Chapter 3

I sat in the corner booth of the dimly lit tavern two blocks from our apartment building, slowly swirling amber whiskey in a lowball glass.

Noah arrived ten minutes early. He had changed out of his work shirt into a dark wool jacket, but the raw tension in his broad frame made him look like a man stepping toward an executioner.

"You texted," Noah said, sliding into the booth across from me.

He studied my face as if twenty years had given him no right to recognize it. "I didn't think you'd ever sit across from me again."

"Twenty years is a long time, Noah," I said softly, letting my voice drop into that low, fragile register we used to share in the dark.

I looked down at my glass, playing the wounded girl who never understood why she was discarded. "I just wanted to know... was any of it real?"

The pain in his eyes was immediate and devastating. He reached across the table, his rough fingers almost touching mine before he pulled back, as if afraid he would burn me.

"Every single second of it was real, Irene," he choked out, his chest heaving. "I loved you more than my own life. Leaving you on that platform was the biggest regret of my existence."

"Then why did you take the money?"

I reached into my purse, pulled out the photo of my father's ledger, and slid it face-up onto the dark wood between our glasses.

Noah looked down at his own name written in my father's ink. His jaw tightened, the muscles along his neck standing out sharp and rigid.

But he didn't look shocked. He looked crushed beneath an old, unbearable weight.

"My father paid you off," I whispered, holding his gaze as a tear slipped down my cheek -- half strategy, half the lingering ache of a girl who had waited all night in the rain. "You took a cash settlement to disappear, and you left me for Gavin."

Noah reached across the table. This time, he didn't hesitate. His palm settled over mine, warm and unsteady.

"That money did not buy my leaving," Noah said, his voice dropping to a low, raw rasp that cut straight through my ribs.

My pulse jumped violently. "Then why did you take it? Why didn't you show up on that platform?"

Noah looked into my eyes for five agonizing seconds. The sorrow in his gaze was suffocating, but his jaw locked tight.

"I can't tell you," he whispered, his voice cracking with agony. "Not yet."

"You took my father's money, Noah!" I pulled my hand out of his grip, my heart fracturing all over again. "And you won't even give me the truth?"

Noah closed his eyes, bowing his head in silence, refusing to say another word.

He thought that was the only secret between us.

What Noah didn't know was that while searching my father's desk that morning, I had found a second transaction slip tucked behind the ledger page.

A private payment cleared forty-eight hours after my father's wire.

Signed not by my father, but in my mother's elegant handwriting.

And written in the memo line were four chilling words that tied Noah Vance to my mother forever:

"You promised me."