Page 5 of Dark Billionaire Predator

This is what I would tell a client, if a client brought me this problem: the person you love hasn't left you. They've expanded. And expansion sometimes feels like abandonment to the people standing still.

Knowing doesn't make it hurt less.

The afternoon passes—other people's pain, held carefully, set down a fraction lighter. Marcus, my three o'clock, is working through a messy divorce. He cries today for the first time in four sessions, and I hand him the tissue box and tell him that tears aren't weakness, and he looks at me like I've handed him a life raft. Diane, my four-thirty, has OCD and a wicked sense of humor about it. She makes me laugh twice and then tells me about the ritual she's trying to break—checking the stove nine times before leaving the house—and the laughter turns into something more complicated. The way it always does.

I love my clients. Not personally, not possessively. But with a fierce professional tenderness that fills me up during the day and leaves me empty at night. I give and give and give, and when the last client leaves and the door closes, and the office goes quiet, there's nothing left for me.

I know this is a problem. I know it the way a doctor knows she should quit smoking—intellectually, thoroughly, with full awareness of the consequences. I just haven't figured out how to fix it yet.

I close up at six. Lock the office, check the lock twice—not OCD, just caution; this is New York—and step out onto West 10th. The evening is cool, early autumn settling over the Village in that way I love, the light going amber and the air carrying the first hint of wood smoke and somewhere someone is cooking something with garlic and my stomach reminds me that a desk salad is not, in fact, a meal.

I walk home. Four blocks—one of the reasons I chose this office, this neighborhood, this precise configuration of work and life. I pass the bookshop where I buy too many novels. The wine bar where I sometimes sit alone on Friday evenings with aglass of red and a book, feeling like a cliché and not caring. The bodega where the owner knows my name and always asks about my sister.

My sister, who married into a family that makes my skin prickle with unease.

The wedding was two weeks ago. Beautiful—I'll give them that. The manor, the roses, the way Josiah looked at Ava when she walked toward him—like she was the only real thing in a world made of smoke. I cried. Everyone cried. Even Gabriel, though he'd deny it, and I caught Poppy elbowing him with a look of delighted triumph when a tear escaped down his cheek.

But there were other things. Things I noticed because noticing is what I do.

The guests who stood at the perimeter with an alertness that had nothing to do with celebration. Conversations that dropped to whispers when I walked past. Gabriel's toast—warm, genuine, and carefully worded in a way that suggested a man used to saying things that meant more than their surface.

And Benedict.

I reach my building—a narrow brownstone with a blue door—and the thought of him stops me on the stoop with my keys in my hand.

Benedict Ambrose. The youngest brother. The one who gave a toast that made everyone laugh and then cry and then laugh again within four minutes. The one who danced with baby Iris on his hip like he'd been doing it his whole life. The one who moved through the reception like a spark—bright, warm, slightly unpredictable—leaving people charmed in his wake.

The kind of man my clients would describe as "charismatic" and I would silently translate as "potentially dysregulated attachment style."

But then we made eye contact.

I'm standing on my stoop remembering it. The moment across the reception when I turned and found him looking at me—not glancing, not scanning the room, but looking. Fixed. Intent. With an expression I still can't categorize, and I'm a woman who categorizes expressions for a living.

It wasn't desire. Or not just desire. There was something underneath—something raw and vast and starving. Like a man seeing water after years in the desert. Like a man seeing something he'd been waiting for without knowing he was waiting.

It lasted two seconds, maybe three. Then the night continued and I danced with Ava and ate cake and went home.

Except I kept thinking about it. In the car home. Brushing my teeth that night. Three days later, while Marcus was telling me about his wife's lawyer, I had to refocus because Benedict Ambrose's eyes had floated, uninvited, into my professional consciousness, and that is not acceptable.

He's my brother-in-law's brother. He's part of a family I don't fully trust. He's a stranger I exchanged one loaded glance with at a wedding, and I'm building it into something it isn't because I'm lonely and because loneliness makes pattern-seekers out of all of us.

I know this. I know it clinically, practically, rationally.

I turn the key. Climb the stairs to my apartment—third floor, the one with the good light and the creaking floorboard by the bathroom.

The apartment is small and it's mine. Books on every surface. A kitchen barely big enough for one. A bedroom with white curtains that glow in the morning light. A couch I've fallen asleep on more times than my actual bed, usually with a book on my chest and my reading glasses askew.

I drop my bag. Kick off my shoes. Stand in the middle of my quiet apartment and feel the familiar settling of evening—the silence landing on my shoulders like a weight I've learned to carry.

This is my life. It's a good life. A meaningful life. I help people. I have a sister who loves me, a career that fills me with purpose, a bookshelf full of stories about other people's loves and adventures, and a window that faces west so I can watch the sunset when I remember to look.

It's enough. It has to be enough.

I heat leftover soup on the stove. Eat it standing at the counter, scrolling through my phone. Ava has sent another photo—a sunset over Nice. I send a heart and a reminder to wear sunscreen.

I wash the bowl. Read for an hour—a novel about a woman who leaves her husband and drives across the country, which feels aspirational in a way I don't want to examine too closely. I brush my teeth. Change into a t-shirt and shorts. Check the lock on the front door, then check it again.

I'm about to turn off the living room light when I stop.