“No. We landed with no leeway before he had to go back to work, so I ordered a car.”
“Did you have a good time?”
Max could practically hear Seb smile in response to his question. Good. At least someone was happy.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t in touch. We were . . . off the grid this past week.”
“I wager you were.”
“How did it go with Daniela?”
“I asked her to marry me and she said no and ran away and now she’s not talking to me.”
“What? Max! Why would you do that?”
“Because I love her.” Because I’m not sure how to be in the world without her. He didn’t say that part, though. He was already stepping out of character here. “But then when it became clear it wasn’t a welcome proposal, I downshifted and tried to get her to move in with me.”
“That was ill-advised. If anything, you should move to New York.”
“What?” Max almost dropped the phone, he was so shocked.
“New York suits you—a lot more than holing up in your cottage twisting yourself into knots to avoid the main house and its occupants does, anyway.”
“Well, that’s fine, but it doesn’t do me any good in actuality.”
“It does, though. Just go there.”
“I can’t move to New York,” he said reflexively.
“Why not?”
Could he move to New York? He’d been going to suggest to Dani that they could live in Witten. He’d been thinking of that as an option if his parents made living on the estate impossible. If Witten was a possibility, why not New York?
“You remember when Marie was going to abdicate?” Seb asked.
It took Max a moment to adjust to the abrupt change of subject. “Of course I do. How do you?” Max and Marie had talked about the prospect, but she hadn’t had to pull the trigger since her father had come around at the last minute.
“She told me about it,” Seb said.
“She did?”
“Well, I asked her about it.”
Sebastien and Marie knew each other well, of course, given how close the two families were, but Marie was a little older than Max, even, and although she’d always been kind to Seb, Max had never known them to communicate independently. Why was Sebastien asking Marie about abdication? He wasn’t inheriting anything.
“She told me you helped her,” Seb went on, “that she was about to burn it all down and you were with her every step of the way.”
“Well, it turned out not to be necessary.”
“My point is you seem to be willing to go to great lengths to ensure the happiness of the people you love. Why aren’t you willing to do that for yourself?”
“Because then all the shit that’s coming my way would become your problem!”
“Ah,” said Sebastien. “There it is.”
Max tried to backtrack. “I didn’t mean—”
“You protected me all those years,” Seb went on. “If you want to walk away now, that’s all right with me. It’s my turn to shoulder some of the burden. But honestly, I don’t know that that’s necessary. As with Marie, I think it can be avoided.”
“So, what . . . If I . . .” Max was still so gobsmacked, he was having trouble forming sentences. “What do I do? What do we do?”
“Well, first we stop hiding, which for me means coming out. Then—”
“Don’t say anything to them until I get home, all right? I can be there this evening.”
“Where are you?”
“Still in Innsbruck.”
“Ah.” He didn’t ask any more questions, probably because Max still being in Innsbruck perfectly illustrated Seb’s assertion that he was hiding.
“So you come out, and then what?” Max prompted. “You said, first we stop hiding. What’s next?”
“Next we live our lives the way we want to. If Mother and Father don’t like it, if they make it too miserable, we live our lives somewhere else. And Mother and Father aside, if we need to go somewhere else—New York, for example—to live our lives the way we want to, then we do that.”
“What about the company? What about your job? If it doesn’t go well, you know Father will have you sacked.”
Seb made a noncommittal noise. “I became one of the world’s foremost experts on mining remediation while no one was paying attention. I’ll get another job.”
“But—”
“You, though, I don’t know.” Seb snorted. “You don’t have any actual skills. You can come live with me if you can’t fix things with Dani.”
“Sebastien.” Max forced some older-brother gravitas into his tone. “Where is all this coming from?”
“It’s coming from spending two weeks not looking over my shoulder. It’s coming from spending two weeks being happy.”
The idea that Seb was so suddenly, and so utterly, happy buoyed Max. “You’re just going to tell them you’re gay?” He already knew the answer. “But later, after I get home,” he added quickly.
“I’m just going to tell them,” Seb confirmed. “And yes, I’ll wait until you get home.” Max could hear the smile in Seb’s voice again.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of course I’m afraid. I’d be an idiot not to be. But ultimately, you have to ask yourself—and I’m talking about you, not the proverbial you—is that fear worth more to you than what’s potentially on the other side of it?”
Well. Max allowed himself, for a moment, to imagine that—the other side of the fear. “But if I . . . went to New York.” It was hard to say it. “I would have to come back when he dies.” Despite what Seb said, Max would never walk away and leave him to deal with the dukedom.
“Perhaps. But perhaps there’s more than one way to be a duke. And you know who gets to decide about that?”
Max chuckled. “The duke?”
“Exactly. But don’t think that far ahead. Get a place in New York. Come and go. You travel so much anyway. Will it really be all that different? When Father dies, we’ll make a plan. We’ll make a plan. Even if you’re the one inheriting, it’s not your burden alone.”
Max heaved a shaky breath. It sounded pathetic to his own ears, but he was so bowled over. By Dani, and now by this. This allyship that should not be a surprise but somehow was.
“Max.” Seb’s tone was fond but a touch exasperated. “I love you, but you’re making this harder than it has to be.”
“I don’t even know if she’ll have me. Forget that, I don’t even know if she’ll ever speak to me again.” That was the crux of the matter. He could go to New York, yes, but what was he going to say to Dani when he got there? Double down, except this time lead with “I love you” and hope it turned out better? Or just try to get everything back to what it had been?
Although . . . perhaps whether Dani would have him or not wasn’t the crux of the matter. It felt like the most important thing in the world, but perhaps what Seb was suggesting had its own logic.
Was Max ready to do everything Seb was talking about—was he ready to remake his life and his reputation—without Dani? He had been thinking about how she was worth it. But for him to upend his life so utterly, he had to be worth it, too, didn’t he?