Chapter 21 #2
I listened. I’d believed for years that my brother had deliberately seduced the woman I loved, that it was calculated, that it was Dominic doing what Dominic always did, taking what belonged to Christopher because it was there and because he could.
The truth was smaller, messier, more human than the story I’d built—two drunk people making a foolish mistake.
A failure rather than a betrayal, ugly, ordinary and painfully human.
“Do you still feel anything for me? I shouldn’t ask… I mean…” she eyed me.
I searched for the feeling. I went looking for it the way you search a house for something you’re sure you left somewhere. I found the memory. The shape of what it used to be. The place where it used to live, behind my ribs, the spot that used to burn when I heard her name.
The spot was occupied now. By someone else. By flour on a collar and sticky notes and a laugh with an overlapping tooth.
“I loved you once,” I said. “And it’s over.”
“The wife?”
“Miley is the love of my life. And there’s no one who can take her place,” I said it simply. Factually.
Seraphina smiled, sad and genuine. “She’s lucky.”
“I’m the lucky one.”
We parted with a handshake. It felt like a period at the end of a sentence that had run on too long.
I walked out of the hotel bar and into the Miami evening and the air felt lighter and the sky felt wider.
I drove home thinking about yellow gold and round-cut diamonds and the woman I was going to ask to stay.
Miley
The photos arrived that night.
Unknown number. Two images. A text underneath.
UNKNOWN
He’s back with his ex. Your marriage was fake after all.
I opened the first photo. A hotel bar. Dim lighting. Two people at a table. Christopher and a woman. She was striking, dark-haired, and effortlessly elegant. They were sitting close. Not touching, but close. The body language was intimate. Familiar. Two people who had history and weren’t hiding it.
I opened the second photo. Same bar. Different angle. Christopher leaning toward her. The woman’s hand on the table near his. His face in profile, attentive, focused, the same way he focused on me when I talked about food, like the person in front of him was the only thing in the room.
I knew who she was. After Dominic’s confession at the cafe, I’d done what any rational adult would do when confronted with the name of her husband’s ex-lover.
I searched the internet for three hours.
Seraphina. Model. London-based. Christopher’s ex from his early-twenties.
There were old photos of them together at premieres and events, and in every one, they looked like a couple from the cover of a magazine. The perfect duo.
She was beautiful enough to make you look at your own reflection and think: Well, that’s not going to compete.
I sat on the bed and stared at the photos until the screen went dark. Then I lit it again and stared some more. The text underneath them pulsed like a heartbeat: Your marriage was fake after all.
I could already guess who sent them. Esmeralda. She was the only one who possessed that kind of intent.
I got up and walked to his study. I don’t know what I was looking for—proof, denial, something that would explain the photos without invoking the word I was trying not to think.
The divorce papers were on his desk.
Printed. Official. The contract dissolution agreement. Ready to be signed. The ninety-day timeline was ending and Christopher had already prepared the exit paperwork.
I picked them up and read them. My name was on the signature line beside his. The lump sum was listed. The terms of dissolution—clean, professional, exactly as he’d described it the night he laid out his rules. A transaction. Ninety days. Then separate ways.
I read the document twice. Looking for something between the lines.
A note. A deviation. Some small sign that this wasn’t what it looked like.
That the man who held me every night and kissed my forehead every morning and whispered stay into my hair after the first time we made love hadn’t already printed the paperwork to let me go.
There was nothing. Just terms. Just signatures. Just a clean, professional exit from a marriage that was never supposed to be real.
I put the papers down. Pressed my hands against my chest and tried to breathe through the feeling that was crushing my ribcage from the inside. I thought about Anna’s voice on the phone, weeks ago, a lifetime ago. Don’t fall in love with him. That’s not part of the deal.
I’d fallen anyway. I’d fallen so far and so completely that standing in his study looking at divorce papers felt like standing at the edge of a cliff I’d already gone over.
I walked back to the bedroom. Got into bed. Pulled the covers up. Pressed my face into his pillow because even now, even with photos on my phone and papers on his desk, I still wanted to be close to him. That was the cruelest part. The wanting didn’t stop just because the evidence said it should.
