Page 129 of Harrison's Wedding

“I’m sure she’s fine,” he assures me.

I’m on edge as I wait for her to arrive, and I can barely breathe. I look up when someone enters the room, and it’s Heather leading the group of people who are arriving. Her hair is loose and hanging down her back. She’s as beautiful as ever, and even though I know there’s no spare seat next to me, a part of me expects her to sit there.

Our eyes meet, and it’s as though everyone and everything else in the room has disappeared. I haven’t seen her since the day we talked about splitting our assets, and it’s been way too long.

She looks pained just by being here, and guilt washes over me at everything that’s happened. I can feel myself beginning to panic, so I focus on the feeling of the necklace hanging around my neck with its calming weight.

Heather doesn’t sit next to me, of course. Instead, she sits directly opposite me, and Sebastian sits to her right. Ariana takes the place to her left, and Gabriel sits next to Ariana.

They all look shaken, and I wonder how the paparazzi was for them. No doubt they would have hammered Heather about Maddy. I can’t stop myself from feeling guilty for doing anything that might have made that worse for her, even though I couldn’t have left Maddy to be torn to pieces by them without any protection.

They probably accused Sebastian of sleeping with Heather, as usual. I look at my other two friends as Gabriel clutches the hand with her engagement ring on it, and I hate myself for the resentment I feel at their happiness.

Finally, I allow myself to look at Heather as her gaze travels the room. She doesn’t meet my eyes; instead, she looks at Hayden next to me, and he says, “Hi, Heather.”

“Hey, Hayden.” She smiles at him.

I want to say something to her, but there are too many things to say and too many people to hear them.

I’m distracted as Cooper says from where he’s seated on the other side of Helen, “Now that we’re all here, we can probably begin, Aaron.”

The police chief nods and shakes the lawyer’s hand before the man goes to sit next to Cooper. The policeman faces the table and stands a little straighter before he begins talking to us.

“My name is Aaron Hamilton. I’m the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. Firstly, I want to express my sincere regret that any of you had to go through what you went through. You were guests in our city, and it’s awful that this happened to you.”

His words are a bitter comfort to me. He can apologize all he likes, but it doesn’t change anything. Nor is he to blame for any of it. My entire life went down in flames the night I went to Los Angeles, and nothing will change that. I grit my teeth as he continues.

“We’ve had a task force on this since the day it happened, and we made arrests on Monday morning with charges being filed on Tuesday afternoon. We’ve already received one full confession, and we may receive more information, but that was enough to build a very firm case.”

I turn my gaze from the man at the head of the room to look at Heather across the table from me. She’s staring intently at the police chief, so I drink in the sight of her while I listen to him speaking.

It doesn’t matter that we’ve broken up; Heather will always be the love of my life. I watch her chest rising and falling as she breathes in and out, and I can see the tension in her body. I long to help her relax because I know her better than I know myself, and I ache for the alternate reality where none of this ever happened.

Aaron Hamilton continues, “I’m here to debrief you, and I’m going to assume that you will probably have some questions. If you can hold them until the end, I may cover them during the debrief. We suspected from the outset that someone from the hotel must have been involved. It could have been the catering company, and we did investigate that angle heavily, but ultimately came to the conclusion that no one from the company was involved.”

It should’ve been obvious, because they had access to us as well as our drinks. I watch Heather’s reaction as she takes this in, her eyes widening slightly before she gives the tiniest nod of her head as though she’s slotting the puzzle pieces into place.

God, I love her so much. She’s clever, and she’s putting two and two together right now. I can’t stop the smile that comes to my lips as I stare at her. My angel.

She turns her head to look at me, and when our eyes meet, her breath catches. I tune out the man who’s speaking and focus solely on Heather. We stare at each other, and a million words pass between us. Memories of our time together, all of the apologies that I haven’t voiced, my desire and longing for her, and hers for me. Everything is hanging in the air between us.

I stare at her for a long time, remembering the times when this didn’t feel like a complete luxury. I took Heather’s presence in my life for granted. She was the constant. The one thing I was always sure of in my life. The very foundation that my life was built on was my relationship with Heather.

I can feel the pain from no longer having her in my life start to build, and it’s only another thirty seconds or so before it becomes so unbearable that I have to look away.

I tune back into what Aaron Hamilton has been saying in time to hear him say, “When we asked to view the tapes, they informed us at first that they would supply them. After a few days, when we pressed them, they told us that technical issues meant they weren’t able to provide them. This was frustrating, and it definitely caused us some issues because we couldn’t check the security footage. We were suspicious about that; it was too convenient, so we started digging around for possible financial motivations.”

“It’s always about fucking money,” Sebastian mutters under his breath across the table from me.

“The photo of Harrison and Madeline,” I get a familiar rush of nausea at the mention of the photograph and force it away while counting slow breaths in my head, “sold for over a million dollars for the initial licenses to print. That was just for the rights to print it in the United States. Tallying up the total cost of ongoing royalties for the photograph worldwide came to a very large sum of money.

“I do want to acknowledge that we did receive the news of your theory, Mr. Fox,” he nods to Sebastian, “and it was a good one, pretty much spot on. We had already begun working the theory by that point and had started to interview all staff that had been working in the hotel at all over the course of the weekend. Eventually, we were able to convince a maid, who was driving around in a brand-new Mercedes, to give a confession.

“In short, there was a group of hotel staff involved, the head of the operation was the hotel manager—” There are several gasps from around the table when he says this.

“He was so nice and sympathetic to us!” Ariana says while shaking her head.

I remember him following us to Maddy’s room, escorting us out of the hotel, and Ariana thanking him for his assistance. The nausea returns as I remember wondering why we were leaving the hotel from the front exit at his direction, and I conjure up his image in my head, the man who caused me to fuck up my life.

---