7. Heather
— ? —
Heather
The gallery opening is exactly the kind of event I used to love.
White walls, interesting art, expensive wine, the soft hum of conversation among people who understand the difference between investment and appreciation.
A couple of months ago, I would have drifted through this room like I belonged, because I did belong, because I was Kirk Moore’s wife and that meant something.
Now I’m Heather Teagues again, and I’m here with Grayson Falkner, and every head turns when we walk in.
“Smile,” Grayson murmurs, his palm at the small of my back. “You look like you’re walking into battle.”
“Aren’t I?”
“More like a siege. Battles are quick.” His fingers spread slightly, warm through the silk of my dress. “This will take all night.”
Kirk and Penelope are impossible to avoid.
They’re stationed near the bar - of course they are - looking like the cover of a magazine announcing new beginnings.
Penelope’s hand rests on her belly, a gesture that might be maternal or might be territorial.
Kirk looks polished, composed, every inch the man I married.
I hate that my chest still tightens when I see him.
“Steady,” Grayson says quietly.
“I’m steady.”
“Your hand is shaking.”
I look down. He’s right. My champagne is trembling, tiny ripples disturbing the bubbles. I set the glass on a passing tray and fold my fingers together, willing them to stillness.
“Better?”
“Getting there.”
We drift through the exhibit, pausing at pieces neither of us sees, making conversation neither of us remembers. Grayson stays close, his hand migrating from my back to my waist to my hip, a possessive geography that I’ve stopped noticing except when it’s gone.
When did I stop noticing?
When did his touch become something I expected, something I leaned into, something that made me feel anchored instead of suffocated?
I don’t have time to examine the question, because Penelope is walking toward him.
She waits until I’ve drifted toward the bar - deliberate, timed, a surgical separation - and then she appears at Grayson’s elbow, her fingers landing on his sleeve with the practiced intimacy of eight years of marriage.
From across the room, I watch.
She’s leaning in, speaking low, her face a careful arrangement of sincerity.
Grayson’s expression doesn’t change, but something tightens in his shoulders.
She touches his arm again. Laughs at something he didn’t say.
Tilts her head in that way women do when they want to seem smaller, softer, more in need of protection.
The heat climbing my throat has nothing to do with the wine.
“She’s good at that,” someone says beside me.
I turn. Margot Hale, because of course. Her smile is sharp enough to draw blood.
“Good at what?”
“Getting what she wants.” Margot nods toward the tableau across the room. “She always could wrap Grayson around her finger. I suppose some things don’t change.”
“Some things do.”
“Do they?” Margot’s eyes glitter. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like history repeating itself. She kept Kirk interested for three years while being married to that one. What makes you think you’ll fare any better?”
I set down my champagne before I throw it in her face.
“Excuse me.”
I cross the gallery, my heels clicking against the concrete floor, not running but not strolling either. The crowd parts for me, or maybe they’re just getting out of the way of something they can see coming.
Penelope is mid-sentence when I arrive. “-have to understand, Gray, I made a mistake. You have to understand-”
“Do I?” He hasn’t moved, hasn’t touched her, his hands hanging loose at his sides. “That’s a lot of mistakes over three years, Penelope. I’m having trouble keeping track.”
“Please.” Her voice drops to something soft, wounded. “Can we just talk? Alone? Without an audience?”
“I believe we’re done talking.”
“Grayson-”
“And I believe your husband is looking for you.”
She turns. Sees me. Her face rearranges into something that might be concern on someone with better acting skills.
“Heather. I was just telling Grayson how sorry I am. About everything. I never meant to hurt anyone.”
“How generous of you.”
“I know you’re angry. You have every right to be angry.” She puts a hand on her belly - the gesture again, the constant reminder. “But this isn’t good for anyone. The tension, the public scenes... it’s not healthy.”
“You’re right.” I smile with all my teeth. “It’s probably not healthy that my ex-husband spent three years sleeping with you while you were married to someone else. But we’re past the point of healthy choices, aren’t we?”
Penelope’s expression hardens. “I was trying to be kind.”
“No, you were trying to manage me.” I step closer, close enough to see the flicker of something in her eyes - fear, maybe, or surprise that the passive little wife Kirk described actually bites. “I’ve been managed by experts my entire life. You’re not even a talented amateur.”
“Heather-”
“Go back to your husband. The one you chose.” I tilt my head. “Unless you’ve already started looking for his replacement.”
Something snaps behind her eyes.
“Does she even know?” Penelope’s voice rises, high enough that nearby guests turn to listen. “Does she know you can’t have children? That she’s settling for a man who’ll never give her a family? That every time she thinks about the future, it’ll be empty-”
I don’t think. I react.
The champagne leaves my glass in a golden arc and hits Penelope full in the face.
She gasps - the sound loud in the sudden silence - her dress soaked, her makeup running, her carefully arranged expression destroyed.
“You-”
Her palm cracks across my cheek.
The impact snaps my head sideways. Pain blooms along my jaw, sharp and immediate, and for a moment I’m too stunned to move. The room has gone completely still, the crowd frozen in place, phones already rising to capture the moment.
Grayson steps between us.
“You get one.” His voice is quiet, controlled, but there’s something underneath it - rage, barely contained. “One, Penelope. Because you’re pregnant, and because we were married, and because despite everything, I don’t hit people who can’t hit back.”
