He Called It a Joke. I Called My Lawyers. Chapter 14

One year after the night I was wrapped in plastic, I stood at the top of the London Eye.

Midnight. New Year’s Eve. The whole city spread beneath us in gold and silver, the Thames black and glittering theo had rented an entire capsule. Just us, a bottle of champagne, and a view I’d waited my whole life to see.

“Champagne?” he asked, holding up a glass with a small, careful smile.

I laughed. “Only if it goes in my mouth this time.”

“Noted,” he said. “Strictly oral consumption. I’ll put it in the contract.”

So much had changed in a year.

Whitfield London had posted its best quarter in a decade. The Times had called me “the most quietly lethal executive in the City.” My father had stopped saying my daughter, the heiress and started saying my daughter, the CEO.

The surgeon from Dallas, Dr. Alana Reyes, had launched the Not A Joke Foundation with Grant’s check as its very first donation. Ninety thousand women had signed up in six months. Some of them sent me letters. kept every one in a box on my desk.

I left him. I asked myself your question. Did he ever ask?

He never asked. So I didn’t stay.

Kayla Dunn was serving eight years in a Massachusetts state prison. Her mother sold the house in Scottsdale to pay for appeals. Every single one was denied,

Tyler, Brent, and Josh were on probation. None of them had found work in marketing again. I heard Tyler was selling used cars in New Hampshire. I didn’t feel anything about it. That was how I knew I’d healed.

And Grant…

Diane sent me a Christmas card. Inside was a photo. Grant, standing beside a frozen pond in a red scarf, teaching a group of kids how to lie flat on the ice and reach for each other. He’d started volunteering with the town’s water-safety program.

On the back, in Diane’s handwriting:

He’s sober eight months. He’s learning to say no. He asked me to tell you he’s sorry, and that he isn’t writing to you himself, because you deserve not to have to answer. – D.

I’d stood in my kitche

n and cried for a minute. Not for him. For the seven-year-old boy and the six-year-old girl who’d deserved a better ending.

Then I’d put the card away and gone back to my life.

“You’re thinking about something,” Theo said.

“Just how far I’ve come.”

“Six hundred feet, technically,” he said. “At this exact moment.”

I elbowed him. He caught my hand and didn’t let go.

Below us, the crowds began to count. Ten. Nine. Eight.

“Nora,” Theo said, suddenly very serious.

Seven. Six.

He was reaching into his jacket.

Five. Four.

My heart stopped.

He pulled out a small velvet box. He didn’t kneel. He didn’t make a speech. He just opened it, and looked at me, and waited.

Three. Two.

“I’m not asking you to owe me anything,” he said softly. “I’m asking you if you want this. Only if you want it. You can say no, and I’ll still be here tomorrow.”

One.

Fireworks exploded over the Thames, gold and red and silver, lighting up the whole sky. The capsule glowed.

I’d spent twenty years saying yes to a man because I thought I had to.

This was the first time I got to say it because I wanted to.

“Yes,” I said, “Theo. Yes.”

He slid the ring onto my finger. It fit perfectly. Of course it did. He’d asked my mother my size.

Somewhere far away, a video of the girl on the pillar was still floating around the internet. Ice Queen. Please thaw.

I’d thawed, all right.

Just not for the people who laughed.

I kissed the man who asked, at the top of the world, while the whole city burned bright beneath us.

And for the first time in my life, nobody owed anybody anything.

We were just in love.