HIS EX WORE CHANEL — NOW SHE WEARS HIS REGRET

The tie was beautiful. I hated that I noticed.

Deep navy silk, the kind that caught the light and held it, cool and smooth under my fingertip before I even registered what I was doing. I'd only come in to kill twenty minutes before the bus. The Prada store on Michigan Avenue was warm, and it was October, and I hadn't eaten since six in the morning, and sometimes warmth is reason enough.

I wasn't going to buy it.

I was just touching it.

"Add hers to my tab."

My spine went rigid before his voice fully registered. That was the worst part — not hearing him, not the slow, unhurried confidence in those five words — but the half-second where my body knew before my brain did. Five years. Five years and my vertebrae still snapped to attention like he was gravity and I was something that couldn't help falling.

I hated that most of all.

I turned slowly, the way you turn when you need those extra two seconds to put your face back together. Derek Vaughn stood three feet away, hands in the pockets of a charcoal overcoat that probably cost more than my monthly rent, watching me with that expression I'd spent years trying to decode and finally given up on. Like he was waiting. Like he'd been waiting for a while and wasn't particularly bothered by it.

He looked the same. Of course he did. Men like Derek Vaughn don't erode.

I pulled two twenties from my wallet and set them on the glass counter, smoothing the bills flat with more deliberateness than was necessary. The edge of one crumpled under my thumb. I pressed it anyway.

"I'm good."

The saleswoman glanced between us. Smart girl — she took my cash.

Derek's eyes didn't move from my face. "You're dressed like you lost a bet."

"I'm dressed like someone who didn't know she'd run into her ex in a luxury department store at eleven a.m. on a Tuesday." I tucked the tie into its bag and picked it up. "What's your excuse?"

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. "Meeting ran short." His gaze dropped, briefly, to the canvas tote hanging off my shoulder, the faded university logo, the worn strap. Then my hoodie. My shoes. Back up to my face, and something shifted in his expression — not pity, which I could've handled — but something softer and more infuriating. "Sie—"

"Don't." I walked.

He followed.

Of course he followed. The man had never in his life accepted a closed door as a final answer. I could hear his footsteps behind me on the marble, that particular cadence — unhurried, certain — and I pushed through the revolving door into the cold and kept moving.

The bus stop was half a block down. I could see the shelter from here.

"Sienna."

He stepped around me and stopped, planting himself on the sidewalk between me and the bench with the infuriating ease of