Penelope draws back her hand again, mascara streaming, fury overriding whatever sense she had left.
Grayson catches her wrist mid-air. His grip is firm, not bruising, but absolutely immovable.
“I said one.”
The whole room is watching.
Security materializes from nowhere, a man in a dark suit who looks at the tableau and reaches the obvious conclusion.
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“I’m the one who was assaulted!” Penelope’s voice is shrill. “She threw a drink at me!”
“And then you struck her.” The security guard’s expression doesn’t change. “I think we’re done here.”
They walk her out, Penelope streaming protests, her dress ruined, her dignity in pieces on the gallery floor.
Kirk lingers at the door. His eyes find mine across the room, and what crosses his face looks a lot like regret.
Three years too late to matter.
He follows his pregnant mistress into the night, and I’m left standing in a silent gallery with a handprint rising on my cheek and a man who’s still holding my gaze like I’m the only thing in the room that matters.
“You should put ice on that.”
We’re in the car, his car, because I couldn’t manage my own zipper and calling for separate vehicles felt like admitting something neither of us is ready to name. Grayson hasn’t taken his eyes off the road, but his knuckles are white on the wheel.
“I’m fine.”
“You have a bruise forming.”
“I’ve had worse.”
He’s quiet. The city slides past the windows, neon and shadow, and I’m hyperaware of every inch of space between us. The gearshift. The center console. The careful distance he’s maintaining even though his hand keeps twitching toward my knee.
“She had no right.” His voice is rough. “What she said about me. About children. That was designed to hurt you.”
“It didn’t.”
“Heather.”
“Okay, it did.” I press my fingers to my cheek, feeling the heat of the rising bruise. “But not because of what she said about you.”
“Then what?”
I should tell him about Kirk. About the two years of trying, the quiet desperation, the monthly devastation of another negative test. About how Penelope’s words landed in a wound that’s still bleeding.
Instead, I tell him a different truth.
“She’s wrong.” My voice is barely a whisper. “About you. About what you can give someone. She’s wrong.”
He pulls over. Some quiet street I don’t recognize, brownstones with warm windows, the engine idling beneath us.
When he turns to face me, his eyes are dark in the ambient glow of streetlights.
I can’t breathe.
The car suddenly feels smaller, intimate in a way it didn’t moments ago, the console between us a barrier that’s also a mercy. If there were nothing separating us, I don’t know what I’d do. Climb into his lap, probably. Press my face into his neck and breathe him in until I stop shaking.
You have a bruise on your face, I remind myself. Penelope slapped you an hour ago. This is adrenaline, not attraction.
But my body doesn’t seem to know the difference.
My thighs are pressed together beneath my dress, an unconscious response to the ache that’s building between them. My skin feels too tight, too sensitive, like every nerve ending has migrated to the surface.
When he shifts in his seat and his knee almost - almost - brushes mine, I have to swallow a sound that would have been mortifying.
“Heather-”
“I don’t feel like I’m settling.” The words tumble out before I can stop them. “Being with you - even pretending to be with you - it doesn’t feel like compromise. It feels like-”
I can’t finish the sentence. Can’t put words to the thing that’s been building in my chest for weeks.
He reaches out.
His thumb brushes my cheek where the slap landed, featherlight, careful, tracing the path of heat beneath my skin. His touch is so gentle it undoes something in my chest.
But it also lights a fuse.
The bruise throbs beneath his fingertip, pain and pleasure blurring into something I can’t separate. My lips part without permission.
My breath comes faster.
And I’m suddenly, devastatingly aware of how close he is, the warmth radiating from his body, the scent of cedar and skin, the way his eyes have dropped to my mouth and stayed there.
My body is doing things without my consent. Leaning toward him. Pulse hammering in places it shouldn’t. The ache between my thighs sharpening into something urgent, demanding, completely inappropriate given that I was assaulted an hour ago.
What is wrong with you?
But I don’t pull away.
“The rules,” I manage. “We said no-”
“I know what we said.”
He doesn’t move his hand. His thumb traces along my jaw, my cheekbone, the corner of my mouth. I’m not breathing. I can’t remember how.
“Tell me to stop,” he says quietly.
We can’t do this. The thought surfaces and drowns just as fast. We have rules. We have boundaries. This is supposed to be-
But his hand is on my face, and his thumb is tracing my cheekbone, and I can’t remember a single reason why the rules mattered. So I don’t tell him to stop.
His fingers slide into my hair, cupping the back of my skull, tilting my face up toward his. We’re so close I can feel his breath against my lips. So close I can see the individual lashes framing his eyes, the slight part of his mouth, the way his throat moves when he swallows.
Pull back. Get out of the car. Go upstairs and pretend his thumb isn’t still on your cheek. Every rule we wrote in that coffee shop is standing right here in this car with us, and I’m choosing not to look at any of them.
“We should go home,” I whisper.
“Yes.” He doesn’t pull away. “We should.”
Neither of us moves.
The space between us has collapsed to inches. To centimeters. To the thin, electric gap between intention and action.
“Grayson-”
A car passes, headlights sweeping through the interior, and the moment shatters.
He pulls back. Turns to the road. The engine hums to life.
I press myself against the passenger door and try to remember how to breathe normally.
We drive the rest of the way in silence.
But I can still feel his thumb against my cheek.
I can still feel everything.