14. Cali
CALI
I don't sleep well.
This is not a new development. I haven't slept well since the night a smart scale told me I'd lost forty pounds I was definitely still carrying around.
But last night's restlessness had a specific flavor to it, a particular brand of insomnia that I'm choosing to blame entirely on Ronan Akov and the thing he said over the molten chocolate seduction-slash-disaster, in that even, unbothered voice that makes everything sound like an inevitability.
Men like your husband don't quit.
I spent the hours between two and five in the morning bouncing back and forth between replays of that haunting prediction and replays of that spoon passing my lips as Ronan fed me sweetness with his eyes burning from across the table.
By 5:15 A.M., I decide that I should probably not keep doing that. So I bounce up, make an illegally strong pot of coffee, and start emailing divorce attorneys.
By 7:15, I have three meetings booked for the day.
By 8:00, I've dropped the kids at summer camp.
By 9:30, I'm sitting across from the first lawyer on my list. Kimber Hart charges seven hundred dollars an hour to nod sympathetically and tell me things I already know.
"These cases can get contentious," he says, steepling his fingers like a man auditioning for a role as a lawyer in a commercial about lawyers. "Especially when there's a business involved. We'll want to be very strategic."
"Strategic how?"
"Well." He smiles. Or at least, I think he does. But his walrus-esque mustache makes it hard to say for sure. "We'll cross that bridge."
I do not hire Kimber Hart.
The second one is a woman named Aurelia.
She's got a razor-sharp bob and her power suit is even sharper, padded shoulders included.
The view from her corner office screams, I bill more than God.
I have higher hopes for her, which last all of eleven minutes before she informs me that, given Todd's "professional standing" and "the optics," I should be prepared to "manage my expectations" about whether or not I'll retain ownership of the company.
"It's my company," I say, outraged. "I built it."
"On paper," Aurelia demurs, "it's a little more complicated."
I wish I could go back in time and bitch-slap my old self.
If I could just teleport to the moment when Todd slid those papers over to me and said, Just sign here, babe, it's a tax thing, I'd rip that pen out of Old Me's hand and shove it right into Todd's earhole.
I'd save us both a lot of trouble, I think.
But I'll be damned if I let that mistake—the simple sin of, oh, I dunno, trusting my motherfucking husband—be the thing that lets my lifelong dream get ripped away from me.
Aurelia can suck it. I'm not hiring her.
But my options dwindle even further when the third meeting doesn't even come to pass. Tobias Hogan's assistant calls at 11:40 to reschedule, citing "a calendar conflict." Her tone makes it very clear that the actual reason is, Someone with more money than you wanted Mr. Hogan's time.
That leaves me marooned on a FiDi sidewalk at noon in my good blazer and my serious-business shoes, holding a cold coffee I don't remember buying.
I. Am. Furious.
Not at the lawyers, exactly. Or, okay, sure somewhat at the lawyers.
But mostly, irrationally, at Ronan.
He said this would happen, and it almost feels like he was cursing me with exactly this predicament. Why couldn't he have just said that everything would go well? That the divorce papers would be finalized any day now and I'd waltz off into the sunset with my kiddos, happy as a trio of clams?
It's his fault, I decide.
And as such, he deserves to be read the riot act.
While I'm on the subject of things that Ronan Akov has done to irritate me, I'm also still mad about him paying off my company's debts—which were gonna get paid as soon as my next client signed—and that whole bait-and-switch with the dinner bill.
Does he think I'm going to feel indebted to him, all the way into his bedroom?
Does he truly believe that he can just whisk me off my feet with endless cash and seductively offered bites of delicious dessert?
Does he actually, in his heart of hearts, feel that this is an okay way to conduct himself?
Like I'm gonna thank him for his role in ruining my life?
No.
Let me rephrase: Hell no.
I have a bone to pick with him. Several, actually.
As I turn on my heel and start the angry march to his office, I remind myself of the reasons I'm doing this.
More than anything else, it's about the money.
The dinner, the invoice, the principle of the thing.
A woman who let a man pay for her whole life once and lost herself doing it has every right to storm into his office and demand he stop doing favors she didn't ask for.
