at her law firm and found it a whole lot easier to smooth things over than she had expected it to be. Of course she and Ethan could work together, and seamlessly. Of course there would be no “unfortunate romantic blowback” on the firm. Of course everything could carry on as it always had, because that was what the firm wanted most. But then, Maya didn’t want revenge. She didn’t want anything from Ethan. She wanted to move on from him as if he had never happened.
And in the meantime, she had to figure out how to live in the black-and-white world she’d created for herself when inside she still felt wild and raw with color. Bleeding with it. Dreaming in Technicolor at night and waking up with tears on her cheeks, a weight where her heart should have been and that terrible, aching fire between her legs.
It didn’t help that it was the darkest part of the year. She tried to lose herself in the Christmas lights that fought off the night, telling herself they were a promise that the sun would return. That she would, too, if she held on long enough.
Sometimes she even pretended she believed it.
But she’d returned to Toronto. She had chosen to resume her real life—the one that had nothing to do with staggering Italian vistas or a man who roamed about the cliffs of the Amalfi coast like a lion in blue jeans. That meant she couldn’t hide from her responsibilities, and this time of year was all about duty and putting on a brave face no matter her internal battles.
She had two parties to attend and no interest in either one of them. There was the law firm’s annual holiday party, where no one had originally expected her to make an appearance because she’d been supposed to be off on her honeymoon. But of course, they all knew she was back by now. They would whisper if she didn’t show up with a calm smile on her face, exuding the sort of competence that was expected of her.
After all, she was supposed to be a high-powered attorney. That meant she was expected to be unflappable—and what better way to prove it than this?
As if that wasn’t enough, there was also her parents’ annual Christmas Eve party, where she would also need to parade about in front of so many of her parents’ friends and business associates, all of whom had been sitting in that chapel waiting for a wedding that didn’t happen.
She would have to somehow spin her failure into triumph, her personal mess into strength—because she was a Martin. That was what was expected.
But as Maya lay there in the guest room in Melinda’s tastefully stark and minimalist house, accented with important investment art, she honestly didn’t know if she had it in her.
And she realized it was the first time in all her life that she hadn’t simply assumed that she could do whatever was expected of her, somehow. If she worked hard enough. If she extended herself. If she was too afraid of the consequences to fail.
It all left a sour taste in her mouth, if she was honest.
But if she had intended to shirk her duties, she would have stayed in Italy with the only man—the only person—she’d ever met who could make her forget herself entirely.
And delightfully.
She had come home to Toronto, so she dressed for her company party with exquisite care even though she would have preferred to stay in bed with the covers over her head like the teenager she’d never been. She chose a sparkling gown that skimmed over her curves but showed almost nothing. Because there was a power in restraint.
And she needed to assure everyone she knew that despite what had happened, she had all the power.
She practiced her chilly, faintly pitying social smile all the way over in her taxi. It was an expression she had learned at her frosty mother’s knee and intended to employ with impunity tonight. After all, it was up to her to show how deeply unbothered she was by the wreckage of her personal life. It was up to her to act as if she was the one in control, no matter that she was the one who had been left at the altar.
It didn’t surprise her in the least that the first people she saw when she walked into the firm’s self-consciously glamorous party, up there on its glittering top floor with views all over Toronto, were Ethan and Lorraine.
Looking significantly more pulled together than the last time she’d seen them, half-asleep in the condo.
“Let me guess,” Maya said as she handed over her coat at the door. “You decided to wait for me. So we could make a calm, amiable entrance together.”
“You know how important it is to get the optics right,” Ethan bit out at her.
Very much as if Maya was the one who had caused an optics problem in the first place.
She opened her mouth to remind him that the optics had not been awesome when he’d abandoned her on their wedding day with most of the people he was so worried about sitting out there in the chapel, but reminded herself that, really, she didn’t care.
Truly. Deeply. She didn’t care enough to fight with him. She didn’t care enough to try to make him feel bad when she knew he didn’t. She might never understand how she could have imagined herself in love enough to marry him one day and void of any feeling for him at all so soon after, but she didn’t have to.
What she knew was that she was free of him, whatever that meant, good and bad and everything in between.
Maya contented herself with rolling her eyes at Ethan and started toward the party. Then paused when she felt Lorraine’s hand on her arm.
“Maya. Please. You know... You know I don’t care about optics.”
Ethan bit off Lorraine’s name. Maya looked down at her best friend’s hand, then up to her face. And it was still so...familiar. She knew the back of Lorraine’s hand better than she knew her own.
Was this what she wanted? That tortured expression in Lorraine’s gaze? Finally, the kind of self-awareness she’d always been certain her friend could never—would never—possess? Or the grief that hung between them?
The way, Maya thought then, it always would. For who they’d been. And worse maybe, who they hadn’t been to and for each other.
“We can’t go back, Lorraine,” she said softly. “You must know that.”
“I know it,” Lorraine replied, her voice thick. “I do.” But she shook her head, in a show of restraint that Maya would have said she didn’t possess. “Of course I know it. I just... I’m sorry.”
She squeezed Maya’s arm a little when she said it, as if to underscore the apology. Then let go.
And Maya didn’t know what came over her then. She was the one who reached out and caught Lorraine’s hand before she could pull it back. Only for a second. Just enough to get her friend’s attention.
“There’s no way back, but that doesn’t mean that someday, some way, maybe we might find a way forward,” she heard herself say. And nothing in her rebelled at that notion, so she thought it was possible she meant it. “Maybe.”
Lorraine’s gaze met hers, bright with emotion and all their shared history. All those years. The particular language and vast world they’d created between the two of them, the geography of which only they would ever know.
Their whole, complicated life together, which Maya could either cast aside forever, here
