Chapter 7
Blake didn’t sleep. The penthouse had become a museum of things he had taken for granted.
Angela's silk scarf still hung over the chair near the bedroom window.
Her reading glasses rested on a book she had left face down in the living room.
A pair of her heels stood beneath the console table elegant and empty. Every object accused him.
At three in the morning, he sat on the edge of the bed he could no longer bring himself to sleep in and read through months of messages from Lily.
He had told himself they were harmless. Now, in the blue glare of his phone, they looked like a road he had walked one step at a time while pretending he was standing still.
Are you all right? You seemed tense after the board dinner.
Angela is brilliant, but I know it must be hard always standing in her shadow at the gallery.
You don't have to answer. I just wanted you to know someone sees how much you carry.
He had answered. Of course, it wasn’t every time, but it was enough.
Enough to make a woman like Lily believe she had access.
Enough to make his wife feel replaced. Enough to make the staged bedroom look like the final chapter instead of a lie.
Blake dropped the phone onto the mattress and covered his face with both hands.
By dawn, he had about three hours of sleep. He fought the urge to text Angela. He wasn’t her problem anymore. At nine, his father called again. Blake let it ring. At ten, Richard Hunter appeared at the penthouse anyway.
His father entered with the air of a man who had never been refused by blood or staff. Richard was silver-haired, broad-shouldered, and immaculately dressed, the kind of man whose affairs had been called indiscretions by people who depended on his donations.
He took one look at Blake's face and sighed.
"You look like hell."
"Good morning to you too."
"Don't be childish. We have a family dinner tonight."
Blake stared at him. "No."
"Yes."
"I'm not sitting down while you try to manage Angela into silence."
Richard's expression cooled. "Your wife is staying at Connor King's hotel. She was seen walking through her gallery with him. If you think silence is your largest problem, you're not paying attention."
Jealousy rose hot and immediate.
Blake hated it because his father saw it.
"Ah," Richard said. "So that does bother you."
Blake walked to the window. Rain had washed the city clean overnight, but nothing inside him felt clean. "Angela can have dinner with anyone she wants."
"That’s a noble sentence men say when they have no control."
Blake turned. "I don't have control. That's the point."
"You’re still her husband."
"I stopped acting like it before she stopped wearing my ring."
Something moved across Richard's face. Disapproval, perhaps. Or maybe it was the discomfort of a man hearing his son reject a family inheritance more poisonous than money.
"Your mother would have handled this privately," Richard said.
Blake refused to dignify that with a response. His mother had died when he was seventeen. Richard still used her memory like polished silver, brought out when useful, kept locked away when inconvenient.
"Do not bring my mother into this."
"She understood dignity."
"She understood loneliness. I was old enough to see that."
Richard's mouth tightened.
"And your wife?" Blake continued. "Damon's mother? Did Katherine understand dignity when you cheated on her too, or did everyone just applaud because she swallowed it silently?"
"That is my marriage."
"And this is mine."
Richard studied him, then changed tactics with the smoothness of long practice. "Angela should come tonight. Katherine wants to see her."
Katherine. Damon's mother. Richard's second wife. Gracious, elegant, and so practiced at surviving humiliation that society mistook her silence for peace.
"Angela doesn’t need a lesson in suffering prettily," Blake said.
"She needs family."
"She needs truth."
"Then invite her and offer it."
Blake almost laughed. "You want me to invite my wife to dinner after she found another woman in our bed?"
"I want you to give her a room where this can be handled without gossip."
"There is no room private enough to make this less shameful," Blake said. "Not for her. For me."
Richard looked at him as if shame were a language he found distasteful.
Blake held his father's gaze. "I'll ask her. Once. If she says no, that's the answer."
Richard's face said he disliked this new version of Blake.
Blake found that for once he didn’t care what his father thought.
Angela didn’t answer Blake's call. He left a message, then hated the sound of his own voice and sent a text instead.
My father is hosting dinner tonight. I know you owe us nothing. Katherine asked to see you. I won’t let anyone pressure you. If you want to come and say everything you were never allowed to say in that family, I will make sure they listen. If you don't, I understand.
He stared at the message for ten minutes before sending it.
The response came an hour later.
I'll come. Not for you.
Blake closed his eyes.
Fair.
By seven, the Hunter dining room looked exactly as it always had.
Candlelight on crystal. White roses in the center of the long table.
Silverware lined with military precision.
Portraits of dead Hunter men watched from the paneled walls, each one framed in gold, each one preserved with more tenderness than the women who had survived them.
Angela arrived in emerald green. Blake felt the room shift around her.
She wore no ring. Her hair was swept back from her face.
Her mouth was painted deep red. She looked so beautiful he almost couldn’t bear it, but it wasn’t beauty that made his chest ache.
It was the fact that she had dressed like a woman attending battle and not a family dinner.
Richard kissed the air near her cheek. "Angela. You look lovely."
"I know."
Blake nearly choked.
Katherine rose from her chair and took Angela's hands.
She was warm-eyed, elegant, and slender in ivory silk, her dark hair threaded with silver.
Pearls lay at her throat, soft and luminous, the kind of heirloom women were given for staying graceful through things no one named.
Damon had her smile. Blake had always liked her, which made what she represented more painful.
