Chapter 299

[ 1,099 words ]

Katia’s POV

I was reviewing the Brooklyn shipyard contract amendments when someone knocked on my office door.

I set my pen down and told them to come in.

The door opened and Jude Wolfe walked in carrying a large bunch of white roses. He was in a dark suit, his jaw still showing the last of the healing, his hair carefully styled. He held the flowers in one hand with the slight awkwardness of a man who did not make a habit of carrying them and was aware of how it looked on him.

I stood up and stepped around the desk.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

He did not answer straight away. He looked at my face first, taking in the fading bruise on my cheek and the healed line of my lip. Something shifted in his expression that I had not expected to see on the face of Jude Wolfe. It was not confidence or calculation or the cold composure he had shown me every other time we had been in the same room. It was shame. Quiet and real and sitting on him heavily.

He closed the distance between us and took my hand in both of his. Then he went down on one knee.

I stared at him on the floor of my office and could not find a single word.

This was the man who had used a cloned keycard to walk into my apartment. Who had grabbed my wrist and threatened my son and hit me hard enough to put me on the floor. He was on his knees in front of me now with white roses and a face I did not recognize from any of those moments.

“I am so sorry,” he said.

His voice was the quietest I had ever heard it. His accent was still there, but the weight behind it had changed. It was stripped of everything except the words themselves.

“When I saw the marks of another man on you, I acted foolishly,” he said. “That was wrong. Seven years is a long time, and I should have understood that you had a life. That you could not have waited for me forever. I was wrong, and I knew it the moment I did it, and I have not stopped knowing it since p>

I said nothing. There was nothing yet that I could say.

A tear slipped from his left eye, and he did not wipe it away. He let it go, which told me something. A man performing an apology would have controlled the tear. He did not.

And then he broke, just quietly and completely, the way things broke when they had been held too tightly for too long. His shoulders dropped slightly, and the rest of the tears came, and he kept his eyes on me while they did.

“It kills me to know what I did to you,” he said. “A man should never raise his hand to a woman. Not ever. What I did to you in that office was wrong in every way I can think of. Julian Windsor was right to beat me to my senses. I deserved everything he gave me and more p>

I looked down at him on the floor of my office.

“Please forgive me,” he said. “I want my family. I want to get to know my wife. I will not demand anything from you, and I will not put conditions on any of this. We are two imperfect people who came together under imperfect circumstances, and I am not standing here asking for perfection. I am only asking you not to close the door on me. Please. Do not shut me out p>

The office was very quiet around us.

I stood there with my hand in his and thought about seven years. About a ring I was wearing, I thought about all the years I have carried it since Vegas. About a name, I had been calling Jules in my head for so long it had become something fixed inside me, not quite a person anymore, more like a shape, an outline, the idea of someone who had left and taken nothing with him except the space he used to be in.

Jude Wolfe was on his knees in front of me, and he was not Jules.

I did not know what he was.

But the tears were real, and the shame was real, and the apology had nothing in it that I could find a strategy inside. It was just what it was. A man who had done something terrible asking not to be defined entirely by it.

“Get up,” I said.

He looked up at me.

I accepted the flowers.

“It is okay,” I said carefully. Not a full forgiveness because I was not there yet and I was not going to pretend I was. But a door left open rather than shut. “Let us get to know each other p>

Jude stood up. He looked at me with the careful attention of a man who understood he had been given something he had not earned and was not going to waste it.

“Your mother invited us to dinner this weekend,” he said. “Can we start from there p>

I thought about that for a moment. Martha had gone to see him. Of course she had. Martha Kensington did not wait for anything to come to her when she could go to it instead.

I nodded.

Jude leaned forward and pressed his lips to my forehead. It was brief and careful and asked for nothing. Then he straightened and looked at me one more time and left.

I stood in the middle of my office holding white roses and looking at the closed door.

I set the flowers on the edge of my desk and went back to my chair and looked at the contract amendments on my screen without reading them for a long moment.

I thought about Julian. The way he looked at me in every room we had ever shared together. The way he drove a matching car into a service exit at midnight without being asked. The way he sat at the edge of my bed and said things quietly enough that they barely existed in the air between us.

The dinner this weekend was going to put Jude and Julian in the same room.

The back of my neck went cold thinking about it, and I could not have explained why even if someone had asked me to.

I picked up my pen and went back to work.

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