Hadley drew a shuddering breath. “My apartment’s upstairs,” he said. “Just let me make sure my people have everything under control.”
Miriam slipped inside the door and leaned on the frame, watching the easy way he interacted with his employees. He glanced back at her with a little smile, and her nerve ends lit up in response.
She smiled, her fingers playing with her waterdrop chain, looping it around her fingers, savoring the anticipation. She hadn’t felt like this since that morning, how many years ago, when Teo had whispered in her ear …
Teo.
The locket burned her skin. She let go, but in all her worrying the chain, it had gotten tangled around her fingers. She had to shake it to get free. What was she doing? She was supposed to be out here to honor Teo, not to hook up with the first available guy who showed some hint that he understood what she was going through.
Inside the building, Hadley murmured to one of his employees. A low reply, a raucous laugh. Was he gloating about his conquest already?
Don’t freak out. Not everyone was like Gus von Rickenbach. But suddenly, she felt cheap.
Miriam pulled Talia’s sweater tight around her and slipped out the front door. She stumbled down the sidewalk, Teo’s words chasing her back to the hotel, a whisper on repeat in her brain: “You saved me. You saved me.
“You saved me.”
34
Twelve years earlier
Atlanta, Georgia
THE DAY BLAISE AND Talia headed off to kindergarten, Miriam and Teo walked them to school and waved until the door closed behind them. Then they returned slowly back home. Miriam stopped at the base of the porch steps. The street felt empty, and so did her body, like a burden had just been lifted, one she hadn’t even been aware she was carrying. She tried to remember the feel of tandem nursing them, to recreate the visceral terror, the certainty that those floppy necks would break, that they’d be dead or brain damaged, and it would be her fault. But the sensation was gone as surely as the babies they’d been. All the sacrifices she’d made for such a brief blip on the radar. Plenty of years of parenting remained, but she hadn’t expected this milestone to feel so … monumental.
Not until Teo’s arms encircled her from behind did she feel her body shuddering, the tears sliding down her cheeks. He turned her around and cupped her face, kissed her cheeks, stroked her lips with his thumbs. He’d never touched her like this—with a trembling in his limbs and a sense of power barely restrained. “Mira,” he whispered into the juncture of her neck and shoulder, and her body responded without waiting for permission from her mind. She was drowning in his kisses, her limbs wrapped around him, as she floated up the porch steps with her head flung back, blind and deaf from the glory of the newborn sun and the blood pounding in her ears.
The whisper of the air conditioner caused the seashell wind chimes hanging in the corner to shiver. The sunlight slanting through the window hit the water glass on the nightstand and shattered into a thousand points of light that bounced around the room with the vibration of their lovemaking.
Only when it was over, when Teo, flung back against the sheets like a man utterly spent, tried and failed to speak, did Miriam process what had just happened. That was not the intimacy she’d known, these past five-and-something years. What she’d once expected to be painfully awkward turned out to be quite natural—even, at times, enjoyable. But this was like nothing she’d ever experienced. She felt naked—vulnerable—her very soul exposed. It terrified her.
“Mira?” Teo pushed himself up on one shoulder, curling a lock of her hair around his finger. “I don’t think I ever told you, but that day you walked into my cubicle, you saved me.”
She turned her face toward him, frowning, her skin still hypersensitive to the warmth of the sunlight falling across her bare breast. She’d saved him?
“That morning, they’d offered me a place in the management training program. I didn’t want it. You know how I hated working there, but it was so much money. More than my parents could ever have imagined. Everything they wanted for me, the reason they left me in America. I felt like I had to take it. I was begging God for another option. And then … there you were. You’d come to me. It felt like the answer to my prayer.”
He caught her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it. “I know this wasn’t how you envisioned your life,” he said, “but I’ve loved you since the first summer I met you. I will spend the rest of my life loving you, every moment, if you’ll only let me.”
It was like a moment from Austen or Brontë. Miriam should have been melting into his arms, but all she felt was dread. Love in real life wasn’t like it was in books. Gus and her parents had taught her that. Those “loves” had turned out to be a sham. Why should this one be any different?
And yet she knew Teo deserved better than such jaded thinking. What she saw in his eyes right now was a kind of love she’d never experienced and didn’t know how to reciprocate. Why he’d chosen her, she’d never understand. He’d stepped into the mess and redeemed a situation she’d thought unredeemable. He saw the best in her and managed to bring it out simply by being himself.
She wanted to do right by him. She wanted to be capable of looking at him the way he was looking at her right now.
Could she
