Page 62 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

“Not yet.”

“You have to tell her.” Gabriel leaned forward. “You can’t go to her with the secret still in your pocket. She’ll feel it. She’ll know something is wrong, and she’ll assume the worst, and the worst will be worse than the truth because she’ll invent it herself.”

“I wasn’t planning to go to her.”

Gabriel’s eyebrows rose. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I can’t.” Knox took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose where a headache was forming. The world went soft and blurred. “If I go to her tonight, before I’ve read every page, I’ll be guessing. I won’t do that. I’ll be standing in her kitchen with her hand in mine and her trust in her eyes and I’ll be lying. I won’t do that to her. I’ve done enough.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“I sit here. I review every page. I write down every name. I find out exactly what I did. Not the summary, not the spreadsheet. The actual human cost. Then I’ll go to her, with the truth.”

Gabriel studied him. “You’re not going to call her?”

“I can’t call her without telling her. And I can’t tell her over the phone.”

“She’s going to know something is wrong.”

“She already does.”

“She’ll be scared.”

“She probably is.” Knox put his glasses back on. The world sharpened. “But scared is better than betrayed. Scared, she can ask questions. Betrayed, she closes the door.”

Gabriel took his time with that. Then he stood.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. The minute you close the last file, you go. No waiting.”

Knox nodded. Gabriel left, and the door closed behind him.

Knox spent the day in his office. He didn’t leave, and he didn’t eat. He reviewed every page of the 2018 files and cross-referenced the lease terminations with public records. He found the names of the other thirteen businesses displaced in Batch 14. A pharmacy, a laundromat, a music studio, a tax preparer, a bodega. He read about their owners and learned their stories, and he sat with each one until it stopped being a line item.

At six, he walked home. He flipped on the kitchen light, stood at the counter, and ate a granola bar he didn’t taste. Then he sat down with his laptop and the list of names he’d spent the day assembling.

He wanted to call her. He wanted to hear her voice. He wanted to pretend, for one more night, that he was the man she believed him to be.

He opened the files again and read the termination notice for Golden Lotus a third time. His signature sat at the bottom of it. His father’s voice surfaced, unbidden, from a decade ago. Love is the most expensive mistake a man can make.

Knox had made so many mistakes. But loving Lucy Wang wasn’t one of them. The mistake was everything that came before, his blindness, the refusal to see who lived inside the numbers. He had built a machine that destroyed her family.

He could go to her tomorrow and take her apart while she still had a wedding cake to build and serve—Gabriel and Tessa’s, a day she’d poured a hundred roses into. He could let his sin take that too. Or he could carry it through Sunday, stand up beside his best friend the way he’d promised before any of this, and come to her afterward with every page and the first real plan to make it right.

Part of that was mercy. Part of it, he knew even as he chose it, was a coward’s arithmetic—two more days of being the man she still believed he was. He hated that he wanted them. He took them anyway.

He lay down on the bed in his shoes and his glasses and watched the ceiling do nothing for a long while.

Chapter 19

LUCY

Saturday morning arrived. Still no text from Knox.

Lucy checked her phone at six, at six thirty, and at seven, while she pulled the first batch of croissants from the oven and the kitchen filled with hot butter and steam. The screen stayed empty.

“Your phone is going to combust,” Marco said from the counter, where he was squaring a tray of scones into a tidier row than anyone would notice. “You’ve checked it fourteen times in the last hour. I counted.”