Rowan is standing with his hands braced against the edge of the stainless steel prep counter, his shoulders tense, his head bent. When his gaze collides with mine, it’s wracked with darkness and defeat.
“What’s wrong…？” I ask as I slow to a stop and take him in. My heart surges with worry. Every spark of intuition tells me everything about this is very wrong. “Did something happen with the restaurant? Are you okay?”
I start to approach him, my hand raised to touch his arm, but he straightens abruptly and backs out of reach. My feet halt instantly. My heart rate doubles.
“Are you okay?” I ask again.
His voice holds no kindness, no warmth, not even familiarity when he says, “No, Sloane. I am not okay.”
My throat collapses around the words I want to say. Heat erupts beneath my skin, burning every inch of me from the inside out. My gaze bounds between the confines of Rowan’s dark, sharp stare, its edges bordering on lethal. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that you need to go home.”
“Okay… I’ll just get an Uber—”
“No. To Raleigh. You need to go back where you belong.”
“I don’t…” a sudden burst of emotion chokes my throat. My nose burns. A sting floods my eyes. “I don’t understand.”
Rowan drags a hand through his hair and breaks his gaze away before he takes another step backward, clearly agitated that I’m lingering here. I’m desperate to take a step closer, to just touch him and make whatever this is stop before it all disintegrates in my hand like a castle of sand swept out to sea.
“Did I do something? If I did something, you need to tell me. We can talk it through.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose as a frustrated sigh empties from his lungs. “You didn’t do anything Sloane, this just isn’t fucking working. And I need you to go.”
“But… I thought you said we would do what normal people do. Talk to one another. Make it work.”
“We’re not ‘normal people’， Sloane. We can’t pretend to be something we’re not. Not anymore. I told you this back in April, on the tenth. I said that I never wanted to be like everybody else.”
I shake my head, trying to claw my way through confusion and into my memories. “I don’t remember—”
“Tenth or the thirteenth. Whatever. It’s just like I told you in the car on the way to the gala. I said even then that the restaurant was the only thing that made sense in my life. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are some things we can never have. I can never have a normal life. Neither can you. We’re monsters in this world.”
I know I’m not a normal person, but I don’t feel like a monster. I feel like a weapon. The final justice on behalf of those who can’t speak, delivering punishment for those who don’t deserve clemency. But maybe Rowan is right. Maybe I’ve just been deluding myself about my reign of vengeance, and I’m every bit the monster as the prey that we hunt.
I’m caught on these questions when Rowan lets out a frustrated sigh, like this is taking up too much of his time. The hurt of it twists and burns in my chest.
“My restaurants are all that really matters,” he says, pointing toward the dining room before pressing his finger to the stainless steel counter. “I need to keep my focus here. Trying to have both these places and a relationship is not feasible for me. So you need to leave. Go home.”
Rowan’s hard stare doesn’t let up. It drills right into the depths of me. It doesn’t waver as the first tear falls from my lashes to carve a hot line down my cheek. He doesn’t even blink when the next ones quickly follow.
“But… I love you, Rowan,” I whisper.
Rowan isn’t warm, or kind, or anything but cold and clinical when he says, “You think you do, but you don’t. Because you can’t.”
My mind is spinning. My heart is crumbling into ash. Part of me wants to run as much as he wants me to. Run and run until I don’t even know where I am anymore. Until I can’t feel this pain.
But I plant my feet.
“I’ll go, if that’s what you want,” I say, my voice tight and small. “But I need you to tell me something first, please.”
“What.”
“I need to know why I’m unloveable.”
It’s the first time I’ve seen even the slightest hint of hesitation in Rowan since I stepped into this kitchen. But in an instant, he swallows it down. And nothing else comes.