Chapter 10
She found the wine bar on a Tuesday afternoon, three days before she planned to use it.
The place sat halfway up Bridgeway in Sausalito, tucked between a ceramics gallery and a real estate office.
Small. Twelve tables. Windows facing the water.
The kind of spot that attracted tourists who wanted to feel like locals and locals who wanted to avoid tourists.
Aria ordered a glass of albari?o, sat at a corner table, and studied the room the way she used to study restaurants before writing about them.
Sight lines. Acoustics. The distance between tables.
Close enough to enforce civility. Far enough apart for honesty.
The reply came in under a minute. I'll be there.
No apology. No explanation. No attempt to reshape the terms. Aria stared at those three words and something shifted in her chest — not softening, but a grudging recognition. Whatever Katarina Hirst was, she wasn't a coward.
#
Friday arrived gray and cool. Aria drove the ninety minutes from Sonoma in near silence, the radio off, her hands steady on the wheel of the white Audi. She'd dressed with more care than she wanted to admit — dark jeans, a cream sweater, her good leather flats. Not armor, exactly. But close.
She got to the wine bar twenty minutes early. Ordered water. Sat with her back to the wall and her face toward the door.
At 1:58 PM, Katarina walked in.
She looked different than Aria remembered.
Smaller, maybe. Or just less mythic. At the gala last year — the last time Aria had seen her in person — Katarina had been wearing a structured navy blazer and heels that put her at nearly six feet.
Today she wore a gray silk blouse, dark pants, flat shoes.
Her makeup was precise but minimal. Her dark blond hair was pulled back.
She scanned the room, found Aria, and crossed to the table without hesitation. No smile. No outstretched hand.
"Aria."
"Sit down."
Katarina sat. She set her bag on the empty chair beside her, folded her hands on the table, and waited. Her nails were short and clean. No ring on any finger.
The server appeared. Katarina ordered a glass of pinot gris without looking at the list. Aria watched her do it and thought: She's been here before. Then she pushed the thought away. It didn't matter.
"Thank you for coming," Aria said. It sounded formal. She didn't care.
"You said you had questions."
"I do."
The wine arrived. Katarina lifted the glass, took a small sip, and set it down. Her hand was steady. Aria filed that away too — the steadiness, the control. This was a woman who had prepared for this conversation. Who had maybe been expecting it for weeks.
"I'm not here to scream at you," Aria said. "I'm not here to call you names or make a scene. I'm here because I need to know certain things, and you're the only person who can tell me the truth about them."
"Okay."
"If you lie to me, I'll know. And I'll leave."
Katarina met her eyes. "I won't lie to you."
#
Aria started with the hardest question first. She'd decided this in advance — get the worst one out before her nerve could fail.
"Did he tell you he was going to leave me?"
"No." Katarina said it without flinching. "He never said that. Not once."
The answer landed like a stone dropped into still water. The ripple moved through her — not relief, not exactly, but something in that family.
"Did you want him to?"
A pause. The first one. Katarina looked down at her wine, then back up. "In the beginning, I didn't think about it. By the end — no. I didn't."
"Why not?"
"Because by then I understood what it was." She said this carefully, choosing her words the way someone chooses steps on uneven ground. "It wasn't a love affair, Aria. I know that's a strange thing to hear. But it wasn't."
Aria's jaw tightened. "Then what was it?"
"Proximity. Convenience. He was — " Katarina stopped. Started again. "He traveled constantly. I was there. It was easy. That's the ugly truth of it."
"Easy," Aria repeated.
"Yes."
The word sat between them on the table like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
Easy. Eight months of lies, eight months of Aria cooking dinner in that enormous kitchen and wondering why he seemed distant, eight months of believing him when he said long day, babe, just tired — and the whole thing had been easy.
"I need you to understand," Aria said, and her voice was quiet, "that the word you just used is the cruelest thing anyone has said to me in my entire life."
Katarina didn't look away. "I know."
#
They sat with that for a moment. The server passed their table and glanced at them — two women, wine barely touched, faces like closed doors. She kept walking.
"How did it start?" Aria asked.
