HIS EX WORE CHANEL — NOW SHE WEARS HIS REGRET

The tie was beautiful. I hated that I noticed.

Deep navy silk, the kind that caught the light and held it, cool and smooth under my fingertip before I even registered what I was doing. I'd only come in to kill twenty minutes before the bus. The Prada store on Michigan Avenue was warm, and it was October, and I hadn't eaten since six in the morning, and sometimes warmth is reason enough.

I wasn't going to buy it.

I was just touching it.

"Add hers to my tab."

My spine went rigid before his voice fully registered. That was the worst part — not hearing him, not the slow, unhurried confidence in those five words — but the half-second where my body knew before my brain did. Five years. Five years and my vertebrae still snapped to attention like he was gravity and I was something that couldn't help falling.

I hated that most of all.

I turned slowly, the way you turn when you need those extra two seconds to put your face back together. Derek Vaughn stood three feet away, hands in the pockets of a charcoal overcoat that probably cost more than my monthly rent, watching me with that expression I'd spent years trying to decode and finally given up on. Like he was waiting. Like he'd been waiting for a while and wasn't particularly bothered by it.

He looked the same. Of course he did. Men like Derek Vaughn don't erode.

I pulled two twenties from my wallet and set them on the glass counter, smoothing the bills flat with more deliberateness than was necessary. The edge of one crumpled under my thumb. I pressed it anyway.

"I'm good."

The saleswoman glanced between us. Smart girl — she took my cash.

Derek's eyes didn't move from my face. "You're dressed like you lost a bet."

"I'm dressed like someone who didn't know she'd run into her ex in a luxury department store at eleven a.m. on a Tuesday." I tucked the tie into its bag and picked it up. "What's your excuse?"

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. "Meeting ran short." His gaze dropped, briefly, to the canvas tote hanging off my shoulder, the faded university logo, the worn strap. Then my hoodie. My shoes. Back up to my face, and something shifted in his expression — not pity, which I could've handled — but something softer and more infuriating. "Sie—"

"Don't." I walked.

He followed.

Of course he followed. The man had never in his life accepted a closed door as a final answer. I could hear his footsteps behind me on the marble, that particular cadence — unhurried, certain — and I pushed through the revolving door into the cold and kept moving.

The bus stop was half a block down. I could see the shelter from here.

"Sienna."

He stepped around me and stopped, planting himself on the sidewalk between me and the bench with the infuriating ease of someone who has never once worried about taking up space. Wind came off the lake and threw my hair across my face. I shoved it back.

"Move."

"You've got mascara under your eye." His voice had dropped, quieter now, stripped of the easy confidence. Like he'd seen something he hadn't expected. "Your left one."

I looked away.

The cold was doing nothing to help. My eyes had been swollen since six this morning, when I'd woken up and remembered what day it was, and no amount of cold water had fully fixed it. Sixteen years, and October ninth still gutted me the same way.

"Derek. Move."

"Let me drive you home."

"I have a bus."

"You have a bus that comes in—" he checked his watch, "—fourteen minutes, and it's thirty-eight degrees."

"I like the cold."

"You're lying."

I turned to face him fully then, because I needed him to see that I was serious and not fragile, that the redness in my eyes was grief and not weakness, and that there was an important difference. "You don't get to do this. You don't get to show up in a Prada store and decide to be concerned. That's not how this works."

"How does it work, then?"

"You leave me alone. That's how it works."

He was quiet for a moment. Behind him, a city bus lumbered around the corner, and I watched it without really seeing it, and he watched me with that careful, stripped-down attention that I'd once believed meant something.

"You don't gotta act tough with me," he said. Low. Careful. Like he was trying not to spook something.

"I'm not acting." The bus groaned to a stop at the curb, air brakes hissing. I stepped around him. "Tough is just what's left when you burn everything soft."

I got on the bus.

Not because he'd persuaded me. Because there were eleven people watching from the shelter and three more from the doorway of the coffee shop next door, and I was so tired of being a spectacle.

I didn't look back. I found a seat near the window and pressed my temple against the cold glass, and I told myself I didn't notice his car pulling away from the curb two stops later — the black Mercedes, keeping pace — and then I told myself I didn't notice when it didn't.

He drove me home.

Neither of us called it that. He just appeared at the next stop, double-parked, hazards on, and the door was already open, and I was too tired to fight it twice in one morning. I got in. The interior smelled like leather and something faintly expensive that I refused to identify.

We didn't talk.

I gave him the address and looked out the window and watched the city shift around us — the gleaming storefronts of the Gold Coast giving way to grayer blocks, older buildings, a neighborhood that had been slowly pulling itself back together for the last decade and still had the scars to show for it.

I felt the exact moment he recognized Englewood.

His hands didn't move on the wheel. He didn't say anything. But something changed in the quality of his silence, and I knew he was doing the math — the neighborhood, October ninth, my eyes — and coming up with the right answer.

He pulled to the curb in front of my building and put it in park.

I had the door open before the engine settled. The bag with the tie was in my lap.

"Sienna."

I stopped. Didn't turn around.

"That tie." His voice was careful in a way that meant it wasn't. "Who's it for?"

The wind cut between the buildings. Somewhere above us, a window creaked.

"My husband," I said.

I shut the door.

I didn't run. I walked to the entrance, and I kept my back straight, and I did not look back. But I heard it — a single, flat impact of palm against steering wheel, muffled through the glass. Then nothing.

I pressed the elevator button and watched the numbers descend.

His car was still at the curb when the lobby doors closed.

I knew because I looked.

Just once.