9. Flying Home Different
Chapter Nine
FLYING HOME DIFFERENT
The day after Ethan’s downfall, Italy keeps being beautiful.
The lake stays blue. The flowers keep opening. The wedding guests drink espresso on balconies and compliment the view. Boats cut white paths across the water while my marriage lies somewhere behind me in a pile of printed receipts and legal notes.
I have a video meeting with an attorney Matteo recommended. Her name is Vivienne Warner, she’s based in New York, and she has the crisp, reassuring manner of a woman who eats men like Ethan with enough professionalism to make it look like paperwork.
“You need to separate your finances immediately,” she says. “Open an individual account. Freeze or monitor joint credit. Preserve all records. Don’t speak to him without written documentation. Don’t agree to any marital asset division informally.”
“I won’t.”
She studies me over the screen. “You sound certain.”
“I’m new at it.”
Her smile is brief. “You’re doing well.”
I save copies of everything to a secure folder.
The company provides documentation showing which charges are under internal investigation, including those that may involve corporate misuse rather than marital responsibility.
Matteo’s legal team sends formal confirmation that I’m not implicated in Ethan’s actions.
Every hour, the tangle loosens.
Not completely. Divorce isn’t a ribbon pulled free in one tug. There will be court dates, signatures, frozen accounts, angry messages, and mornings when grief arrives wearing the face of memory. I know that.
But knowing a road is long doesn’t mean I have to walk it backward.
Ethan tries to see me at noon.
I agree to five minutes in a public garden with Matteo’s security discreetly nearby, not because I need protection from Ethan’s hands, but because I don’t intend to let him control the setting.
He looks terrible, and I don’t take pleasure in it the way I expected to. His hair is rumpled. His jaw is unshaven. His expensive shirt looks slept in. Without confidence, Ethan seems smaller, as if charm inflated him and someone has finally opened the valve.
“Soph,” he says.
I hate that it still hurts a little. “What do you need?”
He winces. “Do you have to say it like that?”
“Yes.”
He sits across from me at a small iron table beneath a flowering vine. He looks toward the lake, then back at me. “Willow is saying things.”
“Accurate things?”
His mouth tightens. “She’s trying to save herself.”
“So are you.”
“I made mistakes.” He rubs both hands over his face. “I got caught up. The pressure, the promotion, the lifestyle. Willow made me feel?—”
“Don’t.”
His hands drop.
“Don’t sit here and explain your affair by telling me what she made you feel.”
“I’m trying to apologize.”
“No. You’re trying to make your panic sound like remorse.”
Anger flashes through the exhaustion. “You’re really enjoying this new version of yourself.”
I look at him for a long moment. “This isn’t a new version of me. It’s the one you didn’t have a use for.”
His expression shifts, but I can’t tell if the words reach him or only wound his pride.
“I loved you,” he says.
Maybe he did, in the way he understands love. Maybe he loved being cared for. Maybe he loved having someone soften his edges and find his missing cuff links and remember which investor’s wife hated lilies. Maybe he loved the mirror I held up when I angled it just right.
But being loved for what you provide is a slow form of vanishing.
“I loved you too,” I say. “That’s why it took me so long to admit how little you were giving back.”
He swallows. “What happens now?”
“My attorney contacts yours. We communicate in writing. I go home separately.”
His face hardens at the edges. “With him.”
“With Matteo.”
“He’s not going to keep playing hero forever.”
“No,” I say. “He’s going to take me to dinner. Apparently, that’s the plan.”
Ethan stares at me.
The absurd normalcy of it almost makes me smile. Not a villa, not a jet, not diamonds or declarations. Dinner. A man who wants to learn the ordinary shape of my life.
Ethan gets to his feet. “You’re making a mistake.”
“I’ve made plenty, but leaving you isn’t one.”
He looks like he wants to say something cruel enough to make me flinch. Then his gaze shifts past me, and he thinks better of it.
I don’t turn around. I know Matteo is somewhere nearby, but I don’t need him to step in.
Ethan leaves without touching me.
When I finally look over my shoulder, Matteo is standing near the garden path, speaking quietly with a staff member. He doesn’t rush over to ask for a report. He waits until I come to him.
“How was it?” he asks.
“Sad.”
His face softens. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. Not exactly. I think sad is better than confused.”
We walk toward the villa, our shoulders nearly brushing.
