Page 183 of Boss of the Year

I hated that it hurt that way.

I stabbed a chopstick into my bowl like it was the ache itself I was trying to kill.

“Besides,” Daniel continued, apparently taking my silence as permission to keep going. “I don’t know if I’m even capable of love. How pathetic is that? I might not even be a good person.”

I looked up. “I don’t think that’s true. A bad person wouldn’t have asked me here. He wouldn’t have wanted to make amends at all.”

“Maybe.” He finally took another sip of his drink, then, with a quick glance at me, pushed it away. “What about you? Do you think you were really in love with me for ten years, like Lucas said?” His sky-blue eyes widened, like an animal caught in a cage.

Lord, even the idea of that kind of love scared him.

I considered the question seriously, twirling noodles around my chopsticks and then taking a bite and swallowing, more to torture him a little than anything else.

I wasn’t heartless, but I was still stinging from that “no cute staff members” comment.

“No,” I said eventually. “I don’t think I was ever legitimately in love with you. With an idea of you, maybe. A fantasy I’d built up in my head. But I never really knew you either, did I? Not the real you.”

Daniel looked visibly relieved. Almost understanding. “I guess we both had a thing for our imaginations, huh?”

“I guess we did.”

I offered a bittersweet smile, thinking again about Lucas. Who had seemed so real from the very beginning, even when he was lying. Whose pain and loneliness and capacity for love had all felt genuine, even when his motivations were complicated.

Lucas, whom I’d walked away from twice now and whom I would probably never see again.

The ache in my chest intensified.

I stabbed my noodles again, and this time left the chopsticks in place. I had completely lost what little appetite I had today.

“How is he?” I couldn’t help asking.

Daniel looked up from his soup curiously. “Lucas? I guess you could say he’s back to his old self, though, who knows? He went straight back to work as soon as we landed. Has been staying at his place in the city. I think he’s still mad at me, the grouch.”

I pictured the Lucas I’d known before everything changed. Cold, demanding, working constantly, and treating everyone around him like chess pieces. I knew now that it had been yet another mask for his internal misery, a way of coping with having no actual choices in his life. He was stuck in a gilded cage of his own making.

The thought of him retreating into that loneliness again made my heart hurt even more.

I pushed my bowl away, content now to wait for Daniel to finish.

When the check came, he insisted on paying, saying it was the least he could do to make up for how he’d treated me. As we prepared to leave, he pulled something out of his jacket pocket—a cream-colored envelope with elegant script.

“You don’t, um, want to come, do you?” he asked, holding out what was clearly a wedding invitation.

I took it and stared at the swirling calligraphy and the gold-embossed letters. “Seriously?”

He shrugged. “I could use more friends on my side of the aisle. In a weird way, you kind of know me better than most of mine, just from this one conversation.”

I looked at the invitation, specifically the part about celebrating the union of Emma Hubbard and Daniel Lyons. It was exactly the event I’d dreamed of for myself, once upon a time. First, as his date, but eventually, as the other name on the invitation next to his.

How odd that seemed now. How wrong.

“I think I’d better not.” I handed the invitation back to him. “One party invitation from you was enough to turn my life upside down, don’t you think?”

Daniel chuckled and tucked the invite back into his jacket. “You’re funny, Marie. Huh. I never knew that about you.”

We stood outside the restaurant for a moment, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows down Amsterdam Avenue. It felt like the end of something—not just this conversation, but the entire chapter of my life that had been defined by my hopeless crush on Daniel Lyons.

“I hope you’ll be happy,” I said and meant it. “Both of you.”