Chapter 7
It finally came together for me.
All that work he had been buried in was him pulling levers.
He had gutted Sutton Holdings and taken the whole family down with it.
Emma's father ran that company, and Stephen had put him behind bars.
The meeting he had just walked out of was about splitting what was left of it among his partners.
For years he had loved Emma and treated her family like royalty.
Watching him do this left me stunned.
Emma swayed once, and then her knees went and she hit the floor.
The fury drained out of her eyes and left nothing behind at all.
"Why? Why would you do this? You said you loved me."
Stephen looked down at her like she was a joke somebody had told badly.
The glance lasted a second before he looked away, and then he walked out of the room.
His assistant followed with the jacket over one arm.
The tension he had been carrying for weeks came off his face.
He walked into the elevator lighter than I had seen him move in years.
He didn't even wait for the doors to open again before he started giving orders.
"Clear the next week and book me a flight to Dunmere. I'm going to see Aly."
Then he added more, and he couldn't seem to wait.
"Book it now. Earliest one you can get. Everything else waits a week."
I listened to him say it without a second of hesitation and could hardly take it in.
I had been so sure he could never guess where I had gone.
Picking Dunmere had been almost random.
Only then did I remember that he had said the name to me once.
It was the night before I left, the night he took me home.
Afterward he held me and told me the winters in Dunmere were warm.
He said I hated the cold, and that he would take me down there for the holidays.
Then he announced the engagement with Emma.
I left in a hurry and never once thought about anything he had said.
Or maybe some part of me had kept it, and that was why I ended up there.
The assistant moved fast and got him on a flight that night.
Stephen skipped the office that afternoon and went home to pack.
The house he went to was ours.
*****
Stephen and I had come to Riverside City together.
He bought that place on a payment plan and called it the house we would start our marriage in.
Then Emma got tangled up in all of it, and whatever was left between us kept getting worse.
I hardly ever set foot in it after that.
He came through the door and went upstairs.
Something in him was lit up.
He almost never smiled, and now he couldn't keep it off his face.
He took the stairs fast, pushed open the bedroom door, and went straight into the closet.
The second I followed him in, I stopped where I was.
Rack after rack ran down both walls, with glass cases built in between them.
They were packed with dresses, shoes, bags, and jewelry.
In the middle of all of it hung a white wedding gown.
It was the one from the screen at the mall, the year I turned 19, when Stephen and I first got to the city.
The screen had said it was the designer's favorite piece and that it wasn't for sale.
I hadn't been able to look away from it.
Stephen had held on to my hand in all that foot traffic. "You'll wear it one day, Aly."
After he threw me away and took up with Emma, something happened to my memory.
Every small proof that he had once loved me went out of it, a piece at a time, until there was almost nothing left.
Standing in that closet, all of them came back.
My eyes burned, and I couldn't work out what he thought he was doing.
What was any of this supposed to mean?
Stephen looked around at everything in there, and something huge and strange lit up in his face, half excitement and half waiting.
He got his phone out to call his assistant.
A call came in before he could dial.
His thumb was already on the screen, and he must have slipped, because he picked up.
A voice he didn't know came through, careful and halting, the way people talk when they're reading off a form.
"Am I speaking with Mr. Stephen Foster?"
Stephen had a flight to catch, and the impatience showed.
He was about to hang up when the voice went on.
"Are you family or a friend of a Miss Alysha Grant?"
His hand stopped dead and his face changed. "Yes. Where is she?"
The voice on the other end went heavy. "Sir, I'm very sorry to have to tell you this.
"Two months ago, Miss Grant died in her rented apartment in Dunmere.
"The cause was an electrical fire that started inside the unit..."