It is, I assure myself, most definitely about the money.
It is not, for example, about the fact that he is the only person in the entire city who looked me in the eye and told me the truth about my own situation.
It is not about the way Ms. Meadows sounds in his mouth.
It is certainly not about the spoon dripping with dark chocolate and vanilla cream.
A woman at the lobby front desk looks up as I approach. Before I can launch into the speech I've been rehearsing on the way over—I'm here to see Mr. Akov, no I don't have an appointment, yes I'll wait, no I will not be told he's busy—she simply smiles.
"Ms. Meadows," she greets. "He's on the forty-first floor."
I stop dead.
"You… How do you…?" I give up. "Does this man have a file on me at the front desk?"
"I'll let him know you're coming up," she says serenely, and gestures toward the elevators.
I get in the elevator feeling, once again, like the least-informed person in my own story. The doors close on my reflection—flushed cheeks, blazer slightly askew, eyes a little too bright—and I have a moment of clarity where I think, Cali, what exactly are you doing?
The doors open before I can come up with an answer.
His office is somehow even more grand than I remember. Ronan is standing by the window with his back to me, on the phone, speaking low and fast in Russian. He doesn't move a muscle when I come in, but I feel his attention fixate on me anyway.
He says something final into the phone and sets it down on the desk—facedown, I notice, the way Todd used to do it.
"Ms. Meadows," he says, spinning to face me. He doesn't look surprised. He looks pleased. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"You can't pay off my company's debts," I announce.
He considers this. "I already did."
"This is a slippery slope. That's my company. Mine! I built it from nothing while my husband was busy stealing it out from under me, and the one thing I have left that's entirely mine is the right to dig it out of its own holes."
"Forty-one thousand dollars," he reminds me, "is a deep hole."
"I'd have figured it out."
"By Monday?"
I frown. The service-suspension notice was scheduled for Monday. How does he know that?
"That's not the point," I argue.
"No, it's not." He strides around the desk. He's in shirtsleeves again, the cuffs rolled, and I make the unforgivable error of noticing his forearms before I remember I'm supposed to be furious with him. "The point is that you don't like being helped. Especially not by me."
"Yeah, well, when you learn that your husband has been manipulating and gaslighting you for most of your marriage, you kind of tend to get a little gun-shy around scheming men."
"I'm not him."
"Aren't you?" I set my cold coffee down on the corner of his desk.
"Todd managed my whole life. He told me what I should weigh and what I was worth and what I ought to be grateful for.
So forgive me if I get a little twitchy when a man I've known for two weeks decides to start taking care of things without asking. "
Ronan says nothing, nor does his facial expression change one bit. But, like how I knew he was aware of me when I walked in, I get the feeling that something beneath the surface is moving around.
"You're right," he says eventually.
I blink. "I am?"
"I should have asked." He leans against the front of his desk, hands braced on either side of him, and looks at me with those impossible, churning eyes.
"I won't apologize for clearing the invoice, because if I hadn't, your infrastructure would have gone dark on Monday and you'd have had a much worse week than this one.
But I should have told you I was going to do it. That part, I got wrong."
I stand there with all the wind sucked out of my sails. "Uh… Well," I say. "Good. Yes. That's… Thank you for acknowledging that."
"You're welcome."
"I'm still mad."
"I'd be disappointed if you weren't."
The only thing more infuriating than arguing with a stubborn man is when he acknowledges his faults, yields, apologizes, and then refuses to give you anything else to push against. I came up here with a full head of steam and he just absorbs it, agrees with the parts that are true, and somehow ends up making me feel like the unreasonable one.
Except not in the Todd way. There's none of that you're crazy, you need therapy kind of exasperation. Ronan makes me feel seen.
It's deeply destabilizing.
I scowl up at him. He's still leaning against the desk, close enough that I can see the place where his jaw meets his throat, and I'm suddenly aware that I've stopped talking and that we're very, very alone in his office.
"I had three meetings this morning," I hear myself say.
His eyebrow ticks up. "Did you now? Of whom should I be jealous?"
