The Billionaire's Biggest Regret

Jade

The Whitmore Grand’s annual charity gala was the kind of event that made ordinary people feel invisible and made people like Hayes Calloway look like they had been put on this earth specifically to stand in rooms like this one.

I had been watching him for twenty minutes from across the ballroom without meaning to. That was the thing about Hayes. You didn’t decide to watch him. Your eyes just went there and then had trouble leaving.

He moved through the crowd the way water moves around stone, effortless and unbothered, stopping when someone approached him, nodding when it was required, and smiling only when the smile would cost him nothing. He wore a black suit that probably cost more than three months of my rent, and he wore it the way he wore everything, like it had been designed specifically for his body, and the rest of the world was simply borrowing the concept of clothing.

I smoothed the front of my dress and looked down at the champagne glass in my hand.

I had been wanting to say something to him for months. I had carried it around with me the way you carry something heavy that you keep telling yourself you will put down soon. Tonight, I had decided that soon was now.

The decision had felt clean and simple in my apartment two hours ago. It felt considerably less clean and simple standing in a ballroom full of Manhattan’s wealthiest people with Hayes Calloway twenty feet away from me, looking like an entirely different species.

I waited until the group around him thinned. It took another fifteen minutes. I used the time to remind myself that I had not come all the way here in four-inch heels to spend the evening watching him from across a room and then go home and pretend I had tried.

When the last person drifted away from him and he reached for his drink from a passing tray, I moved.

He was standing near the curved edge of the bar, slightly apart from the heaviest part of the crowd. There were people nearby. A couple to his left engaged in their own conversation. Two women, a few feet behind him sharing something on one of their phones. Close enough to hear if they were paying attention. Not close enough to make it a scene.

I stopped beside him.

“Hayes.”

He turned his head. His eyes found my face, and for one fraction of a second, I thought I saw something move behind them. Something quick and small. Then it was gone, and what replaced it was nothing. A blankness so complete it felt almost architectural.

“I need a few minutes,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. “I’ve been trying to find the right time to say something to you, and I’d rather just say it.”

He said nothing. He looked at me the way you look at something you are trying to decide whether to engage with, his expression giving away less than a closed door.

I kept going because stopping now was not an option I was willing to take. “A few months ago. The night of the Calloway Foundation dinner at the Langford.” I held his gaze. “Something happened. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. I think you know what I’m referring to.”

The couple to his left had gone quiet. I was aware of it the way you are aware of a draft without being able to locate the open window.

Hayes looked at me for a long moment. His glass was raised halfway to his mouth, and it stayed there, suspended, while his eyes stayed on my face. The ballroom moved and glittered around us, and he was perfectly, completely still.

Then he lowered his glass.

“I’m sorry.” His voice was low and even and polite in a way that had nothing kind inside it. He tilted his head very slightly, the way someone does when they are making a genuine effort to place a name they cannot locate. “Do we know each other?”

The floor did not move. I know it didn’t because I was standing on it, and I would have felt it. But something shifted anyway. Something that had nothing to do with the floor.

I looked at him. I looked directly at him, and I understood in real time what he was doing. Those four words had not been said quietly. They had not been angled away from the people nearby. The couple to his left had both looked over now. One of the women behind him had glanced up from her phone.

He had not asked that question for my benefit.

“We’ve met before,” I said. My voice was still even. I was holding onto that evenness with everything I had. “At the Langford. The foundation dinner. I’m sure of it.”

Hayes looked at me with a patience that had no warmth inside it, the way a person looks when they are humoring a conversation they have already ended in their own head. “I meet a lot of people at foundation events,” he said. “I apologize if I’ve forgotten. Is there something I can help you with?”

Is there something I can help you with?

Said the way a man says it when what he means is that there is nothing he intends to help you with, and this conversation is now finished.

I was aware of the couple watching. I was aware of the women. I was aware of every single person in the ten-foot radius around us who had caught enough of this exchange to draw their own conclusions about what they were seeing. A woman who had approached Hayes Calloway at a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-table charity gala, claiming a connection he had no recollection of.

I knew what it looked like.

He had made sure I knew what it looked like.

“No,” I said. The word came out quiet and clean. “There isn’t.”

I held his gaze for one more second because I was not going to be the first one to look away. I was going to give myself that much. Then I turned and walked back in the direction I had come from, my heels silent on the marble floor, my champagne glass still in my hand.

I did not stop walking until I found a quiet corridor off the main ballroom. I stepped into it, pressed my back against the cool wall, and stared at the ceiling.

I did not cry.

I stood there, and I breathed, and I made a decision in the quiet of that corridor that I didn’t fully have words for yet.

But I felt it settle into my bones like something permanent.

This was not over.