Chapter 7 7

Hector left without another word.

Isadora watched him go, his Aston Martin screaming down the drive, gravel spraying from tires that cost more than most people's cars. She stood in the silence he left behind, her scalp stinging where she'd pulled her hair, her hands shaking with delayed adrenaline.

"That was-" Jordi started.

"Necessary." She didn't turn around. "Don't tell me it wasn't. Don't tell me I should have been gentler, should have given him time, should have-" She stopped, her voice cracking. "He called me a fraud. He threatened to have you declared incompetent. He-"

"I know."

She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her to face him. His expression was careful, controlled, but his eyes-his eyes were blazing with something she couldn't name.

"You were magnificent," he said. "I've never-" He stopped, shook his head. "I've spent fifteen years learning to fight in boardrooms, in markets, in the kind of corporate warfare that makes people disappear. And you just-" He laughed, the sound wondering. "You just stood there and dared him to doubt you. With science. With truth. With-"

"With his mother's stubbornness." She pulled away, suddenly exhausted. "I need to sit down."

"Of course. The house is-Mr. Pim prepared the west wing, but if you'd prefer-"

"The master bedroom." She said it firmly, watching his expression flicker. "Our bedroom, Jordi. Unless you've moved someone else in?"

"Never." The word was fierce, immediate. "I've never-there hasn't been anyone. Not since-"

"Show me."

He led her through halls that were familiar and strange, past rooms she'd decorated and rooms that had been reimagined by strangers, until they reached the double doors at the end of the west wing. He pushed them open, stood aside, let her enter first.

It was exactly as she remembered.

The four-poster bed, draped in linen she'd chosen from a catalog on a rainy afternoon. The windows overlooking the garden, the ones she'd insisted on despite the security concerns. And above the fireplace, in a simple wooden frame that cost nothing and meant everything-

The lighthouse.

She crossed to it immediately, her fingers finding the familiar brushstrokes, the slightly crooked perspective that proved he'd painted it himself. The only light you ever needed. She'd teased him for weeks about that inscription, about the sentimentality he'd hidden beneath his polished exterior.

"It's been here," Jordi said behind her. "Every day. Every night. I couldn't-I tried to take it down once, in the first year. Hector found me holding it, and he-" His voice caught. "He didn't speak to me for a month."

She turned. He was closer than she'd expected, close enough to touch, his expression raw and unguarded in a way she hadn't seen since the bathroom.

"You should have told him," she said. "Told them. About how you searched, about what you-"

"That I spent a fortune chasing shadows? That I bankrupted three different research foundations on the slimmest of hopes? They would have locked me up, Issy. Hector almost tried." He stopped, his jaw working as he swallowed down the darkest parts of the last fifteen years, the parts he knew would terrify her. "There are ledgers I burned, Issy. Things I'm not proud of. Ways I tried to find you that I can't-"

"Tell me."

"Not yet." He reached for her hand, his fingers threading through hers with desperate care. "Please. Not yet. Let me have this. Let me have you back, just for a little while, before I have to explain how broken I became without you."

She looked at him-the man he'd become, the damage he'd carried, the love that had survived somehow, impossibly, through fifteen years of grief and madness.

"Okay," she said. "Not yet. But soon, Jordi. You can't-" She squeezed his hand. "You can't build a future on secrets. Not again. We tried that before, and it nearly destroyed us."

He nodded, his eyes suspiciously bright. "Soon," he agreed. "I promise."

They stood in silence, hand in hand, watching the afternoon light move across the painting of their beginning.