After Sterling escorted Eleanor out, he did not come near me again.
He disappeared for five days.
On the sixth, Thorne Holdings was in open civil war.
Sterling had personally pulled every authorization Eleanor held inside the firm, and dismissed a tranche of senior advisers loyal to her.
Thorne shares oscillated.
Half the press said he had gone mad for love.
The other half said he was using me as the knife to take the family.
I read the coverage. Nothing in me moved.
Maren came in. Ms. Wynn. Thorne Holdings sent a new partnership proposal. The terms are aggressive.
I read it.
Sterling had given away nearly all the upside.
Sign it.
Maren was surprised.
Aren't you worried about owing him a favor.
I handed it back.
In business, refusing free money is rude.
Maren almost smiled.
That afternoon, Adrian came in to talk about an offshore resort joint venture.
After the meeting he didn't leave.
Sterling has people running open-source on you. Three years deep.
I nodded.
Let him.
Adrian looked at me.
Avery. What do you want him to find.
I set my coffee down.
The truth.
Which truth.
I was quiet for a moment.
The truth that he killed me.
Adrian's fingers tightened, a fraction, around the rim of his cup.
He did not say I was crazy.
He did not ask about loops.
He said: What do you need from me.
A small ache caught me under the sternum.
For ninety-nine loops, everyone around me had wanted me to prove things.
Prove I had been hurt.
Prove I wasn't exaggerating.
Prove I deserved to be loved.
Only Adrian had ever, without preface, asked me what I needed.
I looked at the window. The light over the river was beginning to drop.
Throw me an engagement party.
He went still for two seconds.
With me.
I looked at him.
His face had no joke on it.
I said: If you don't —
I will.
He said it almost too quickly. Then he smiled, half at himself.
I mean — as a strategic matter. I'll play it.
I smiled back.
Thank you.
The System chimed. Male Lead Affection Meter at ninety-four. A targeted stimulus may bring it to maximum.
I put the coffee down.
Send Sterling the invitation.
The day the engagement was announced, the city tore through it.
Avery Wynn and Adrian Pace.
A woman who'd just claimed a four-hundred-million-dollar estate. A man who controlled an international shipping line.
By every measure of social copy, it read better than the unannounced thing I'd had with Sterling for three years.
When the invitation hit Thorne Holdings, Sterling was reportedly in a board meeting.
He opened it, set it down, and the meeting paused for eleven minutes.
No one spoke.
Eventually he asked the room one question.
Did she choose this herself.
His assistant said: Yes.
Sterling put the card inside his jacket.
I'll be there.
The night before the party, a packet was delivered to my apartment.
Anonymous.
Inside was Sterling's intelligence file.
Across ninety-nine loops, the documentary thread doesn't survive the reset, but the malice of the people involved repeats.
Camille Devereaux's account statements: unusual transfers.
Eleanor's correspondence with Hollis.
A Thorne-cousin family-office paper trail leading to a private-security contractor in Long Island City.
Every line matched a place I had died.
At the bottom was a handwritten page in Sterling's left-leaning print.
Avery — I do not know what you mean when you say every time.
If every word of it is true, I do not ask you to forgive me.
I only ask that you stop having to carry it alone.
I read it for a while.
Then I fed the page into the shredder by my desk.
The System asked carefully: Host. Did that move you.
I watched the paper come out the other side in ribbons.
No.
The day of the engagement party, the courtyard at the Hamptons compound had been turned into a cathedral of flowers.
Adrian came down in a white dinner jacket, more openly tender than he had ever allowed himself.
He fixed the back of one of my earrings.
If you want out, now is the time.
I said: I won't regret this.
He looked at me. The smile dimmed.
I'm not talking about Sterling.
I paused.
He brushed a knuckle, very lightly, against my hair.
I mean — vengeance is its own kind of pain.
I looked at the floor.
I've already taken that pain.
The doors of the tent opened.
Two hundred guests stood.
I went down the aisle on Adrian's arm.
Sterling was in the first row of seats.
He looked up at me.
In that moment the System pinged.
Male Lead Affection Meter at ninety-eight.
Before the ceremony began, a video came up on the screens behind the dais.
Camille Devereaux, in an interview room, hollow-cheeked.
I admit it. The stunt-rigging accident three years ago — that was me.
The tent erupted.
The video continued.
Avery was standing too close to Sterling. I couldn't accept it.
Eleanor had implied, more than once, that if Avery was out of the picture, the family would reconsider me.
Eleanor was in the second row.
She came halfway out of her chair.
Turn it off. Turn that off at once.
Nobody moved.
The control booth was Maren's.
Then Hollis Wynn's deposition rolled.
Then the Thorne-cousin recording.
Piece by piece, the tidy linen of this family was laid open on a long table for everyone to see.
The guests were whispering loud enough to carry.
Eleanor pointed at me, shaking. Avery Wynn. Is this an engagement, or a public stoning of our family.
