Page 68 of The Hotel Room

Silence stretched between them, raw and heavy.

Kate looked around the studio again, taking in the sunlight streaming through the glass he’d installed just for her. The empty shelves waiting forherchoices.

It wasn’t perfect.

But it feltreal.

And in that moment, as James wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, broken and vulnerable, she realized something.

He wasn’t asking for forgiveness.

Not yet.

He was offering something else.

Space.

A chance to heal.

And just like that, Kate felt a little closer to believing that healing might be possible.

Not today.

But maybe someday.

And for now—

That was enough.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

James

James sat at the kitchen table, the journal open in front of him. The pen rested heavily in his hand, though it felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. The house was quiet—Kate was upstairs resting, Lily was coloring in the living room, and Noah was buried in his phone somewhere.

But inside James, it was anything but quiet.

He clenched his jaw, the sharp edge of self-loathing cutting deeper with each passing second. He stared at the blank page, his chest burning with a mix of shame and disgust. The image of Kate’s face when she told him she didn’t know if she could ever trust him again played on a cruel, endless loop in his mind. It was etched into his memory—her eyes filled with pain, disbelief, and something worse: disappointment.

His hand tightened around the pen, his knuckles whitening. He wanted to throw it across the room, to break something, to somehow match the wreckage inside him with the space around him. Instead, he forced himself to sit there, his body stiff and tense.

Pathetic. Stupid. Weak.The words thudded in his brain like a cruel mantra.

How had he not understood that he already had everything he wanted? How could he have gotten so mixed up? How had he been so blind, so utterly selfish?

His pulse hammered in his ears as he thought of the woman—the stranger—he’d been with. He didn’t even remember her name. Not her face, not her voice. She was nothing.Nothing.And yet, he’d let that nothing destroy everything.

“Idiot,” he muttered under his breath, the word barely audible but filled with venom. He hated himself, hated the choices he’d made, hated that he’d broken the life he’d built with his own hands. He was a man who had once been proud of the strength he offered his family, and now he couldn’t even look at his reflection without feeling sick.

His trembling hand lowered the pen to the page. It hovered there for a moment before the ink bled slowly onto the paper, jagged and raw:

I ruined everything.

The words stared back at him, unflinching and true. His breath hitched as the weight of the admission settled over him like lead.

He tossed the pen onto the table, the sound too loud in the stillness of the kitchen, and buried his face in his hands. The tension in his chest felt like it would snap him in half, and his teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw ached. He wanted to scream at himself, to curse the version of him that had made the choices he did.

You’re pathetic,he thought bitterly.You’re the one who destroyed it all.

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