Chapter Text
Snow hissed softly against the tall windows of Rhett Butler’s hotel suite on Fifth Avenue. He stood there, a brandy in his hand, watching the flurries gather on the stone balustrade outside, the light of the streetlamps catching each flake in golden halos. The room behind him was elegant and austere, a far cry from the sultry, crumbling romance of Charleston or the raw energy of Atlanta. New York was a city of men who moved forward and seldom looked back.
It had been two months since he had left Charleston.
Two months since the sea had turned against them, hurling them from their sailboat into the frigid Atlantic, churning and violent. Two months since they'd clung to each other in the water, chilled to the bone, every breath a gasp for survival. And two months since they'd stumbled ashore on that deserted spit of land, half-dead and trembling, making love beneath the shelter of wind-whipped dunes with the kind of desperation only those who have nearly died know.
But that moment felt far away now. Blurred at the edges, like a dream too beautiful and too harrowing to be true.
He sipped the brandy.
Scarlett.
Her name clung to him like the salt of that night air. He tried not to say it, even in thought. He tried not to remember how her skin had felt against him, damp and cold but alive, fiercely alive. He tried not to recall the sound of her voice calling his name through chattering teeth, or the way she’d clutched him long after they’d found shelter, not out of fear, but something else. Something he had dared to believe might be love.
He had left her the next week.
The doctors said she needed rest, warmth, someone to watch over her. So he had brought her to his mother, Eleanor, and his sister Rosemary at the family mansion on the Battery, with its high ceilings and dark, polished wood, its stillness. It was the only place he trusted to keep her safe. At the time, he had told himself he was doing the right thing, giving her a quiet place to recover.
But the truth was, he couldn’t stay.
He couldn’t trust himself not to fall under her spell again, not to lose the tattered remains of his pride, his resolve. He couldn’t bear the thought of needing her. Needing Scarlett O’Hara had always been a dangerous thing.
And yet…
His mother’s letters piled on the secretary desk in the corner, unopened for days, weeks. He knew their contents by heart even without reading them. "She’s still unwell, Rhett." "She won’t eat." "She's barely coherent." "She wakes in the night asking for you, though she won’t admit it in the light of day."
Scarlett O’Hara asking for him? It sounded like another one of his mother’s romantic delusions.
But some nights - like this one - he wasn’t so sure.
He ran a hand through his hair, now touched with grey at the temples. Guilt gnawed at the edges of his solitude, sharp and insistent. Was it true? Had he truly abandoned her? He had convinced himself it was necessary. That she was playing her usual games, that her illness was another manipulation, another desperate grasp to reclaim what they had both long since broken.
And yet… why was he still here, in this city of strangers, thinking only of her?
"Damn you, Scarlett," he whispered.
She was always strongest when she was weakest. It was the paradox that had drawn him to her in the first place. But this time, he didn’t know if she was strong or merely slipping through the cracks he’d left in her world.
He walked to the desk, tore open one of the newer letters.
His mother’s handwriting - elegant and slanted- marched across the page in firm strokes:
"Rhett, I beg you to come home. I do not say this lightly. Scarlett’s condition is deteriorating. The physicians are concerned. Rosemary insists it is theatrics, but I know the look of true sickness in a girl’s eyes. There is something more at work here, something she won’t say."
He let the letter fall.
What could be more at work?
He thought briefly of the lawyer - Uncle Henry Hamilton - and the divorce papers he had sent, weeks after Charleston, when the memory of the storm was still raw and he had wanted to sever ties once and for all. Had that been too cruel? Sending such news to a woman convalescing under his mother’s roof?
He had told himself it was merciful. Better to end things cleanly, without another cycle of accusations, seductions, and tears. But now…
Now, he didn’t know what he regretted more, sending them, or not staying to see the light in her eyes when she read them.
He crossed to the fire and crouched before it, feeding in a few more logs. The flames licked upward, warm and indifferent to the storm outside. He wished he could be the same.
But a man doesn’t walk away from a woman like Scarlett and remain unchanged. He may burn the bridge, but the ashes cling to his coat all the same.
A knock interrupted his thoughts.
He opened the door to find a bellboy with a telegram.
He signed, tipped, and tore it open without ceremony.
FROM: ELEANOR BUTLER
TO: RHETT BUTLER, FIFTH AVE HOTEL, NEW YORK CITY
DATE: APRIL 3RDSCARLETT WEAKER. PHYSICIAN CALLED AGAIN. REFUSES TO EAT. WAKES CRYING. SOMETHING IS WRONG. PLEASE COME. SHE NEEDS YOU.
MOTHER
Rhett’s breath caught.
He read the lines again. Wakes crying. Something is wrong.
For a moment, his mind leapt to fear. Then suspicion. Was it all a ruse? Her final ploy?
But deep down, he knew better. Scarlett never cried unless it was real. Not like that.
And then, a thought gripped him, cold and sudden.
Could she be…? No. Impossible.
He paced, the idea rooting itself deeper, taking hold in the dark corners of his reason. She had seemed… different. Quieter. Not herself. His mother’s hints, the veiled concern, her refusal to eat, the paleness. It all fit. The way she had clung to him on that beach…
Could he have left her not only wounded but carrying his child?
The storm outside rattled the windows, but it was nothing compared to the tempest rising inside him.
He had tried to leave her behind.
He had tried to sever the last threads of their shared history.
But perhaps history, like love, did not unravel so easily.
He turned toward his trunk, already reaching for his coat.
He had a train to catch.