Chapter 14 - Sloan’s Choice
Sloan drove for ninety minutes before she stopped.
Harrison found her because she had left the family SUV at a gas station and used a credit card at a roadside motel under her own name.
She did not seem surprised when he knocked.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“My father’s letter.”
She stood in the doorway wearing jeans, a borrowed sweatshirt, and no makeup. Without the red dress and pearls, she looked younger. Not innocent. Just tired.
“You came alone?”
“Yes.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Probably.”
She let him in.
The letter lay on the bed.
Harrison picked it up but did not open it.
“Why did you take it?”
Sloan sat by the window.
“Because I read it first.”
His eyes lifted.
“You opened it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m apparently exactly the person everyone thinks I am.”
Harrison waited.
Sloan looked at him.
“Your father wrote that he knew my father was using me.”
Harrison said nothing.
“He wrote that if Richard ever pushed me toward you, you should not assume I understood why.”
Her voice cracked.
“My father introduced us, Harrison.”
He remembered. A charity dinner. Sloan at the end of a table, laughing too loudly at a donor’s joke. Richard had insisted Harrison walk her to her car.
Sloan wiped her face.
“I thought he was being a father. He was placing me.”
Harrison finally opened Thomas’s letter.
The words were there.
Richard has begun asking too many questions about your personal life. I fear he sees marriage as leverage. If Sloan cares for you, do not punish her for his calculation. But do not confuse love with trust. They are not the same thing.
Harrison lowered the page.
“Did you love me?”
Sloan laughed through tears. “Yes.”
“Did you marry me because your father asked you to?”
She hesitated.
“Yes.”
The answer cut through whatever remained.
Harrison stood.
Sloan reached for him. “Both things can be true.”
“They can.”
He put the letter in his coat.
“But that doesn’t mean both things can survive.”
He walked to the door.
“Harrison.”
He stopped.
Sloan’s voice was barely audible.
“I have something else.”
She opened the motel safe.
May you like
Inside was a second memory card.
“My father doesn’t know I copied this one.”
