My first reaction when I saw her in my study was guilt. It coalesced rapidly into anger, primarily aimed at myself. I should have locked the door. I should have led her directly to her room. I should have put the tin away in the drawer last night, not left everything sprawled out for her to find.

Then she’d run off, leaving me to follow her upstairs, wondering what the hell I was going to say to her.

“I want to be honest with you,” I said as I walked into the bedroom. “Will you listen to me?”

“I can’t believe you would be that selfish,” she said, raising her bed from the pillow and turning to face me. She’d put the white dress on again and she looked stunningly beautiful.

“I wrote that letter before I met you.”

“What?”

“The suicide note. I wrote it six months ago.”

She sat up on the bed, wiping the tears from her cheeks as she stared at me without saying anything.

I sank into the armchair by the window, looking outside, watching a bird pecking at the grass on the lawn. “Things have changed,” I said quietly, glancing at her. “I can’t go through with it.”

“I can’t believe you would even want to. Think of the damage you’ll do, how hurt your family will be.”

“My family don’t care about me and I don’t blame them. I screwed them all over to get where I am.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I just can.”

“So you were going to groom me, break me, ruin me, then kill yourself? What about me, Ethan? What was supposed to happen to me?”

I sighed, rubbing my eyes as a headache appeared from nowhere, making my temple throb. “It wasn’t about you. It was about Emilia.”

“Who’s Emilia? The girl in the photo?”

I nodded. “It was my way of getting revenge on her.”

“Do you know how screwed up that sounds?”

“Of course I do. But it’s changed, I’ve changed. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t care about beating her. All I care about is not hurting you any more.”

“So you’ve enjoyed hurting me up to now?” She paused. “Sorry, that wasn’t fair.”

“Yes, it was,” I replied. “I’ve been cruel to you, Zoey. And I’m sorry for that. I wasn’t honest with why I invited you here. I really think it would be better if you leave.”

“I told you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“But why?”

She sat bolt up right. “Because this had been the greatest week of my life, Ethan. I’ve never felt so alive.”

“You’re not serious?”

“You’ve given me more attention and affection than anyone ever has. You’re an idiot if you can’t see how good that has been for me. I’ve learned more about me in a few days with you than in my entire life. That’s why I’m so cross with you. You’ve done so much for me and you think I’m only doing it for the money. I don’t care about the money. Keep it. Give it away to charity. Create a foundation for the victims of sadistic billionaires, do anything. Just don’t give up.” She crossed the floor and took my hands in hers. “Don’t ever give up.”

I didn’t know what to say. For the first time, I had no idea what to say. I’d tried to break her and in doing so, I’d achieved something completely different, I’d made her care about me. She didn’t rely on me, she wasn’t clinging to me, she was independently deciding that I had done a good thing for her. Had I? The idea was confusing and it didn’t help my headache to try and think about it.

She continued looking down at me as I found it hard to meet her eye. “Let me in, Ethan,” she said. “If you were so lost that you thought that was your only option, you need help. I had no idea.”

“I’m good at hiding things.”

“Unless they’re laid out on your desk.”

She managed to make me smile. I looked up at her, saw the sincerity in her face and I wasn’t sure I could handle the sight of it.

“You’re on a road right now,” she continued. “It might look like it’s going to be dark forever but it’s not, trust me. It’ll come out into the light if you just start moving.”

“Who made you so wise?” I asked as I felt a tear forming in my eye, a tear that had spent ten years waiting to come out.

“You did,” she replied, squeezing my hand.

That was when the tears began to fall. I managed to get a grip of myself before they completely took over but it was far more emotion than I thought I was capable of anymore.

“I will help you if you let me,” she said. “After all, the week’s not up yet.”

“I can’t believe you still want to stay, even after finding out the truth.”

She nodded, slipping onto my lap and throwing her arms around me. “I think you were supposed to meet me,” she whispered into my ear. “I think you were supposed to scare the hell out of me, trap me here, spank the living daylights out of me. I needed it. It shook me out of my despair, it distracted me from the world. It taught me what I really am.”

“What are you?”

“I’m yours, if you’ll have me.”

“For the rest of the week?”

“How about we start with that and see how things go from there?”

She turned my face to hers and I kissed her, our first kiss. My lips brushed over hers and I felt a tingling spark deep inside me. It felt different to when I’d kissed Emilia. There wasn’t the urgent obsessive feel to it, there was something else, something stronger, more solid. It was hard to define but as our embrace continued, I let my wondering thoughts go and just fell into the moment, something I should have learned to do, long ago.