Page 57 of When Ice Queens Collide
Simone’s gaze moved a fraction, betraying her expectation that there would be some pushback from Alexandra.
“Alexandra—”
“I’m going to ask you something,” she interrupted. “And I want you to be honest with me about it. Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“You know why.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Simone’s eyes stayed steady on hers. The brittleness that Alexandra had been watching for since Simone walked in came through, just at the edges, just enough to hear it in the next sentence.
“Because it won’t stop at this article. Tomorrow, there will be another piece, and next week, a longer one, potentially an expose. The longer this drags out, the worse it gets for you, the company, and the board. I can take it off the table with one move, and I’m the only person who can. I’ll publicly withdraw, cite the conflict, and the intrigue dies. If the merger doesn’t exist anymore, there’s nothing to scrutinize. You’ll keep what you’ve built, and it stays intact.”
“And you’ll go to London.”
“Yes.”
“Because you decided that loving me meant that you needed to leave?”
Simone looked away, but she didn’t rebuild her walls and Alexandra saw the flash of emotion across her face. “That’s not fair.”
“I know,” Alexandra said. “It isn’t. I’m asking anyway.”
“It’s the loving thing to do.”
“I know.”
Simone’s eyes welled up with unshed tears. “Then let me do it.”
“No.”
The word hung suspended between them with only the tick of the radiator audible.
“Would you please sit down?” Alexandra asked.
This time, she didn’t resist.
“Thank you. I want to tell you what I see when I look at you right now,” Alexandra said. “I want you to hear it before you go anywhere or do anything. Will you let me?”
“Yes.”
“I see a woman who loves me enough to walk away from me on purpose. I see a woman who flew back from Maplewood to do it face to face instead of by phone. I see a woman who has chosen the most painful route available to her because she believes it is the right one. And I see my mother.”
Simone’s mouth opened slightly. “Don’t…”
“I have to. Because the thing you're doing right now is the thing I watched her do for forty years. She loved my father and she loved me. And the way she expressed both was by maintaining a perfect distance from everyone by managing what people saw of her. By assuming that what she felt was a problem the people she loved would be better off not having to deal with. She called it discretion and strength and being a Vaughn. And it is the loneliest thing I have ever watched in my life.
“I’m not asking you to stay so you can fix that for me. I'm telling you that the version of love you came in here with is theversion I was raised with, and I am asking you choose something different. Not because I can't survive it. I can. I survived my mother. I would survive you. I'm asking you not to do it because there is another version of love possible for us, and I don't want to live the rest of my life knowing I let you walk out of this room before I showed it to you.”
Simone adjusted in her chair. “What’s the other version?”
“Come to dinner with me. The private room in Elements at seven. I will have the document with me, and you can read it then. If, after you've read it, you still want to do what you came in here to do, you can do it. The flight to London is at ten. You'll make it. I won't follow you or fight you. I will help Audrey draft the statement myself if that's what you need.”
“You’d do that?”
