Married to the Gay Billionaire, Still in Love with My Ex

Clara The rain had stopped by the time Ethan pulled me onto the rooftop of his apartment building, but the city still smelled like wet concrete and possibility. He had strung up a single line of fairy lights along the railing, the kind you buy in a dollar store, and somehow it was more beautiful than anything my mother's decorators had ever built for one of her parties. "Close your eyes," he said. "Ethan, it's freezing." "Humor me. Five years and you still don't trust me?" I closed my eyes. I heard the small click of a box opening, felt the warmth of his hand find mine. "Okay. Open them." It was a ring, but not the kind my family would have approved of. Thin silver band, no stone, the metal a little uneven where he must have shaped it himself in the garage where he worked. My throat tightened before he even said anything. "I know it's not what you're used to," he said, and there was that familiar flicker of doubt in his eyes, the one that always showed up whenever the difference between our worlds got too loud to ignore. "It's not a real ring. Not yet. Think of it as a promise. One day I'm going to put a real one on this finger, and it's going to be because I earned it, not because somebody wrote me a check for it." I looked at him, at the grease still faintly staining the crease of his knuckles, at the tired lines under his eyes from a double shift he hadn't complained about once, and I thought, not for the first time, that I had never wanted anything my parents' money could buy as much as I wanted this. "I don't care about real rings, Ethan Cole." "You will. Someday I'll be able to give you everything." "You already have." He slid the ring onto my finger and kissed my knuckles like I was something rare. For a moment the city noise fell away and it was just us, five years deep in a love neither of us had ever had to explain to each other, only to everyone else. That was the last easy moment I had for a long time. I felt the shift the second I walked through my parents' front door that night. My mother was waiting in the foyer with her arms crossed, and my father stood behind her with the expression he wore when he'd already decided something and was only informing me of it as a courtesy. "We saw the pictures," my mother said. "You were seen with him again. At that garage." "His name is Ethan." "His name is irrelevant." My father's voice was flat, the same tone he used when closing a business deal, like I was a line item that had stopped performing. "The Whitfield merger depends on the family's image being spotless. A daughter photographed hanging around a mechanic from the east side does not help that image." "I love him." "You love the idea of him," my mother said. "Rebellion has a shelf life, Clara. You're twenty-four. It's time to grow up." I could feel the old argument rising in my chest, the one we'd had a hundred times in a hundred different forms, always circling back to the same ugly center. Love versus legacy. Ethan versus everything my name was supposed to protect. "I'm not choosing," I said. "I've never once asked you to accept him. I only asked you to let me have this one part of my life that's mine." "Nothing about you is only yours," my father said. "Not while you carry this family's name." "Then maybe I won't carry it anymore." The words left me before I could measure them, but once they were out, I found I meant every one. My mother's face went white, then hard. "If you walk out that door to go to him," she said, "don't expect an inheritance waiting for you when you crawl back." "I won't be crawling back." I turned and walked out before either of them could see my hands shaking, before they could see that the ache in my chest wasn't fear of losing money. It was grief, plain and simple, grief for the fact that loving Ethan Cole had always meant losing pieces of my family, one confrontation at a time, and I had run out of pieces to spare. By the time I reached his apartment above the garage, my anger had burned down into something quieter and more determined. I told him everything on his doorstep, the merger, the ultimatum, the inheritance I'd just thrown away without blinking. He listened with his jaw tight, guilt written all over him the way it always was whenever my family's cruelty became the price of loving him. "You shouldn't have to lose your whole family for me," he said. "I'm not losing my family. I'm choosing mine." He pulled me inside, out of the cold, and for a few hours we let ourselves forget. We ordered cheap noodles from the place on the corner and ate them sitting on his floor because the one chair in his apartment had a broken leg he kept promising to fix. He made me laugh until my stomach hurt, telling stories about his coworkers at the shop, doing terrible impressions of his boss. It was the kind of night that felt like proof, solid and warm, that we were going to be fine. That love like ours had to be enough. I didn't know yet that it was the last easy night either of us would have for a very long time. It happened just after midnight. One moment Ethan was laughing at something I'd said, reaching for my hand across the blanket we'd spread on the floor, and the next his face went pale and his hand flew to his chest instead. "Ethan?" He didn't answer. His breath came in short, ragged pulls, his eyes wide with a kind of confusion that terrified me more than pain would have. He tried to stand and his knees buckled. "Ethan!" I caught him before he hit the floor, screaming his name, fumbling for my phone with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. The line to emergency services felt endless. I pressed my palm flat against his chest like I could hold whatever was breaking inside him together by will alone, and the whole time he kept trying to tell me he was fine, that it would pass, his voice getting fainter with every word. The ambulance ride blurred into fluorescent lights and the smell of antiseptic and a nurse gently prying my fingers off his hand so they could wheel him back. Hours later, a doctor in pale green scrubs found me in the waiting room, his expression carefully arranged into the kind of calm that only makes things worse. "Miss Bennett," he said. "Mr. Cole has a serious cardiac condition. Without immediate surgery, his heart will fail. I won't lie to you. Without treatment, he doesn't have long." I heard the rest of what he said as if from underwater, numbers and procedures and a word that landed harder than any of them. Cost. An amount I didn't have. An amount only my parents could pay without blinking.