He came home near midnight. I heard the front door. His footsteps on the stairs. The bedroom door opening. He moved through the room in the dark, quiet, careful, the way he always moved when he thought I was asleep.
I kept my eyes closed. Kept my breathing even. Played the role of a sleeping woman the way Christopher played every role, with total commitment and a heart that was screaming underneath.
He sat on the edge of the bed. I felt the mattress dip under his weight.
His hand found my hair. He brushed it back from my face, gentle, like you touch something you’re afraid of breaking.
Then he leaned down and kissed my forehead.
His lips were warm and the kiss was slow and it lasted longer than it needed to.
I felt every second of it in every part of my body.
He pulled back. Then he touched my nose. Ran his finger down the bridge of it, a small, playful gesture, the kind of silly, intimate thing that only happens between people who care for each other. He did it again.
“Goodnight, beautiful,” he said quietly.
He got up. I heard him change. The rustle of clothes. The bathroom door. Water running. Then he came back and slid into bed beside me and his arm went around my waist and he pulled me against his chest the way he always did, his face in my hair, his body warm and solid behind mine.
He fell asleep within minutes. His breathing evened out. His arm stayed around me.
I lay there in the dark with his arm around my waist, his breath against my hair, and tears running sideways across my face into his pillow.
I didn’t make a sound. I pressed my lips together, breathed through my nose, and let the tears fall silently because I didn’t want to wake him.
I didn’t want him to see me like this. I didn’t want to have the conversation that would come if he opened his eyes and found me crying in his arms.
Seraphina. The divorce papers. The photos. The way he kissed my forehead like I mattered while the paperwork to end us sat in the next room.
I lay there until his breathing was deep and steady.
I barely slept. When I did, it was the thin, restless kind where your body shuts down but your brain keeps running and you wake up more exhausted than when you closed your eyes.
Every time Christopher shifted in his sleep, pulled me closer, pressed his face into my hair, I felt it like a blade.
The tenderness. He held me with casual intimacy, as though I were the most important thing in his world.
While the papers to let me go sat thirty feet away in his study.
Morning came. His alarm went off at six-thirty. He groaned, reached over me to silence it, and his arm settled back around my waist.
“Five more minutes,” he murmured against my shoulder. His voice was rough with sleep and warm. It took everything I had not to turn around, bury my face in his chest, and pretend I hadn’t seen anything.
I kept my eyes closed. Played sleeping. He pressed his lips against my shoulder. Then the back of my neck. Then he propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. I could feel his eyes on my face even with mine closed.
“You’re beautiful when you sleep,” he said quietly, to himself.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to turn over and ask him why he was saying that when the divorce papers were already printed. Instead I lay still and breathed and let him believe I was asleep.
He got up. Showered. Dressed.
He kissed me on the lips, slow and gentle. It was a kiss you give someone you love when you’re leaving for the day, wanting the last thing they feel before you go to be warmth.
“I’ll be home early tonight,” he said. “I have something I want to talk to you about.”
My heart stopped. Something he wanted to talk about. The papers. The divorce. The end of us, presented the way Christopher presented everything, calmly, strategically, with a plan already in place.
I heard him leave. The front door closing. The car pulling out.
I opened my eyes. Stared at the ceiling. My face was wet.
Finally, I got up and called Eleanor.
“Good morning, my beautiful girl,” she wished from the other side.
“I’m not feeling well today.” My voice sounded strange, thin and far away. “I’m going to take the day off if that’s okay.”
“Of course. Rest. Is it a cold? I have a recipe for a ginger broth that could kill any virus known to science.”
“Just tired. I think I need sleep.”
“Sleep, dear. I’ll have Gloria make something. You take care of yourself.”
I spent the morning on the couch. Not moving. Not eating. Watching light crawl across the living room floor and thinking about nothing and everything at the same time. My phone was face down on the cushion beside me because looking at it meant seeing the photos again and I couldn’t.
At two in the afternoon, I turned the television on for background noise, something to fill the silence that was eating me alive.
The entertainment channel was running a story.