The Ticket Was Never for His Mistress Chapter 11

The Ticket Was Never for His Mistress Chapter 11

Brooke was arraigned three days later.

Forgery. Wire fraud. Extortion.

Her lawyer tried to argue she was “an impressionable young woman groomed by a powerful older man.”

The judge didn’t buy it. Neither did the internet.

Someone found her old TikToks. “How to make your boss obsessed with you in 30 days.” She’d posted it six

months before she was hired.

Bail was set at two hundred thousand dollars.

Nobody paid it.

I was back in London, curled on my couch with a heating pad on my back, when Tessa called.

Tessa had been my college roommate. The only friend I’d kept through seven years of Grant.

“Hazel. Are you sitting down?”

“I’m pregnant, Tess. I’m always sitting down.”

She didn’t laugh.

“It’s Grant.”

My hand stopped moving on my stomach.

“He went to the garage. The one in Palo Alto. Where you started. He’d been drinking all day. His neighbor saw

him sitting on the floor in there, talking to himself. Saying your name.”

“Tess.”

“He tried to drive home. He hit a guardrail on 280.”

The room went very quiet.

“Is he-”

“He’s alive. But his leg is crushed. They put in rods. The doctors say he might never walk without a cane.”

I sat there. Holding the phone.

I waited to feel something.

Grief. Satisfaction. Guilt.

What I felt was the kind of sadness you feel for a stranger in a news story. Real, but distant. Like watching

rain on someone else’s window.

“His mom’s been calling everyone,” Tessa said. “She wants you to come. She says he keeps asking for you when he’s on morphine. Calling for ‘Haze.”

Haze.

Nobody else called me that. Only him. Only in the early years.

“I’m not going, Tess.”

“I know, honey. I just thought you should hear it from me.”

After we hung up, I sat in the dark for a long time.

Then my phone rang again. An unknown U.S. number.

I almost ignored it. I didn’t.

“Hazel.” A woman’s voice, trembling. “It’s Linda.”

Grant’s mother.

The woman who’d told me at my wedding, “Thank God he found someone sensible.” The woman who’d never

once called me since.

“He’s asking for you. He won’t eat. He just stares at the ceiling. Please. You’re the only one who can-”

“Linda.”

She stopped.

“Did you know about Brooke?”

A long, guilty silence.

“He brought her to Easter,” she whispered. “He said she was his assistant. She was sweet. I thought… I thought you were too busy with work to come.”

I’d been in the hospital that Easter. Food poisoning. Grant had told me he’d tell his mother.

He’d brought Brooke instead.

hope he gets better, Linda,” I said quietly. “I truly do. But he’s not my responsibility anymore.”

“He’s the father of your baby.”

“Yes. And when she’s born, he can meet her. If he’s sober. If he earns it.” I paused. “But I will never again be the woman who puts herself back together so that he can fall apart.”

I hung up.

There was a knock on my door an hour later.

Rhys. Of course.

He didn’t have food this time. He just stood there in the hallway, rain on his hair.

“Tessa called me,” he admitted. “She said you shouldn’t be alone tonight.”

“She’s a menace.”

“She’s a good friend.”

He didn’t come in until I stepped aside.

He made tea. Ginger. He’d learned how I liked it. Two slices, a little honey. He sat on the far end of the couch,

not touching me.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Do you want to watch something terrible?”

I almost smiled. “Yes.”

We watched a reality show about people renovating castles in Scotland. He made fun of their accents. His

own accent came out thicker every time, until I was laughing so hard I had to hold my stomach.

Halfway through, the baby kicked.

The first time. A tiny flutter, like a butterfly inside a jar.

I gasped.

Rhys was on his feet in a second. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Tears filled my eyes. “She kicked. She kicked, Rhys.”

His face went soft in a way I’d never seen.

“Can I-”

He stopped. Didn’t finish.

I took his hand and placed it on my stomach.

We waited.

She kicked again.

Rhys Callahan, a man who’d built a billion–dollar company from nothing, stood in my living room with his hand on my belly and looked like he’d just seen a miracle.

“Hello, little one,” he whispered.

And something in my chest, something I thought had died in a kitchen in San Francisco, turned over and quietly began to breathe.