Chapter 4 - The Unraveling Ghost
By Thursday morning, Grant Holloway discovered the difference between a memory and a reality.
The penthouse suite at the Park Hyatt, which Grant had booked to shelter Sienna after her supposed “collapse” at O’Hare, smelled of stale room service, expensive perfume, and an unbearable, suffocating petulance.
Sienna Blake sat propped against the headboard of the king-sized bed, wearing an ivory silk robe that Grant had bought for her the previous evening from the boutique downstairs. Her dark hair was artfully disheveled, her pale skin devoid of makeup.
To the outside world, she looked like a tragic Victorian heroine recovering from an acute heart incident.
To the ER physician who had discharged her twelve hours after she arrived at the hospital, she was a twenty-eight-year-old woman suffering from mild hyperventilation and elevated dehydration, fully capable of walking out on her own two feet.
“Grant, darling, my head is pounding,” Sienna whimpered, pressing the back of her wrist to her brow. “Could you tell the concierge to turn off the corridor ventilation? The hum is vibrating through my skull.”
Grant stood by the panoramic window, his phone pressed to his ear, his tuxedo from the wedding discarded on the armchair in wrinkled disgrace. He was wearing an unironed dress shirt, his hair uncombed, dark violet circles bruising the skin beneath his eyes.
“Just take an aspirin, Sienna,” he muttered, his voice frayed.
“You know aspirin upsets my stomach,” she whined, her lower lip trembling. “When we were in Maine, you always had the kitchen prepare that special chamomile and ginger reduction for me. Why are you being so short? I nearly died yesterday, Grant!”
Grant closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose.
*She didn’t nearly die.* The doctor had explicitly told him there was no cardiac event, no arrhythmia, nothing more than a panic attack brought on by travel stress.
And yet, for that panic attack, Grant had walked out of his own wedding.
He had abandoned two hundred guests. He had humiliated his mother, whose telephone calls he was now too terrified to answer. And worst of all, he had watched Nora look at him with those freezing, gray-green eyes—eyes that held no anger, no tears, only an absolute, irrevocable finality.
*“Am I afraid of the dark, or is Sienna afraid of the dark?”*
The question had haunted him every second of the night. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Nora dropping her cathedral veil onto the floor of the Halston.
“Grant!” Sienna’s voice rose to a shrill pitch. “Are you even listening to me? My father called from Vancouver. The creditors have frozen our operating accounts. He needs the wire transfer from Holloway Development by noon today, or the receivers will seize the docks! You promised me!”
Grant turned slowly from the window.
For the first time in five years, the golden haze of nostalgia stripped away from his vision, like grease wiped from a dirty lens.
He looked at Sienna Blake.
He didn't see the ethereal muse who had played Chopin beside him in his family’s music room at twenty-one. He saw a desperate, demanding woman whose first instinct upon learning he had built an eighty-million-dollar empire was to manipulate his unresolved guilt to save her family from bankruptcy.
“The wire transfer hasn’t cleared, Sienna,” Grant said, his tone dangerously flat.
“What do you mean it hasn’t cleared?” She sat bolt upright, the faint, fragile act vanishing instantly. “You’re the CEO! You sign the release!”
“I need the municipal bridge loan to clear the funds,” Grant snapped, stepping toward the bed. “And to clear the municipal bridge loan, I need the architectural sign-off for the Navy Pier project. And the architect is not answering my calls.”
Sienna sneered, an ugly, bitter twist of her lips. “The architect? You mean that pathetic little draftswoman you were going to marry? Just forge her signature! She’s nobody, Grant! She’s just a girl you found in a mid-level design firm who happened to look like me!”
The words landed like a slap across Grant’s face.
*A girl you found who happened to look like me.*
Grant stared at her, a cold dread pooling in his gut. “What did you say?”
Sienna rolled her eyes, waving a hand dismissively. “Oh, please. Don’t pretend you were in love with her. Miller told me everything. You kept her hair long like mine. You made her wear my colors. You even bought her the pear-cut ring I picked out in college! She was a placeholder, Grant. Now call your lawyers, get her off the paperwork, and send my father the money!”
Grant took a step back, as if the woman in the bed were radioactive.
In that horrifying instant of absolute clarity, Grant Holloway saw himself for what he truly was: a monster of vanity. He had taken Nora Vance—brilliant, patient, breathtaking Nora, who had stayed by his side when he had double pneumonia, who had rewritten his municipal proposals until three in the morning without asking for credit, who had held him together when his father died—and he had treated her like a costume for a ghost.
And the ghost was nothing more than an illusion.
“Get dressed,” Grant said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
Sienna frowned. “What?”
“Get dressed, pack your bags, and get out of my suite.”
“Grant, what are you talking about? My father—”
“I don't give a damn about your father’s shipping company!” Grant roared, the sound tearing from his lungs with such violence that Sienna shrank back against the pillows. “Get out! Get on a train, get on a bus, I don't care! Don't you ever speak Nora’s name with your mouth again!”
He grabbed his coat from the chair, ripped open the penthouse door, and sprinted toward the elevators.
He had to get to City Hall.
May you like
He had to find Nora. He had to drop to his knees, crawl through glass, let her strike him, let her do whatever she needed to do—so long as she signed the papers, so long as she came back, so long as she looked at him without that terrible, empty void in her eyes.
***
