Chapter 10
The rain had returned by late afternoon, transforming the city into a watercolor of blurred grey, amber, and indigo.
I stood on the worn wooden floor of *Wild June*, listening to the rhythmic, soothing patter of raindrops against the large display window. The shop smelled of fresh eucalyptus, wet paper wrapping, and damp soil. It was the only smell in New York that had ever felt like home.
On the front counter, next to my brass shears and the spool of green twine, sat the manila folder Ethan had given me in his office.
The dissolution agreement.
His signature was bold and dark at the bottom of the final page, executed in black ink with the same decisive precision he used to command multi-billion-dollar acquisitions. All it needed was my name next to his, and the six months of our marriage would be erased as neatly as an error on a balance sheet.
I had been home for five hours.
The media circus outside Whitmore Tower had moved on. The financial channels were running analytical segments on Marcus Whitmore’s sudden ouster and the triumphant restructuring of the board under Ethan’s sole leadership. Ethan’s photograph flashed across the news ticker every twenty minutes: powerful, untouchable, the undisputed king of Manhattan finance.
Nobody was talking about the downtown florist anymore. The storm had passed, leaving me behind in the quiet wreckage of its aftermath.
Mia had come by an hour ago. She hadn't said much. She had just set down a cup of hot tea, looked at the manila folder on the counter, hugged me tightly, and slipped out the back door, leaving me alone with my silence.
The bell above the shop door chimed.
I didn't look up immediately. “We’re closed for the evening,” I said softly, my hands continuing to strip the thorns from a stem of dark crimson garden roses. “Please come back tomorrow at nine.”
“I don't need flowers, Claire.”
My hands froze. The stem snapped cleanly in my grip.
I looked up.
Ethan stood in the entrance of *Wild June*.
He wasn't wearing his tailored overcoat. He wasn't wearing his suit jacket. He wore a simple, dark cashmere sweater, drenched from the November rain, his dark hair plastered against his forehead. He had no driver waiting outside; through the steamy window, I could see only the empty, rain-slicked cobblestones of Mercer Street.
He had walked.
He stood by the display of potted ferns, breathing hard, looking at me across the small shop as if he were standing at the edge of a cliff.
“Ethan,” I breathed, the word caught in my throat. “What are you doing here?”
“You left the papers on my desk,” he said, his voice rough, stripped of every trace of authority. “Julian brought them to my apartment an hour ago. He said you walked out of the tower without taking the envelope.”
I looked down at the counter, where the identical duplicate of the agreement sat beneath my shears.
“Julian had a copy sent here,” I whispered.
Ethan’s eyes flicked to the folder on the counter, then slowly moved back to mine. His hands hung at his sides, trembling slightly from the cold.
“Then why haven't you signed it?” he asked.
The question hung in the warm, fragrant air of the flower shop, vibrating with terrifying weight.
I set down the broken rose. I took off my canvas apron, folding it neatly, laying it beside the legal document.
“You spent thirty years learning how to build walls, Ethan,” I said, my voice steady despite the violent pounding of my heart. “You built contracts, you built trusts, you built legal clauses to make sure nobody could ever get close enough to see that you were bleeding.”
Ethan didn't speak. He took a single, hesitant step forward, his eyes burning with an agony so pure it made my chest ache.
“You asked me six months ago why I agreed to marry you on a blind date,” I continued, walking out from behind the counter until I was standing three feet in front of him. “I told you it was to protect your employees. I told you it was because you remembered me.”
“And it wasn't?” he whispered.
“It was,” I said, looking up into his dark, rain-drenched eyes. “But it was also because seventeen-year-old Claire, who used to hide in the greenhouse because she thought she wasn't rich enough or pretty enough for your world, never stopped hoping that one day you would look at her the way you looked at the horizon.”
Ethan closed his eyes, a shudder passing through his broad shoulders. When he opened them, tears were spilling down his cheeks, mingling with the rain on his skin.
“I don't want your ten million dollars, Ethan,” I whispered, stepping closer until I could feel the cold dampness radiating from his sweater. “And I don't want a contract that expires in two years. I spent half my life loving a ghost. I won't spend the other half living in a transaction.”
Ethan reached out. His hands were shaking violently as his long fingers cupped my face, his thumbs wiping the moisture from my cheeks with a tenderness that shattered every defense I had left.
“Then tell me what you want, Claire,” he begged, his voice dropping into a broken, desperate plea. “Tell me what you want, and I will tear up every document in that tower. I will give away the shares. I will walk away from Whitmore Capital tonight if that’s what it takes to earn the right to stand in this room.”
I looked up at the man who possessed an empire, standing soaked and defenseless in the middle of a downtown flower shop, offering me everything he was.
Outside, the rain beat steadily against the glass, blurring the lights of Manhattan into soft, luminous halos of gold.
I looked at his hands holding my face.
I looked back at the counter, where the unsigned divorce papers sat beside the shears.
May you like
“Ethan,” I murmured, my hand rising slowly, hesitating between us, hovering over the heavy wool of his sweater just above his racing heart.
The door behind him remained shut against the cold city. The papers on the counter remained unsigned. And between the boy I had loved in secret and the man standing broken before me, the threshold of our entire future hung suspended on the silence of my next breath.
