Page 91 of The Problem with Dating

The table was set with the same meal from the night I met her, and the whirl of anxiety I felt as I waited for her to enter the house was unnerving. I kept checking my phone for the time and to see if she responded to my messages, which had been left on read. Before I could shoot off another one, the front door key began to jingle, and right as Catie walked in, she was in my viewpoint.

I got down on one knee and held open the box.

She gasped. “What’s going on, Alex?”

I smiled a bit as I held the ring out toward her. “Asking you for forever.”

Tears poured out of her eyes as her body began to tremble. At first, I thought it was from excitement, but then her sobs became more intense and painful, even.

“Get up, Alex,” she whispered, shaking her head.

I laughed slightly. “I think you’re supposed to answer first.”

She hurried over to me and grabbed my arm. “No, get up. Get up. You can’t do this.”

“Am I missing something? What’s going—”

“I’m in love with Henry,” she blurted out, covering her mouth with her hands. The tears raced down her face as if she was the one with a broken heart. As if her heart was being shattered.

“Henry who?” I choked out.

She choked on her tears and shook her head. “Henry. Your Henry.”

“My Henry?” I echoed again, confused by her words because there was no way… There was no way she was in love with the man who stabbed me in the fucking back years ago. She was in love with the man who tried to ruin my career?

“I was coming tonight to tell you that I was moving out, Alex… I’m leaving.”

My heart didn’t shatter, no. It froze.

She kept talking, her words feeling empty as they trickled through my ears. Then she packed up her things as I remained in the apartment foyer, completely still. She moved past me and left me alone to remove any ounce of light that was still left within me.

CHAPTER24

Yara

Present Day

“Henry trained me when I came back to the United States with my aunt. I was a stupid kid, straight out of culinary school, and somehow, I landed a job at his restaurant. I studied under him for years. For a long time, I looked up to him as a father figure after mine walked out on me,” Alex explained as we walked home from running into Catie. “Sure, Henry was arrogant and a know-it-all, but he was damn good at his craft. He had enough accolades to warrant his cocky persona. It was no secret that he was a womanizer, and lived a wild life, but I never thought he’d turn on me. He always treated me well, until he didn’t.”

“What made him change?”

“Once my career took off, Henry became very intrigued with my goals. Me, being a stupid kid, told him about my dreams. I shared secret recipes with him. I told him about my restaurant. I pretty much poured my soul out to him, and he stole my work. He opened a restaurant using my menu without telling me.”

My hand flew to my mouth, stifling an involuntary gasp. “He stole your menu?”

“Worse. He even stole the restaurant name.”

“You’re kidding.”

His smile was a quiet reflection of his past regrets. “I wish I was. That place ranked as one of the top five restaurants across the nation that year, and the menu was voted as a top three treasure.”

“But it was yours! Did he get in trouble?”

“Nope. There was no way I could prove he stole anything from me. After that, we stopped talking. Yet, we’d unfortunately run into one another at events. That was how Catie met him. When I surpassed him for awards, his resentment toward me grew. Even though it should’ve been the other way around. It was as if he couldn’t deal with the fact that I was winning. He couldn’t deal with the fact that I didn’t need him either.”

“So he slept with your girlfriend.”

“Yeah. You know what’s funny? When I called him out on it, he told me that she basically threw herself at him. That he had no option to say no to her. Imagine that. This fifty-year-old cocky fucker couldn’t help but sleep with the woman I was with.”

---