Chapter 21
Christopher
Fourteen days.
That’s what was left on the contract. Fourteen days until the ninety-day timeline expired, the papers dissolved, and Miley Torres walked out of my house and my life with a lump sum and a handshake. And I went back to being the man I was before her.
The man who ate alone. Who slept on closet floors. Who kept every person at arm’s length because that was the only distance that felt safe.
I didn’t want to be that man anymore.
The realization had been building for weeks, accumulating quietly the way rain fills a basin, one drop at a time, until one morning I was standing in the kitchen watching Miley argue with a sourdough starter that wasn’t cooperating and she turned to me with flour on her cheek and said “This bread is personally victimizing me” and I thought, very clearly and without any effort to stop it: I am in love with this woman.
What I felt for Miley was solid, consuming. It was the feeling of standing in a kitchen that smelled like rosemary and watching a woman with flour on her face talk to bread like it was misbehaving, and knowing that this was where I wanted to be.
Here. With her. In the mess and the warmth and the sticky notes with angry faces.
I walked into the kitchen one morning while she was prepping Eleanor’s lunch and said I wanted to help. She turned around so fast she dropped a spatula. It clattered on the tile and she stared at me like I’d announced I was taking up skydiving.
“You want to help,” she said, flat and suspicious.
“I can chop things.”
“You can chop things.”
“I have hands. I have a knife. The physics aren’t complicated.”
She handed me an onion and a cutting board and watched me the way a surgeon watches an intern holding a scalpel for the first time.
I chopped the onion. The pieces were uneven and too large and she took the knife from me without a word and re-diced everything in about fifteen seconds and I stood there thinking that watching Miley Torres handle a knife was unreasonably attractive.
I drove her to the Sazón construction site.
Stood in the gutted dining room while she walked me through the new layout, pointing at empty spaces with so much conviction and energy that I could almost see what she was describing.
The new kitchen would be larger. The bar would face the entrance.
She wanted an open-concept design where guests could watch the cooking, because she believed food was a conversation between the chef and the person eating it, and conversations shouldn’t happen behind closed doors.
I watched her face while she talked. The way it lit up. The way her hands moved. The way she became something bigger than herself when she was inside this dream.
I was going to marry her. The real way. The kind where I mean the vows and keep them. I wanted to wake up every morning choosing her because she was the only person who makes the noise in my head go quiet.
I let it slip to Trisha.
We were on a call about the upcoming board meeting. She mentioned the ninety-day timeline. Said the contract conclusion was approaching and she’d need to prepare the dissolution paperwork.
I went quiet.
Three seconds. Five. Ten.
“Oh my God,” Trisha said.
“Don’t.”
“You have feelings.”
“Trisha.”
“You have actual, real, human feelings for your contract wife.”
“That’s absurd.”
“You paused for ten seconds when I mentioned the divorce papers. You, Christopher Vale, who doesn’t pause for anything.” She was grinning. I could hear it through the phone.
“Draft the divorce agreement,” I said.
She went dead silent. “You want to WHAT?”
I winced, setting the phone a distance from my ears, “Draft the divorce agreement. For the contract marriage.”
“Why would you divorce the woman you just admitted you love?”
“Because I’m going to marry her for real.”
The sound Trisha made was somewhere between a shriek and a laugh. I held the phone away from my ear.
“Yes! YES! Oh my God, finally! Christopher Vale has a heart! It’s beating and everything!
” She took a breath. “For the record, I like Miley. A lot. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you and that includes your Oscar nomination.
If you screw this up, I will personally make your life miserable and I’m not speaking contractually, I’m speaking spiritually. ”
“Noted.”
“I mean it. That woman makes you breakfast every morning and leaves sticky notes on your door and defended you to Esmeralda in an elevator. She is a treasure. Treat her like one.”
“Are you done?”
“No. But I’ll pause for business.” Her voice shifted to professional.
“The family law firm you asked me to contact about Vicky’s case, they’ve reviewed the files.
They have a strategy. The main issue is documented income and stability, which is exactly what Greg’s lawyers are targeting.
