Chapter 23 #3
In the car, I noticed two bags in the back seat.
My overnight bag, which resided on the top shelf of my closet, was packed and zipped.
He had sent someone to pack my bag. Or had he packed it himself?
My insides were on fire. Stefan had always said I was hot-tempered, so I took a moment to calm down.
I lasted eleven minutes.
“The article,” I pressed as he entered the freeway.
“What about it?”
“You leaked our wedding announcement.” It wasn’t a question.
He still answered. “Yes.”
“You provided the photographs.”
A beat. “Yes.”
“Does it ever occur to you that this is my life, too? You made a unilateral decision to go public about our marriage, and you didn’t give me any warning. Everyone at my hospital knows about us now.”
“Correct.”
I turned to look at him, practically shaking with anger.
He was driving with the composed attention he gave to everything, jaw set, eyes on the road.
He wasn’t going to apologize. I understood by now that Kai didn’t apologize for things he had done deliberately, because an apology implied that he wished he hadn’t done them.
“Why?” I asked.
A long pause. “Because people were going to find out anyway. I wanted to control the narrative.”
It was one of the most honest things he could have said, and that was the most infuriating part.
I turned back to the window. “These are my colleagues, my reputation. You announced my second marriage to them, and to the entire town, without giving me any warning whatsoever.” My voice threatened to rise, and I controlled it.
Barely. “You paid one of my coworkers to never look at me again. You paid the rest of my colleagues to call me Mrs. Cavendish. You had someone go through my personal things and pack a bag for me—”
“I packed your bag.”
I paused. “How would you even know what to pack for me?”
“I made an educated guess. But we can go shopping for anything else you need. That’s the best part of a vacation,” he said, even though I hadn’t asked him where we were going. I was too busy trying to sear him with my eyes. “Don’t worry. I packed a sweatshirt for the plane ride.”
“I—” I stopped. He packed a sweatshirt because I had mentioned exactly once, in passing, that I got cold on planes.
He had filed it and retrieved it. That was the thing about Kai.
The details. The relentless, suffocating, devastating attention to detail.
“Where are we going?” I asked because blasting Kai for his antics was hopeless.
Fighting the trip was even more pointless because his prenup stated I was to accompany him on trips if he requested it.
I only agreed because, at that time, he’d stated that he never took anyone with him on his business trips.
Kai didn’t answer. I recognized the private aviation road from when we returned from our honeymoon. He pulled into the terminal, parked, and retrieved our bags from the back seat.
I was still seething over the article, the thousand-dollar name change, Ricky, and the collective erasure of Stefan from my professional life when I saw the placard.
The flight attendant was standing at the foot of the steps, holding it as they did, the destination printed in clean black text.
Beirut.
I stopped walking.
Kai continued two steps before he realized I hadn’t followed. He turned.
I was staring at the placard. My throat bobbed involuntarily. The full inventory of grievances dissolved without ceremony.
Beirut. He was taking me to Beirut. My favorite childhood memories. My grandmother’s street. Za’atar drying on the rooftop in summer, its smell filling the whole building for weeks. My parents’ church, the stone warm and golden in the afternoon light. The Corniche.
“You—” I looked at the placard. Then at him. Then back at the placard. The sentence wouldn’t finish itself. “What did you do?”
“You said you missed Lebanon.” His voice was even, careful, as he watched me.
My eyes teared up without my permission, and I pressed my lips together. He stood there with my bag over his shoulder and a patient, unreadable expression.
My brain was still angry with him, but my legs had minds of their own. I closed the two steps between us and wrapped my arms around him.
He went still, just for a second, like a recalibration. Then his arms came around me.
I hugged him, with my face against his jacket, furious and grateful in equal measure, hating that both things could be true at once.
“You shouldn’t have published that article without my permission,” I said into his lapel.
“Okay.”
“And you can’t pay my coworkers to call me Mrs. Cavendish or to get me out of a shift.”
“Noted.”
“And you can’t throw your money around to make people not speak to me when you get jealous.”
“Noted,” he said again in exactly the same tone. Not dismissive, just immovable.
I pulled back and looked at him. “Thank you for this.”
He stared back at me, his composure breaking a fraction before it reassembled. It happened so fast I might have imagined it.
I didn’t think I imagined it.
“Let’s go home, Princess,” he said.
And that was exactly what we did.