Chapter 2 - THE LOVE THEY TRIED TO ERASE
Natalie Bennett had spent eight years learning how powerful people describe accidents.
Unfortunate.
Tragic.
Private.
Complicated.
Nobody ever called them convenient unless they were brave enough to follow the money.
The accident happened when Natalie was nineteen.
She had been young enough to believe love could survive disapproval and old enough to know the Hawthorne family did not consider belief a legal category.
Cole Hawthorne loved her.
That was the part Beatrice spent years trying to erase.
Cole was twenty-one, reckless in charming ways, heir-adjacent but not disciplined enough for the family boardroom. He was Beatrice’s favorite grandson because he made her laugh and because he had inherited the Hawthorne face: dark hair, sharp jaw, blue eyes, the sort of beauty wealthy families mistake for destiny.
Natalie met him at Northwestern.
She was on scholarship studying policy and economics. He was pretending to study architecture while spending more time sketching buildings than attending lectures. She was practical. He was extravagant. She planned everything. He forgot umbrellas. She called him impossible. He called her the only person on campus who made impossible sound like an invitation.
They fell in love the way nineteen-year-olds do.
Entirely.
May you like
Urgently.
Without asking what old money does to people who do not ask permission first.