"My dear," Katherine said softly. "I'm so sorry."
Angela's expression gentled a fraction. "Thank you."
They sat. For ten minutes, everyone pretended to eat. Richard asked about the gallery. Angela answered with polished brevity. Katherine asked if the hotel was comfortable. Angela said Connor had been generous with privacy. Blake's hand tightened around his water glass, but he said nothing.
Richard set down his fork. "This family has endured difficult moments before."
Angela looked at him. "What a tasteful way to describe betrayal."
Blake lowered his gaze to hide the flicker of satisfaction he had no right to feel.
Richard's mouth tightened. "Public anger often causes damage that private restraint could avoid."
"Private restraint seems to have worked beautifully for the men in this family."
Katherine inhaled softly.
Blake's father was silent.
Angela looked at Katherine, and her voice lost some of its edge. "That wasn't aimed at you."
Katherine's smile was sad. "I know."
"Do you?" Angela asked quietly.
Something in the air changed.
Katherine folded her hands in her lap. "There are things a wife learns to carry privately."
Angela's face changed. It wasn’t anger exactly. More like grief recognizing itself in another woman's mirror and refusing the inheritance.
For one moment, Blake saw Angela see Katherine clearly. Not as weak. Not as foolish. As a woman who had survived the only way she had been allowed to survive, then had been praised until she mistook the cage for composure.
"I respect what you’ve gone through," Angela said softly. "But I won't mistake survival for freedom."
Katherine looked down at her plate. For a moment, Blake thought she might be offended. Instead, she looked almost relieved. Or ashamed. Or both.
Richard cleared his throat. "Angela, no one is asking you to accept humiliation."
Angela looked at him. "That’s exactly what you're asking. You've simply set a better table around it."
Before Richard could answer, the dining room doors opened.
Damon Hunter strolled in late, sun-browned, handsome, and careless in a black suit with no tie. He carried the faint scent of expensive cologne and sea air.
"Did somebody die?" he asked, glancing around the table. "Because this feels like the dinner people attend after the will is read."
No one laughed.
Damon's smile faded. His eyes moved to Angela, then Blake, then his mother's pale face. "Right. Bad joke."
"You're late," Richard said.
"I'm Damon. That was implied."
Katherine gave him a look.
He kissed her cheek. "Sorry, Mom."
Angela watched Damon sit across from Blake. Blake could feel her cataloguing the family resemblance. Damon had Richard's charm and Katherine's warmth, but his eyes were sharper than his jokes suggested.
Dinner resumed, though no one pretended successfully now.
Then the butler appeared at the doorway, uncomfortable. "Mr. Hunter, Ms. Saint is here."
Blake stood so fast his chair scraped the floor. "No."
Angela's face went white in a way that made him want to break every glass in the room.
Richard's brows drew together. "Why is she here?"
Blake moved toward the door, but Lily stepped past the butler before he reached it.
She wore pale blue again. Soft, trembling, angelic. Her hair fell around her shoulders. One hand pressed to her stomach, not dramatically enough to announce anything yet, but enough that Angela's gaze dropped to it.
Damon made a small sound.
Almost nothing.
But Angela saw it.
Blake saw Angela see it.
Lily looked around the room as if entering had cost her everything. "I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't be here."
"Then leave," Blake said.
Her eyes filled. "I tried to speak to you privately."
"I told you not to contact me."
"I couldn't keep this secret anymore."
The room went utterly quiet.
Angela rose slowly.
Lily's hand spread over her stomach.
"I'm pregnant," she said.
For a second, Blake heard the rain tapping the windows.
"No," he said.
Lily looked at him with devastating softness. "You don't remember enough to say that."
Angela's face emptied.
Blake stepped toward her, but she was already moving away from the table.
"Angela."
She looked at him once, and he felt the full force of what his choices had created. Not Lily's lie. Not yet. His choices. His wife standing in his family dining room while the woman he had defended announced a child that might be his because Blake couldn’t remember enough to deny it.
Richard murmured something about everyone calming down.
Angela turned on him.
"Don't you dare ask me to be calm."
Richard closed his mouth.
Katherine pressed a hand to her lips.
Damon stared at Lily with a look Blake couldn’t read.
Lily lowered her eyes, but not before Blake saw the flash of triumph.
Angela walked out.
Blake followed, but he didn’t grab her. He didn’t call her unreasonable.
He didn’t ask her to think of the family.
He followed because he had one thing left to offer, and even that was only words.
He caught up to her in the marble foyer beneath a chandelier that had probably watched generations of Hunter men ruin women and call it complexity.
"Angela, please."
She spun around. "Your family doesn't want truth. They want a wife quiet enough to live the lie."
"I won't let them do that to you."
"You already did." Her voice broke then, just barely. "You made her believable."
The words struck harder than anything Lily had said.
Blake stepped back instead of forward. He wanted to tell her he loved her. He wanted to swear Lily was lying. He wanted to promise that he would fix it but fixing it had become another way men like him seized control.
So, he said the only thing that didn’t ask her to comfort him.
"You're right."
Angela's eyes flashed with pain.
"I hope, for your sake, Blake, that you're as innocent as you keep trying to sound."
Then she walked into the night without him.
Blake let her go. It was the first good choice he had made all evening, and it felt like dying.