatened to escape.

He wrote about the break-in at my Brooklyn apartment which not even my family knew about. He had stalked me for years.

“I had three men there inside an hour but you never knew. You walked out with your emergency bag and your burner phone but you surprisingly looked calm from the outside while I watched you on the street camera and I knew you weren't calm and I wanted to—”

The sentence ended there.

I closed the laptop.

Sat in the dark for a minute.

Opened it again.

The next entry was about Melissa in an entry dated four and a half years ago.

“ stood at that altar and all I could think about was that morning in my kitchen. The way you lifted your chin and said congratulations with a shaky voice which made me know that you were on the brink of tears and trying to be strong. I left Melissa because I couldn't make promises to someone else when I'd already made every one I was capable of to a girl who hated me. She deserved better than a man whose hands were already full of someone he'd never have. So did you. That's the part I keep coming back to.”

I was crying before I finished reading the sentence.

I didn't notice until a tear hit the back of my hand and I looked down at it then pressed my palm flat against my sternum because something in there was coming apart and I didn't know how to stop it. The wall that had been load-bearing for five years finally giving up.

I closed the laptop again. It was all too much.

This time I put it on the nightstand and pulled my knees to my chest, sat against the headboard in the dark and just breathed because breathing was the only thing I was capable of managing.

He had been at that gala. Three feet away, maybe less, and I hadn't known and he'd moved so I wouldn't see him and then come home and written about the green dress and the recorder in my left hand while I had gone home that night and ordered takeout and complained to my empty apartment about the senator's evasions.

I hadn't known any of it.

Five years of silence, distance and coldness and underneath all of it this, pages and pages of this, a conversation he'd been having with me for years without my knowledge or consent. I didn't know if I was furious or devastated and honestly? the answer was both but the devastation was louder right now and I hated that, I wanted the fury because it was easier to stand on.

I opened the laptop one more time.

The last entry was dated a few weks ago, the night before I arrived, and it was three lines.

“Her name came up in the Vargas intercepts. I've been waiting for this and I always knew it would happen bu I still wasn't ready. I'm not ready yet. I don't think I'm going to be ready.”

I read it twice trying to understand what he wasn't ready for.

Then I closed the laptop for the last time and got off the bed then walked out of my room before I could talk myself out of it.

The hallway was empty except for the guard at the far end who watched me pass without stopping me because by the lokon my face, he knew that stopping me would be a disaster.

His door was at the end of the east corridor. I stood in front of it at two in the morning with red eyes and wet cheeks then I knocked.

A pause. T hen footsteps and the door opened and he was still dressed, no jacket but otherwise put together, like he hadn't been sleeping either. He looked at my face and I watched him take in the red eyes, the wet cheeks and the way I was holding myself together with nothing but stubbornness and he said nothing.

Not a word. f**k him.

"You had five years," I said and my voice was steadier than I expected, "to say any of that."

"I know."

"Any of it, Ryder. Even if it was one sentence. Just one."

"I know."

"Why didn't you?”

He was quiet for a moment then said, "Because you were better off without me."

I stared at him and finally, all the fury came rushing back.

"You don't get to decide that." I said. “f**k you, Ryder. I wish you feel all the pain you caused me years ago, a thousand fold. I want you to suffer because I'll never forgive you.”

Then I turned and walked away not once did I look back. I didn't stop until I got t my room and shut the door behind me.

He never hated me.

That was the part I couldn't stand.