I held the microphone steady. My voice did not rise.
Both.
Sterling was sitting at the edge of his row, white.
He was not hearing any of this for the first time.
But the fact that I had chosen to drop it here, at my engagement party, told him what he hadn't quite let himself know.
I was not just leaving him.
I was disassembling the world that had let him do this.
Eleanor turned to him.
Sterling. Are you going to allow her to humiliate this family.
The room turned with her.
For ninety-nine loops, every time it had come down to my body or the family's name, Sterling had chosen the name.
This time he stood up slowly.
He walked up to the dais and took the second microphone out of the steward's hand.
The room went still.
Eleanor's eyes filled with hope.
Sterling spoke.
Whatever the Thorne family owes Avery Wynn, I will pay in full.
Eleanor went rigid.
From tonight, no member of this family may approach her on my behalf.
He looked at me. His voice had gone rough.
Including me.
The System whispered: Male Lead Affection Meter at ninety-nine.
I held the microphone harder.
One short of one hundred.
Adrian stood beside me. He said quietly: Are we still going.
I looked at Sterling.
His eyes looked like a thing about to crack.
I said: Keep going.
The ceremony went forward.
The officiant's voice was unsteady but professional.
Mr. Pace. Do you, Adrian Pace, take Avery Wynn as your betrothed, to honor her, to safeguard her, to stay with her, in fair seasons and in hard —
Adrian was looking at me.
I do.
Applause came up.
The officiant turned to me.
Ms. Wynn. Do you —
The doors at the back of the tent opened.
Sterling was standing in the entrance.
He had said he would not approach me.
He started down the aisle anyway.
Eleanor's face filled with renewed light.
The guests rolled toward each other in audible whispers.
Objection?
He can't —
Oh, my God, this is —
Adrian stepped in front of me.
Sterling stopped.
He didn't look at Adrian. He looked at me only.
Avery.
His voice was so worn he sounded older.
I know I have no right.
I know you will not forgive me.
He went to one knee.
The tent let out one sound, all at once.
The man who never bent in any board meeting in his life was on the marble at my engagement party.
There was no ring in his hands.
There was a leather portfolio.
He opened it.
This is the Class B controlling stake of Thorne Holdings. Fifty-one percent of the voting shares.
Eleanor screamed in her chair.
Sterling.
Sterling did not turn his head.
He held the open portfolio up to me.
The family is yours.
I am yours.
His eyes had gone bloodshot. His voice fell almost to a plea.
Avery. I love you.
Please. Give me one more chance.
The System chime, finally.
Male Lead Affection Meter at one hundred.
The whole tent went very far away.
I looked at the man kneeling at my feet.
Ninety-nine deaths. Ninety-nine pleas. Ninety-nine turns I had not lived long enough to see him make.
He had finally come.
I smiled. I took the portfolio from his hands.
His eyes brightened, briefly.
I tossed the portfolio sideways to Maren.
Verify it.
He froze.
I leaned down. I put my mouth close to his ear.
Sterling.
Welcome to my hell.
The System's replay space opened in the next second.
The lights in the tent stayed bright. The guests stayed in their chairs.
But Sterling's consciousness was already gone.
Death one. Drowning.
He was standing on the deck of a yacht in Long Island Sound. He watched the man he had been let go of my hand.
I dropped into the water.
This time, the body in the water was his.
The Sound was cold. It came in through his nose, into the back of his throat. His lungs went into something I don't have a word for.
He tried to swim back up. On the deck, I was standing in his place, looking down at him without expression.
He tried to scream my name. He took in more water.
Death two. Fire.
He was inside the cold-storage warehouse on a Brooklyn industrial pier. The smoke went up through his throat like something abrasive. The fire door was bolted from outside.
He heard the man he had been say to a Thorne security officer: Don't go in. She knows too much.
When the flame reached his skin, he finally screamed.
In the tent, Sterling was on the floor at the head of the aisle. His body went into a hard, repeated convulsion.
Guests pulled back from him.
Eleanor ran toward him.
Sterling. Sterling.
I didn't move from where I stood.
Adrian came close to me. They can't see what he's seeing.
I shook my head.
They can only see that he's in pain.
Death three. A pile-up on the LIE.
Death four. A fall from a window of the old Fifth Avenue apartment.
Death five. Anaphylaxis on a flight to Aspen.
Sterling died in his own head, again and again.
Each time he saw me at the moment I died.
Sometimes I was in a wedding dress.
Sometimes I had been carrying his birthday present.
Sometimes I had been about to tell him I no longer wanted the assignment. That I only wanted to live.
Each time, he had moved. Or signed. Or turned. Or arrived too late.
At the end of the tenth replay, Sterling forced one word out of his throat.
Stop.
Eleanor wept. Avery. Make it stop. Please.
I looked down at her.
You're the one who believes in cause and effect.
She didn't move.
I said: Now it's the Thorne family's turn to settle.