If Vicky had a steady, verifiable position at a reputable company, the custody argument falls apart. ”
I thought about it for a second and it clicked in my head. I should've thought about it before.
“Arrange a position for her. Something within a Vale Industries subsidiary. Marketing, operations, whatever matches her background. A real job, not charity. Something that uses her skills.”
“Consider it done.”
I thought about Miley’s face when she found out. The relief. The tears she’d try to hide. The way she’d say she couldn’t accept it and then accept it because Eloise mattered more than anything.
“And Trisha? Don’t tell Miley yet. I want to do it myself.”
“You’re going to propose and tell her you saved her sister’s custody case in the same conversation?”
“Is that a problem?”
“No, that’s called a power move and I respect it deeply.”
I spent the afternoon looking at rings.
This was a mistake. Not the concept of buying a ring. The execution. I walked into three different jewelers and stared at trays of diamonds like a man trying to read a language he’d never studied. They were all shiny. They were all expensive. They all looked like rings. Beyond that, I had nothing.
The first jeweler showed me a princess-cut diamond the size of a small marble. I looked at it and thought about Miley’s hands, the way they moved when she cooked, quick and precise, always in motion. She’d hate something that big. It would get in the way.
The second jeweler showed me something with a halo setting and enough sparkle to be visible from space. I thought about the way Miley dressed, simple, elegant, nothing that screamed for attention. The ring screamed. I left.
I called Eleanor from the parking lot of the third jeweler.
“I need help.”
“With what, sweetheart?”
“Buying a ring. For Miley.”
The pause that followed was exactly two seconds long, and in those two seconds I could hear my grandmother’s entire emotional response, the joy, the relief, the I-told-you-so she was physically restraining herself from saying.
“What does she like?” Eleanor asked.
“She likes simple things. She likes things that mean something. She hates anything flashy.”
“Then get her something simple that means something and isn’t flashy.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“It’s perfectly helpful. You’re overthinking it because you’re in love and love makes intelligent men temporarily stupid.” She paused. “Get her a solitaire. Round cut. Not too large. Yellow gold, not platinum. She has warm skin, and warm metals suit warm people.”
I wrote it down.
“And Christopher? She’s going to say yes.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that girl. And I know you. And I’ve been waiting for this phone call since the day she walked into my house and you looked at her like the world had just rearranged itself.” Her voice was warm and sure. “She’s going to say yes.”
I bought the ring. Round-cut solitaire. Yellow gold. Simple and beautiful and exactly like her.
I went to the office to clear my schedule for the next week. I was planning. For the first time in my life, I was planning something that wasn’t a strategy or a performance or a defensive maneuver. I was planning a future.
My receptionist met me at the door. “Mr. Vale, there’s someone waiting for you. A woman. She said you’d know who she was.”
I walked into my office.
Seraphina was sitting in the chair across from my desk.
Legs crossed. Hair shorter than I remembered.
London had sharpened her edges. She looked the same and entirely different, the way people do when you haven’t seen them in years and the version in your memory doesn’t match the one in front of you.
“Christopher.” She stood. “I heard about the marriage. I’m back briefly and I wanted to talk.”
I looked at her. The woman I’d bought a ring for once before. The woman who’d made me believe that maybe the unwanted boy could be wanted after all.
I expected something. Anger. Pain. The old familiar burn.
I felt nothing.
The bitterness was gone, the resentment, the ghost of love, the echo of betrayal—all of it absent now, replaced by a calm that surprised me when I thought about her.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk.”
We went to a hotel bar downtown. Neutral ground. She ordered wine. I ordered water. She raised an eyebrow.
“I’m driving,” I said.
“You’ve changed.”
“I’d hope so.”
The conversation was shorter than I expected.
Seraphina told me what Dominic had already told Miley.
A party. Too much alcohol. One night, stupid and reckless.
She’d woken up horrified. So had Dominic.
Neither of them planned it. Neither of them wanted it.
It happened because two people who should have known better didn’t, and by the time morning came, the damage was permanent.
“I should have told you,” she said. “Instead of running. Shame made me a coward. You deserved the truth and I gave you silence.”