The Dare Collection 2018. Taryn Leigh Taylor

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 and now, or try.

      At some point, try.

      “Maybe,” Lorraine agreed, her voice shaky.

      As if it was a promise.

      And Maya felt lighter than she had since she’d left Italy as she walked into the big room, packed tight with colleagues and clients. There was entirely too much speculation in the gazes that landed on her, Lorraine and Ethan on Lorraine’s other side. Everyone got the optics, just as Ethan had wanted.

      She put the smile she’d practiced on her face, she held her head high and she began to work the room.

      After all, she was good at it.

      But there was something missing as she moved from one gleaming knot of people to the next. She could still do her job. She could smile here, insert a witty comment there, act confident and at ease. As if nothing had happened.

      And yet she felt as if she was wearing someone else’s skin. As if she was a puppet, going through the motions.

      This is black-and-white and gray straight through, something whispered inside her when she laughed politely at a very wealthy client’s joke that wasn’t the least bit funny. When what you want to do is shine.

      She snuck away after she’d done an exhausting round of platitudes, evasions and pointed commentary. She made her way down the abandoned, hushed hall, letting herself into one of the executive-level washrooms. It was single use, which meant she could lock the door and take a deep breath in peace before avoiding her own reflection in the mirror.

      Maya didn’t have any business to take care of, so she simply stood there. Wishing she felt more like herself again. Or not herself—but the person she’d been the last time she’d stood on this floor, a year ago at this same party, absolutely certain that she knew every last facet of her beautiful future.

      She let out a hollow laugh at that.

      Then, when she thought she had no choice but to head back into the fray and resume smiling until her cheeks hurt, she marched over and threw open the door.

      And then stopped, because she was apparently having a stroke.

      Or maybe she’d fallen, there inside the washroom, and hit her head so hard that she was seeing things.

      Because the man who stood there didn’t make sense.

      He was dressed in another dark, bespoke suit that licked over that lean, hard physique of his and made him...more, somehow. More dangerous. More beautiful. More him. His dirty-blond hair was raked back from his face, his beard made him look like some kind of pirate and his blue eyes blazed with a dark, consuming fury she could feel like a punch to the gut.

      Because she knew it was all for her.

      “Charlie...” she whispered, unable to make sense of this. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, his body looking relaxed when she could tell that he was nothing close to relaxed. At all. Quite the opposite. “You can’t... How... You can’t be here.”

      “Too bad for you, babe,” he drawled, too much Texas and far too much lethal retribution in his rough, low, gorgeous voice. “Because I am. And that means you’re pretty much fucked.”