Chapter 5 - The Real Deal
We left Richard standing in the silent room. We walked back through the ballroom, past the staring billionaires, past my gaping mother, and straight out the front doors of the hotel.
We didn't take the Maybach. Logan flagged down a standard yellow cab, and we rode in comfortable, exhausted silence all the way back to Cambridge.
The twenty-four-hour diner looked exactly the same as it had the night we met. Neon signs buzzing. The smell of cheap coffee and frying bacon hanging in the air.
We sat in our usual booth, me in my thousands-of-dollars emerald gown, him in his bespoke tuxedo. The waitress didn't even blink; she just slid two plates of pancakes onto the table and walked away.
Logan reached across the sticky formica table and took my hands in his.
“I am so sorry about my father,” he said quietly.
“I'm sorry about my mother,” I countered with a tired smile.
“We really messed this up, didn't we?” Logan murmured, running his thumb over my knuckles. “We built a marriage on two massive lies. I hid my world because I thought it made me unlovable. You hid yours to protect your peace. We were so busy pretending to be ordinary that we forgot we actually have to live together in the real world.”
“So what do we do now?” I asked, my heart beating a little faster. “Do we get the annulment? Start over?”
Logan reached into his tuxedo jacket. For a terrifying second, I thought he was going to pull out legal papers. Instead, he pulled out a small, worn velvet box.
He opened it. Inside was a ring. Not a massive, ostentatious diamond that his father would have approved of, but a beautiful, vintage sapphire surrounded by small, elegant stones. It was perfect.
“I don't want an annulment,” Logan said, his dark eyes locking onto mine with absolute certainty. “I don't want the warehouse guy's marriage, and I don't want the billionaire's marriage. I want our marriage. The real one. The one where you go make incredible movies, and I go run a company, and at the end of the day, we come home to each other and eat burned tomato soup.”
Tears prickled the corners of my eyes.
“Claire Bennett Pierce,” Logan whispered, sliding out of the booth and getting down on one knee right there on the sticky diner floor. “I am entirely, hopelessly in love with you. Will you marry me? Again. For real this time.”
I looked at the man who had lied about his name, lied about his job, and possessed a bank account that could buy a small country. But underneath it all, he was just Logan. The man who waited in the rain. The man who made me feel safe.
“Yes,” I breathed, pulling him up by his lapels and kissing him hard.
May you like
The few patrons in the diner clapped politely. Logan slipped the sapphire onto my finger, right next to the cheap silver band from the courthouse.
We still had to face the wrath of our families. We still had to figure out how a famous director and a billionaire CEO were going to share a life without the press destroying our peace. But as we sat there sharing a plate of syrup-soaked pancakes, none of that mattered. We had finally told each other the truth, and the truth was more beautiful than any lie we could have invented.
