You Can Let It Go [ZARRY]

Twenty

Zayn:

The week dragged to the next Saturday where there was no piano lesson.

Instead, the house buzzed in prep for
the dinner for Taylor.

Harry’s fiancée.

The words slugged me in the chest,

because it wasn’t real.

Had it been real, I’d have sucked it up and dealt with the fact that the man I cared about was marrying someone else.

But it hurt more to think that Harry wasn’t marrying for love but to fulfill some sort of twisted obligation to his father.

The horror of the idea defeated any hope or gladness that he might be attracted to men.

“I think,” Ramona told me in low tones the morning of the Big Dinner,

“that Mr. Styles might tell Harry the CEO job
is his. Tonight.”

She nodded at the buckets of ice on the
counter. “He’s having us prepare three bottles of Roederer Cristal champagne,” she said.

“There must be something to celebrate.”

I nodded vaguely. Harry shouldn’t drink champagne, but then no one knew he was a recovering addict.

No one knew the real reason he’d been sent to Alaska either, except me.

You don’t know that for sure.

But while the conversation with Marcel grew fainter as time passed, the same words kept coming up like warning flares.

Reprogramming.

Deviant.

Self-harm.

“Zayn?”

I blinked and smiled faintly. “Sorry, what?”

“I was just saying that it’s been quite some time since we’ve seen Miss Swift, ” Ramona said. “Taylor. Lovely girl—a little wild, though. Mr. Styles adores her.”

“How long have she and Harry been together?” I asked as casually as possible.

“Three months? Since he finished management training this last June. Mr. Styles made it a stipulation of his trust
that Harry be married before he turned over the company to him. And voilà. Two weeks later, there she was.”

I frowned, wondering why Ramona was sharing this with me, and she read my expression with a laugh.

“Just getting you up to speed on goings-on around here. We’ve all signed the paperwork to keep mum outside these
walls and it gets tedious, honestly. It wasn’t the same when Anne was alive, God rest her soul.”

“Anne? Their mom?”

Ramona nodded. “A different era, that was. So much laughter and Harry playing the piano for the sheer joy of it. Sort of like he did last week. With you.”

The back of my neck reddened. “You heard about that?”

She laughed. “The entire household heard it. Marvelous. Anne would have been so happy. She wanted him to be a concert pianist. I think Mr. Harry did too, at one time. But. . .”

She sighed. “Anyway, I think she would have liked hearing him play like that. I think she would have liked you, Zayn. Very much.”

Before I could speak, Ramona continued, sprinkling orange zest on the duck she was preparing.

“She also would’ve wanted to see her son married to a person he loves, though perhaps not in such a hasty manner.” She glanced at me sideways.

“I don’t believe Taylor is quite right for Harry. In fact, I think it would be extremely
difficult to find the right woman for him. Impossible, even.”