"A conference in New York. January. The whole team was there. We had drinks after a panel, and everyone else went back to the hotel." She paused. "I should have gone back to the hotel."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"And then what — you just kept going? For eight months?"
"It wasn't constant. Weeks would go by. Then he'd have a trip, or a late meeting, and it would happen again. There was no — " She searched for the right word. "There was no momentum to it. No arc. It just kept happening because neither of us stopped it."
Aria thought about that. No arc. No grand passion, no secret love nest, no whispered promises. Just a man who could have anything he wanted taking the easiest thing available and a woman who let him. The banality of it made her sick in a way the drama never had.
"Did you know about me?" Aria asked. "From the start?"
"Yes. Everyone at Castellano Technologies knows about you."
"And that didn't bother you."
It wasn't a question, but Katarina answered it anyway.
"It should have. It did, sometimes, at three in the morning.
But I was good at not thinking about you during the day.
" She picked up her wine, put it down again.
"I'm not telling you this to get sympathy.
I'm telling you because you asked for the truth. "
"I did."
"The truth is that I was selfish. And he was selfish.
And we were selfish together in a way that was small and ordinary and completely destructive.
" Katarina's voice didn't waver, but something shifted behind her eyes — a flash of something that might have been shame, held at a distance by force of will.
"I've thought about that a lot since September. "
#
Aria had a list of questions in her head. She'd written them on a notepad at the cottage, torn off the page, and left it on the kitchen counter beside the unsigned divorce petition. She'd memorized them the way she used to memorize recipes — by repetition, by feel.
The next question: "Who ended it?"
"I did."
"Why?"
"Because I realized I was becoming someone I didn't want to be.
" Katarina said it plainly, without drama.
"I told him in September that it was over.
He didn't argue. He didn't ask me to reconsider.
He said okay." A thin, humorless smile. "That tells you everything you need to know about what I meant to him. "
Aria studied her face. Twenty-eight years old.
Sharp cheekbones, careful posture, the kind of composure that came from years of performing competence in rooms full of men twice her age.
She was not more beautiful than Aria. She was not less.
She was just — there. A person. Flawed and specific and entirely real, which was somehow both worse and better than the monster Aria had been carrying in her head for weeks.
"He told me it was three months," Aria said. "When I confronted him. He said three months."
Katarina's expression didn't change, but her fingers tightened around the stem of her glass. "It was eight. January through September."
"I know that now. Someone else told me."
"Piers."
Aria didn't confirm it. She didn't have to. Katarina nodded once, as if confirming something to herself.
"He would have lied about the duration," Katarina said. "That's what he does. He manages. He controls the narrative. He decides what you can handle and gives you that version." She looked at Aria with something that wasn't quite pity but lived in the same neighborhood. "You know that about him."
Aria did know that about him. She'd known it for five years. She'd just never been on the wrong end of it until now.
#
"One more question," Aria said.
Katarina waited.
"Did he ever talk about me? During — " She couldn't say during the affair. The words stuck in her throat like fish bones. "During those months."
"Once." Katarina's voice softened for the first time.
"He came back from a weekend at your vineyard.
You'd made something — I don't remember what.
Some dish. And he talked about the way you cooked like it was the most remarkable thing he'd ever seen.
" She paused. "He said you made food that tasted like someone loved you. "
The air left Aria's lungs.
She pressed her palms flat against the table. The wood grain was rough under her fingers. She focused on that — the texture, the cool surface, the small chip near the edge where someone had set down a glass too hard.
"I'm going to need a minute," she said.
"Take your time."
Aria breathed. In through her nose, out through her mouth.
The way Della had taught her after the panic attack in the Sonoma cottage kitchen, the one she'd never told anyone about.
Four counts in. Four counts out. The wine bar hummed around her — a couple at the window laughing about something, the clink of glasses, a car horn on the street.
She was not going to cry. Not here. Not in front of this woman.
"Okay," she said. "I'm done."
Katarina nodded. She reached for her bag, and for a moment Aria thought she was going to pull out something — a letter, a photograph, some final piece of evidence. But she just looped the strap over her shoulder and stood.
"Aria."
"Yes."