Grace POV
Grace doesn't sleep that night.
She sits in her apartment with Henry's note on the kitchen table and watches it like it might move. The handwriting is exactly the same as it was seven years ago. The same curve to the letters. The same way he writes her name like it costs him something to do it.
She picks it up and puts it down maybe fifty times. Each time her hands shake worse than the last.
By three in the morning she's standing at her window looking out at London. The city is quiet now. The people are gone. It's just buildings and darkness and a woman who spent seven years building walls so nobody could hurt her again, watching those walls crumble because one person wrote her name on a piece of paper.
Her phone buzzes. A text from Sophia. "Don't make any decisions until we talk. Please."
Grace doesn't respond.
She doesn't sleep. She doesn't eat. She just sits with that note and remembers things she promised herself she'd forget.
By the time Sophia walks into the office at seven in the morning, Grace looks like she hasn't slept in days. Which is accurate.
"You read it," Sophia says. Not a question.
"I read it."
Sophia sets two cups of coffee on Grace's desk. She sits down and doesn't say anything for a while. That's the thing about Sophia. She knows when talking makes things worse.
"His assistant called again," Sophia finally says. "She wants to schedule a meeting. Tomorrow at three."
Grace's entire body goes tight. "No."
"Grace—"
"I said no, Sophia." Grace's voice sounds like broken glass. "I don't care what his assistant wants. I don't care what he wants. The answer is no. We're not taking this case."
Sophia leans back in her chair. She's looking at Grace the way she looked at her seven years ago when Grace first came to university with bruised ribs from the prenup and a heart that didn't know how to work anymore.
"Do you remember what you told me when we first met," Sophia says quietly.
"Don't—"
"You said you were going to become a lawyer so no one else would feel what you felt. You said you were going to destroy men like him." Sophia pauses. "You've done that. You've built an empire on it. But Grace, you're not actually living. You're just existing inside your revenge."
"This isn't about revenge," Grace says. Lies. It's absolutely about revenge.
"Then what is it about."
Grace stands up. She walks to the window and stares out at the city waking up. People are starting to move through the streets. Cars are honking. The world is starting again.
"It's about the fact that I can't be in a room with him without feeling like I'm twenty-one again," Grace says. "It's about the fact that seven years isn't enough time to stop loving someone who broke you. It's about the fact that if I take his case I might actually forgive him and I don't know how to exist if I do that."
The silence that follows feels like drowning.
"Your retainer would set us up for five years," Sophia says finally. "Maybe longer. We could expand. We could help more women. We could make his company stronger so it can protect more people instead of destroying them."
"I'm not saving Henry Ashford," Grace says.
"Then you're not saving yourself either," Sophia replies.
Grace turns on her. "What is that supposed to mean."
"It means you've been running for seven years and running is just another way of staying still. It means maybe the only way forward is actually facing him."
"I don't want to face him."
"I know," Sophia says gently. "But I think you need to."
They don't talk about it anymore that morning. Grace throws herself into work like she can bury the question under case files and legal research. She wins a motion. She breaks down a contract. She builds walls back up brick by brick.
By evening her hands are steady again.
By the next morning she's almost convinced herself that she's made the right choice. That saying no to Henry is the same as protecting herself. That avoiding him forever is a perfectly reasonable life plan.
The newspaper delivery hits her door at six in the morning like always.
Grace picks it up because she always does. She skims the headlines. Financial news. Politics. The usual London gossip about rich people nobody cares about.
Then she turns the page and stops breathing.
There's a photo of Henry.
He's standing outside what looks like his office building with photographers swarming around him. His suit is wrinkled. His hair is messy. There's something about the way he's looking at the cameras that makes Grace's chest hurt.
He looks broken.
Not the careful controlled kind of broken he's been playing since he walked back into her life. Actually broken. The kind of broken that comes when everything you built is falling apart and you're too tired to keep pretending it isn't.
The headline reads: "ASHFORD CAPITAL IN FREEFALL. CEO UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR SECURITIES FRAUD."
Grace's hands start shaking.
She reads the article three times but the words don't change. Marcus Reid is making moves that will destroy Henry's company completely. Multiple clients are pulling out. The financial world is turning on him. There's talk of criminal charges. There's talk of bankruptcy.
There's a quote from someone anonymous saying Henry is finished. That Ashford Capital will be gone in weeks.
Grace sits on her kitchen floor with the newspaper in her hands and realizes something terrifying.
She doesn't want him to burn anymore.
Somewhere in the last twelve hours of staring at his note and remembering his handwriting and thinking about the way he looked when he asked her for help, something shifted inside her. The anger is still there. The hurt is still there. But underneath it is something else.
Something that looks like the girl who loved him.
Grace takes a photo of the newspaper with her phone and sends it to Sophia with one word: "When."
The response comes back immediately: "Three o'clock. His assistant sent his office address. Grace, you don't have to do this."
But she does.
She absolutely does.
Because the girl who spent seven years building walls was meant to protect herself from Henry Ashford. But the girl Henry broke became the kind of lawyer who saves people. And right now Henry Ashford needs saving.
And Grace is the only one who knows exactly how to do it.
She looks at the photo of him one more time. At the exhaustion in his face. At the way he's standing there completely exposed while cameras flash around him. At the absolute devastation in his blue eyes.
And she understands something she's been running from since the moment he walked back into her life.
She still loves him.
Seven years of building an empire on the ruins of that love couldn't actually destroy it. It just buried it. And now seeing him broken and desperate and asking for help from the one person who has every reason to let him fall.
It's cracking her open all over again.
Grace looks at the clock. She has eight hours before the meeting.
Eight hours to figure out how to walk into a room with Henry Ashford without falling apart. Eight hours to decide if she's strong enough to help him without destroying herself. Eight hours to remember exactly why she swore she would never let him close enough to hurt her again.
Eight hours.
It won't be enough.
But she'll take the case anyway because that's what Grace Winters does. She saves people even when it costs her everything.
Even when the person she's saving is the one who broke her in the first place.