Chapter 3 - The Blue Notebook
For one beautiful week, I believed that had settled everything.
Then Ethan found my diary.
I had kept journals since high school.
Most stayed boxed in the storage room above Wild June.
When a pipe burst one March afternoon, Ethan arrived before the plumber and helped move everything downstairs.
One notebook fell open.
The page was dated October 17, eleven years earlier.
Ethan saw his name.
He did not mean to read it.
At least that was what he later swore.
But once he read one sentence, he read three pages.
When I found him, he was standing beside a table covered in damp cardboard, holding the blue notebook.
My entire body froze.
“Put that down.”
His face had gone pale.
“Claire.”
“Put it down.”
He did.
Too late.
I grabbed the journal.
“You read it.”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Enough.”
Humiliation hit with physical force.
“I need you to leave.”
His eyebrows pulled together.
“Claire—”
“Please.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That was the point.”
“You loved me.”
I laughed once, bitterly.
“Congratulations. You can read.”
“For years.”
“Stop.”
“Before Victoria. During Victoria.”
“Stop.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were in love with someone else!”
My voice broke.
The whole shop seemed to shrink around us.
“I was seventeen, Ethan. Then eighteen. Then twenty. Then old enough to understand that wanting someone does not make them yours.”
He stared at me.
“I didn’t marry you to trap you. I didn’t arrange that blind date. I didn’t manipulate you. I never expected any of this.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“No, you don’t, because now every kind thing I ever did will look like strategy.”
His expression sharpened.
“Never.”
“You’ll wonder whether I agreed to marry you because I’d been waiting.”
“Did you?”
The question hurt because the answer was complicated.
I looked away.
“Partly.”
Silence.
There it was.
The ugliest truth.
I whispered, “I told myself it was about your employees. About helping. About the contract. But yes. Some part of me said yes because the boy I had loved for years finally asked me to choose him.”
Tears filled my eyes.
“I’m not proud of that.”
Ethan crossed the distance between us.
I stepped back.
“Don’t.”
He stopped immediately.
“I need time.”
His face tightened.
But he nodded.
“All right.”
That night, I slept in the guest room.
The following afternoon, Victoria called.
I almost ignored the unfamiliar number.
Then she said, “Claire, I think we should talk.”
“We really shouldn’t.”
“You may want to hear what Ethan told me.”
Every nerve in my body went cold.
“What?”
She paused just long enough to make the silence cruel.
“Meet me at the Ashford Foundation gala tomorrow night.”
“No.”
“You’re afraid.”
“No. I’m busy.”
“With flowers?”
I nearly hung up.
May you like
Then she said, “Ask Ethan why he came to see me after reading your diary.”
The line went dead.