“Vivienne says I should fly home tomorrow,” I say.
“Then we’ll fly home tomorrow.”
I look at him. “You don’t have to arrange everything.”
“No. But I’m allowed to offer.”
“And if I say no?”
“I’ll ask whether you prefer commercial, then I’ll complain privately about the legroom like a spoiled man.”
I laugh.
That evening, the wedding takes place. I don’t attend the ceremony itself, because it’s not my place, and I’ve had enough of vows for one week. Instead, I sit on a small terrace above the water while music drifts from the garden and lights shimmer through the trees.
Matteo finds me after the first dance and carries over two plates of cake.
“Is that stolen?” I ask.
“Rescued.”
“From whom?”
“People too busy dancing to appreciate it.”
I take one plate. It’s lemon cake with sugared flowers, and it’s delicious.
We sit side by side, looking at the lake.
“I need time,” I say.
“I know.”
“I’m not ready to be someone’s grand love story tomorrow.”
“I’m Italian. I can be patient dramatically.”
I laugh again, and his smile deepens.
Then he sets his cake aside and turns toward me. “Sophie, I’m not asking you to move into my life before you’ve rebuilt your own. I’m asking permission to show up.”
My throat tightens.
“I want to fly to you,” he continues. “Take you to dinner. Learn where you buy coffee. Meet the version of you who isn’t managing a crisis in a villa. I want ordinary with you too.”
No one has ever made ordinary sound so intimate and appealing.
“What if ordinary is messy?”
“I run events for wealthy families. Messy doesn’t frighten me.”
“Divorce is ugly.”
“Then I’ll bring flowers to the ugly parts.”
I look down at my cake because his face is too much. “You’re very charming.”
“Yes.”
“At least you admit it.”
“It would be dishonest not to.”
My smile fades into something softer. “I want that,” I say. “Slowly. But I want it.”
He reaches for my hand and kisses my knuckles the way he did in the garden yesterday. “Slowly, then.”
The next morning, I board Matteo’s private jet with my own suitcase.
My luggage has been recovered. My dress from the airport is folded inside it. So are the clothes I packed for the woman I thought I needed to be: supportive, appropriate, easy to place wherever Ethan found convenient.
I keep them because I paid for them, but I don’t feel like her anymore.
The cabin of the private jet looks familiar now, though I know that’s ridiculous. Tan leather. Polished wood. Fresh flowers. Champagne waiting in a bucket though it’s barely ten in the morning.
Julie greets me with a smile. “Welcome back, Sophie.”
Not Mrs. Pratt. Sophie.
Matteo lets me choose my seat, and I choose the one by the window again.
As the jet taxis, I see a commercial plane lifting in the distance. It tilts upward, silver under the sun, carrying strangers in rows I can imagine perfectly: first class at the front, economy behind it, everyone assigned a place before boarding.
I think of Ethan and Willow in seats 3A and 3B. Their private joke. Their champagne. Their belief that leaving me behind would cost them nothing.
For years, I confused being low-maintenance with being loved well.
I accepted the smaller portion, the later apology, the seat no one else wanted.
I told myself marriage required patience, and it does, but patience isn’t the same as erasure.
Loyalty isn’t the same as silence. And love should never depend on one person pretending not to notice the ways they’re being diminished.
Ethan put another woman in first class, and the humiliation of that will always be part of my story, but it's no longer the headline.
Because I walked off the plane.
I chose the open door.
I accepted the seat offered without strings, the kindness given without performance, the hand extended without ownership.
Matteo settles across from me, but his eyes are on my face, not his phone.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
I look out the window as the runway begins to move beneath us. “That I’m not flying home behind anyone.”
His smile is slow and warm. “No,” he says. “You’re not.”
The jet lifts, and Italy falls away beneath us in green hills, silver water, and sunlit stone. My old life doesn’t vanish. It waits for me with lawyers and boxes and difficult mornings.
But above the clouds, with Matteo’s jacket once again around my shoulders and my own name steady inside me, I understand something I should’ve known long ago.
I was never meant to live in the cheap seat of my own life.
And I don’t have to call being chosen a miracle anymore.
From now on, I choose too.
Thank you for reading my book! Can we all agree that revenge is just a little bit sweeter when it involves luxury travel and a handsome Italian man who knows how to respect a woman?
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Sadie