Chapter 5 Strange Man

Isla POV

Dinner had gone on long enough.

I had spent the last stretch of it barely present, my mind was somewhere else entirely. Turning over the same question I couldn't stop circling.

How exactly did I die?

I pushed my chair back and stood.

"I should get going," I said simply. "I need to prepare for work tomorrow."

"So soon?" Vivienne's voice was warm with disappointment.

But I caught the faint smirk underneath it.

"You two have each other," I said pleasantly. "Have fun."

Ronan reached for my hand before I could step away, lifting it and pressing his lips to my knuckles with a smile that was probably meant to be charming.

"Don't let work consume you," he said. "Once we're married you won't have to worry about any of that."

I nodded. Too tired to respond properly.

And left.

I sat in my car for a moment with the engine idling, my hands on the wheel, staring at nothing.

What will they do the moment I'm gone?

The thought arrived before I could stop it.

I drove out of my space and moved to a quiet corner of the lot where the shadows swallowed the car whole. I turned the engine off and waited.

It didn't take long.

They came out together, the body language of two people who had stopped pretending when no audience remained.

I couldn't hear a word through the glass but I didn't need to.

Vivienne turned to him as they reached his car, her hand rising to his chest, her lips moving close to his ear.

Ronan's hand found her waist.

He looked at her the way he had never once looked at me.

And then he kissed her.

Not quickly. Not guiltily. He pressed her back against the car door and kissed her like they had all the time in the world and nobody was watching.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel.

I had known. I had seen it with my own eyes once already, in another life, through a door slightly ajar. I had died knowing this.

And it still hurt.

I felt it before I understood it; the wetness on my cheek, the tightening in my throat. I touched my face and stared at my fingers and felt ashamed at my own tears.

Why are you crying? I asked myself. You knew.

But knowing hadn't made it smaller. Six years.

Six years of making myself less so he could feel like more. Of handing him pieces of my life and watching him accept them without ever once asking what it cost me.

I had thought somewhere underneath everything, in the part of me that refused to stop hoping that it meant something to him.

That I meant something.

Ronan opened the car door.

They slipped inside together, still tangled, and I sat in the dark and watched the windows fog slowly and felt my tears spill quietly down my face and didn't bother wiping them.

I wasn't crying for him.

I was crying for the version of me that had loved him anyway. That had given everything and called it love.

She deserved that much at least.

I pulled out of the corner and drove.

I didn't want to go home. The apartment would be too quiet and too small and too full of the life I had built around people who were using me to build theirs.

So I drove to the one destination I could cry loudly in front of no audience.

The abandoned dumpster beach.

-

I parked by the empty pavement and walked hurriedly down the steps toward the beach.

It wasn't much of a beach. Neglected, forgotten, the kind of place the city had stopped maintaining years ago. Waste collected along the shoreline where the waves pushed it in and nobody came to clear it away.

Nobody came here at all.

That was exactly why I liked it.

I walked toward the water, watching the waves move under the moonlight, and finally when there was nothing left to hold it back. I dropped to my knees on the sand.

I removed my glasses. Pulled the band from my hair and let it fall loose around my shoulders.

And then I broke.

I cried the way you can only cry when you're completely certain nobody is watching; ugly and uncontrolled, my hands covering my face, my whole body shaking with it.

For Ronan. For Vivienne. For six years of a life I had quietly dismantled piece by piece to make room for people who were never going to deserve it.

I didn't know how long I stayed like that.

Then I heard footsteps.

I opened my eyes and turned.

Lucian Vale stood a short distance away.

He was in a t-shirt and joggers, visibly mid-run, chest still rising and falling from the exertion. Sweat at his temples. No jacket. No briefcase. No the immaculate CEO the entire country recognized from magazine covers.

Just a man who had apparently chosen the one beach in the city that nobody else used for his evening run.

Of course.

I wiped my face frantically, glasses still in my hand, painfully aware of exactly how I looked: red-eyed, hair everywhere, sitting in the sand of a dumping ground at night like a person making very questionable life decisions.

I couldn't read his expression in the darkness.

"Miss Montclair." His voice was carefully neutral. "Are you crying because of the report deadline?"

The question landed like a slap.

It wasn't cruel. It wasn't even unkind. It was just him. Everything reduced to work. Everything filtered through the only lens he seemed to have for me. And now here I was, falling apart on a beach at night, and his first instinct was to check if it was about a deadline.

It wasn't fair. I wasn't weak. I wasn't having a breakdown over spreadsheets.

Frustration burned through the grief and I spoke before I could stop myself.

"No, Sir." I said sharply. "It's not work related so I'd appreciate it if you kept jogging and left me alone."

I regretted it the moment the words left my mouth.

I just snapped at Lucian Vale. On a beach. At night. While crying.

I braced myself. For the cold authority. For the reprimand. For the quiet precise dismantling of my professionalism that he was so capable of.

Nothing came.

He just stood there in the darkness for a moment.

Then he said, quietly:

"I suppose the ocean does a better job of offering comfort than I do."

I stared at him.

He was - was that a joke?

Had he been joking the whole time? The report deadline question had he said it deliberately just to give me something to push back against?

I blinked at his dark silhouette, completely lost for words.

I didn't understand this man.

I never had.

I hugged myself tightly and exhaled. "I-I'm sorry for snapping at you."

I felt someone settle beside me in the sand and stiffened

I turned to find him right there, close enough that I could see his face clearly in the moonlight for the first time since he'd arrived.

And for goodness sake.

This man was ridiculously handsome. Unfairly, frustratingly handsome. Even sweaty from a run on an abandoned beach at night.

It didn't help that I had spent three years actively disliking him.

"It's fine," he said, staring at the ocean. "I'm glad to know it has nothing to do with work."

I muttered under my breath, "Like I would cry over you."

He turned his head slightly, one brow raised.

I felt my face go hot. "I - sorry. I didn't mean-"

This was so awkward. This was genuinely the most awkward moment of my life and I had already died once.

"S-So," I said quickly, "you jog here?"

"Yes." He looked back at the ocean. "It's quiet. I sometimes try to help clear some of the waste but it's not easy alone."

I glanced at him.

This man Vale Capital Group CEO, heir to one of the most powerful fortunes in the country came to a neglected dumping ground beach in his free time to pick up rubbish.

"I will push the deadline a bit for you, for the rewrite. I can't have a distressed employee working under such circumstances." He added

I turned to look at him, sitting on a rubbish-filled beach at night in his jogging clothes, extending my deadline because he had found me crying.

"T-thank you," I said carefully.

He finally stood, brushing sand from his joggers, and looked down at me with that expression I still couldn't fully read in the darkness.

"Don't stay too long," he said simply. "It's late."

He turned and jogged back the way he came without another word, his figure disappearing into the dark until I couldn't hear his footsteps anymore.

I sat there a moment longer.

Lucian Vale had sat beside me on a rubbish beach. Had made a terrible joke. Had extended my deadline. Had told me not to stay too long like I was someone worth saying that to.

I didn't know what to do with any of it.

I turned back to the ocean. Taking a deep inhale.

Alone with my thoughts once more and the strange interaction with my boss did help a lot.

I smile reluctantly.

What a strange man.