"Divorce attorneys. After what you said, about Todd not quitting…" I cross my arms. "… I figured I should be prepared."
"And?"
"They were terrible," I admit. "The first two wanted an arm and a leg to do jackshit. The third one didn't show up at all because someone richer than me wanted his lunch hour."
Ronan doesn't smile, but he does nod, satisfied and quiet. "That's the field, Ms. Meadows."
"You undersold how bad it would be."
"I didn't want to completely crush your hopes."
I look at him. He looks at me. And the idea that has been circling the drain of my brain since two in the morning, the one I have been very carefully not articulating, surfaces all at once, fully formed.
"You should be my lawyer," I blurt.
The change is immediate. Subtle, but immediate.
"No."
I press forward. "Why not? You know the system.
You know how men like Todd play it. You know—God, you know more about my situation than any of those vultures I talked to today, and you didn't have to bill me to learn it.
You'd actually—" I stop, hearing myself, hearing how much it sounds like I'm begging him for something, which I refuse to be doing.
"It just makes sense, is all. As a matter of logistics. "
"It doesn't," he says.
"It's not the entire equation." He pushes off the desk and turns toward the window, hands sliding into his pockets, presenting me with the long line of his back. "Todd came to me first."
"So?"
He turns his head, just enough that I catch his profile. "It means that taking you on as a client would be malpractice. Possibly disbarment."
"You let his case rot, didn't you?" I point out. "You did nothing for him. You told me that yourself. Or were you lying?"
"I haven't lied to you once," he lashes out, a surprising note of anger coming into his voice. Then he smooths it out. "Doing nothing for him isn't the same as doing something for you. The line matters, Ms. Meadows. It's one of the few I have."
And there it is again—that flash of something I keep catching at the edges of him, the thing that makes me think there are entire rooms inside this man I haven't been allowed near.
A man needs a code, he seems to be saying, without quite saying it. Lines he will not cross.
What does it say about me that I immediately want to test those lines?
A smarter woman, a woman with a functioning sense of self-preservation, would take the win. Tally it up in a column marked Reasons Ronan Akov Might Not Be a Completely Irredeemable Bastard.
But I just can't bring myself to believe that that column even exists yet. There's something about the way he keeps handing me these polished, principled little answers that makes me want to pry up the floorboards and see what's rotting underneath.
Todd was all surface, too. At first, he said the right things in the right voice. I trusted the packaging and never once checked the contents.
I won't be fooled twice.
"Here's a question," I say in a sharp, tight voice. "Are you still profiting off my marriage somehow?"
He doesn't turn from the window right away.
"You had Todd's retainer," I press. "Fresh hundreds, you told me.
You pocketed them. So maybe you let his case rot, but you kept the money, didn't you?
And now, here you are, clearing my invoices and feeding me chocolate and telling me you have all these lovely little lines you won't cross.
So I'd like to know: Is there a version of this where you come out ahead no matter which of us you're standing next to?
Where the Bradshaws are just a—a revenue stream with two entrances? "
Ronan freezes. I'm suddenly almost afraid of him, and simultaneously aware that we're very alone up here. There was no secretary out front or any signs of life nearby. If he got angry… If he got too angry…
I want to believe that's a line he wouldn't cross. Deep in my bones, I know it is.
But how much am I willing to bet on that?
Especially because, for the first time since I met him, I hear the thing that some animal part of my brain has been whispering about all along—that, under the suit and the rolled sleeves and the dessert-spoon charm, there is something in this man that knows how to be very, very dangerous.
Ronan's shoulders don't move. His hands stay in his pockets. Whatever he's looking at through that window, I don't think he's seeing it anymore.
"Not in any way you'd understand," he says at last.
He turns from the window. His face is smooth again, pleasant even, but the warmth I'd been marinating in all night has drained out of it entirely.
"If that's all, Ms. Meadows," he says, "I'm sure we both have busy days ahead of us."
"Ronan, wait—"
"Alyssa in the lobby will validate your parking." He points toward the elevator. "Give my best to Hayden and Isabella."
And that's it. That's all I get.
Confused and wondering if I'm the one in the wrong, I pick up my cold coffee and leave.