Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Only she could lift it.
And she was gone.
God, please.
The words formed in his mind before he could stop them, and he didn't stop them. He didn't want to stop them. The man who'd spent his entire life politely declining every invitation to faith, who had smiled and redirected and maintained his comfortable distance from the thing that had transformed his father and his brother and the woman he loved, that man was gone. Dissolved. Left behind in the elevator somewhere between the fifty-second floor and the realization that he was not, in fact, the center of his own universe.
I know I messed up.
Not eloquent. Not the kind of prayer his wife would construct, with its green-highlighted commands and its blue-highlighted references and its earnest, organized devotion. This was raw. This was a man on a couch in an empty office with his head in his hands, talking to someone he'd spent thirty-one years ignoring.
I know I was too proud.
The pride was the core of it. The pride that said: I will never need anyone. I will never be broken the way they were broken. I will build a life so controlled that loss cannot touch me. And the pride had worked, and the pride had cost him everything, and the cost was a girl in Mary Janes who loved him with a completeness that terrified him, and he'd answered that love by bringing her to a dinner and using her goodness to close a deal.
But I want to believe it's never too late.
He wanted to believe it the way Chelsea believed it, not as a hope but as a fact, a green-highlighted command from a God who didn't make mistakes, who had placed a girl in an elevator and a man behind her and a braid coming undone at the nape of her neck and nine days that were always going to end here, with him on this couch, talking to the ceiling.
I want to believe You're the God of many chances.
Because he needed more than one. He needed a God who looked at a man who'd spent his whole life building walls and said: again. Who looked at the wreckage and said: still. Who looked at the empty room and the cold tea and the capless highlighter and the wife who was gone and said: not yet.
So please.
I'm begging You.
Please, Father—-
A door opened.
His head jerked up, pulse slamming against his ribs, thinking it was his staff, thinking someone finally had news, thinking—-
But the door to his office remained closed.
The sound had come from behind him.
He knew what he'd heard. The soft click of a handle turning, the whisper of hinges, a sound so small that he shouldn't have been able to hear it over the hum of the building and the blood in his own ears, and yet he'd heard it, the way he heard her footsteps, the way he heard everything about her whether he wanted to or not.
"Olivio?"
His body moved before his mind caught up.
He was on his feet and turning with a speed that nearly cost him his balance, and disbelief locked every joint rigid, because Chelsea was standing in the doorway.
Not the office door.
The other doorway. The one that connected his office to the private bedroom adjoining it, the room he'd mentioned to her once, in passing, on their third night, when she'd asked why there was a door behind his bookcase that she'd never seen him open.
She'd been here.
The entire time.
The entire time he'd been pacing this office, calling in favors across two continents, exposing his heart to every person he knew, mobilizing the combined resources of the Cannizzaro and Marchetti networks to search a city of three million people—-
His wife had been twenty feet away, asleep in his bed.
And when he took it all in, her appearance, the mussed hair, the braid half-undone the way it was always half-undone but more so now, as if sleep had finished what her restless hands had started, the rumpled clothes, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed and blinking against the office light with the dazed confusion of someone surfacing from a depth they hadn't planned to reach—-
She was looking at him the way she'd looked at him on Day One. Like he was something she couldn't quite believe was real.
Except this time, her eyes were full of tears.
Chapter Eleven
CHELSEA CURLED HERSELF into a ball and just breathed. She had been here for hours. The tears on her cheeks had already dried, but her heart had yet to stop breaking.
It hurts so, so much, God.
His scent was all around her, and this...made sense. This was his room, after all.
But what didn't make sense at all?
The fact that she'd come to this room in the first place.
I feel so pathetic, God.
Her body curled up in an even smaller ball at the thought, almost like it was trying to shrink into nothing. Shame was eating her alive. All the memories that used to make her smile and feel loved—-everything now felt so terribly, humiliatingly fake.