loved it. A woman at the bar looked up from washing glasses.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m here for an interview with Mr. Black.”
“Oh right, he mentioned it. Please follow me.”
She came from around the bar and led Darcy down a hallway. “Lucien’s office is back here,” she said from over her shoulder, but Darcy couldn’t hear her words over the roaring in her ears. Her pulse pounded so hard she was surprised the other woman couldn’t hear it. If she didn’t calm down, she was very likely going to faint, which was not at all how she imagined their first meeting after all these years.
She heard his voice coming from down the hall, the cadence and pitch of it exactly as she remembered. When they reached the open door, she could see him behind his desk with his head down, working while he talked to someone on speakerphone.
He had been beautiful at sixteen, and at thirty-one he was simply gorgeous. His slightly longer hair brushed shoulders twice the size they’d been in high school. He wasn’t a boy anymore, but a full-grown man, and the reality of that hurt.
“Lucien, your interview is here.”
“Thanks, Tara,” he said without looking up as he finished his call. “Let me know what you find out. Yeah, thanks.”
His head lifted and Darcy found herself holding her breath when those teal eyes bore right into hers. Memories slammed into her, a mental collage of the two years they had spent together. The emotions they evoked made her almost throw herself into his arms.
She was so lost in her own thoughts that she didn’t realize until he’d spoken that he didn’t remember her.
“Please sit, Ms. MacBride.”
And with those four words he gutted her, the pain slicing her open and leaving her empty. All the years she wished she could have gone back and done things differently—pained over the fact that she had hurt him—were all for nothing because he had forgotten her just like her mother had taunted.
She wanted to run from the room and him and the memories that were even now crumbling to dust, but her feet wouldn’t obey.
The idea of working for him, of being the only one to remember their young love, made her feel sick. She felt the tears and cursed them.
“Are you unwell?” There was genuine concern in his voice, and in that moment she hated him.
“I’m sorry. This was a mistake.” Somewhere she found the strength to turn from him and walk away, eager to put as much distance between them as possible. If only she could run from her memories as easily. She had hurt him once upon a time and now she had a taste of just how much.
Darcy stepped off the subway and made the short trip to her mother’s apartment in Queens. Her mother had come back for her; it had taken her three years, but as she was forever saying, she’d come back. Darcy wasn’t the same girl her mother had dropped off at St. Agnes, though, because she had lived a lifetime of regret in that time.
She had been young, scared, and so deeply in love—the kind of love that you couldn’t imagine would be reciprocated. And when her doubts were spoken back to her, she’d panicked. It was that doubt that brought the end to Lucien and her.
Her mom came for her almost a year after Lucien had left, and being alone and heartbroken at seventeen, Darcy went with her, especially since St. Agnes only served to remind her of what she’d lost. How her mother had been able to take her away from St. Agnes as easily as she had, considering it was a state-funded orphanage and not a hotel, had always baffled Darcy. More strange was the fact that her mother had given her up because of her drinking and the violent jealousy she felt toward her own daughter while drunk. And yet her mother hadn’t had a change of heart, nor had she stopped drinking. If anything, the woman drank even more. Darcy also hadn’t known that going with her mom meant selling herself into servitude.
She never understood how her mom had learned of Lucien and all that happened between them, but her mom took great delight in rubbing salt into the wound. While she worked her way through a bottle of vodka, she’d philosophize on how men were fickle and love didn’t last and what a fool Darcy had been to give herself so completely to someone when she was