Chapter 5
Ifind out about the engagement the way I find out about everything Jason does now. Through a screen after someone feels the need to tag me or send something to me.
Bella posts the photo as I’m scrolling through social media drinking my coffee at my kitchen table. A seven-carat cushion-cut diamond on her left hand, her fingers splayed against Jason’s chest, and a caption that reads he asked, I said obviously. The location tag says Amalfi Coast.
Amalfi. Jason, who packed peanut butter sandwiches for our honeymoon road trip to Myrtle Beach because we couldn’t afford to eat out twice in the same day.
Jason, who proposed to me in the parking lot of a Thai restaurant because the ring came in early and he couldn’t wait.
That Jason is on the Amalfi Coast putting a diamond on a billionaire’s daughter and pretending he got there all on his own merit.
The comments pile up fast. My phone buzzes with texts I don’t open. Cassidy from HR sends a single line. I’m sorry, Rayna.
It doesn’t hurt the way it did in the catering lounge. That was a blade. This is a bruise, deep and dull, the kind that only aches when you press on it. So, I stop pressing. I close the app, wash my mug, and drive to the office because I have work to do.
The building is absolutely buzzing when I get there.
Two assistants at the copy station look up when I walk past, and their faces do that thing where they try to look normal but overshoot into something worse.
A junior associate I’ve spoken to once holds the elevator for me and says, “Morning, Rayna,” with so much softness in his voice that I want to climb out through the ceiling.
In the break area, someone has pulled up the Amalfi photo on their phone.
I see it reflected in the microwave door as I pass.
The diamond, the coastline, Jason’s hand on her waist. A woman I don’t know says, “Honestly, good for her,” and another one says, “He’s still married, though,” and the first one shrugs like that’s a silly technicality.
I keep walking.
At my desk, there’s already an email from Bella’s publicist, asking if Hayes Holdings wants to issue a statement about the engagement. She’s cc’d the marketing team and Gideon’s assistant. She hasn’t cc’d Gideon. I forward it to him with no comment and get back to work.
The wedding planning starts before the engagement post is twelve hours old, before our divorce is even final.
Bella sends a mass email to every department head at Hayes Holdings with the subject line: HAYES-CLARK WEDDING, SPRING, ALL HANDS ON DECK.
No date specified. No venue confirmed. Just the assumption that the company will host it, the foundation will fund it, and everyone will adjust their calendars around her timeline.
By the afternoon, Cassidy forwards me a second email.
Bella has sent a budget spreadsheet to the events team, copying the CFO.
The number at the bottom is staggering. A destination wedding in Capri.
Five hundred guests. A private villa for the bridal party, flown over on a chartered jet.
She’s budgeted designer florals, a couture gown fitting in Milan, and a line item for “bridal content creation,” which I assume means a team who follows her around for a week documenting and posting everything.
She’s submitted all of it under the foundation’s event budget, as if her wedding is a charitable function.
I don’t say anything. I don’t need to.
Gideon calls me at five.
“You saw the wedding budget.”
“I saw it.”
“She submitted it through the foundation account. The same account that funds the pediatric wing, the literacy grants, and the scholarship program you helped me restructure last month.”
“I saw that, too.”
“I declined it. All of it. She can have the wedding she can pay for, and if Jason can’t fund it, that’s a conversation the two of them need to have without my money involved.
” He pauses. “I also checked on the engagement itself. The ring went on a credit card in Jason’s name.
Seven carats, financed. The trip went on Bella’s Amex, which is linked to my operating account.
The ring is his debt. He’s financing a life he can’t afford to impress a woman who doesn’t know what things cost.” I hear the tiredness in his voice.
“She won’t take that well,” I say. “Any of it.”
“She didn’t. She called me selfish. She said Shelly would have wanted her to have the wedding of her dreams.” A long pause. “Shelly would have told her to grow up, and she sure as hell would not have approved of her stealing another woman’s husband. Point blank, period.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I say what I can. “You did the right thing.”
“I know. The right thing and the easy thing haven’t overlapped in a long time where Bella is concerned.”
I get back to work as soon as the phone call ends, but I can’t stop thinking about everything. Can’t stop thinking about how everyone knows. About how everyone is watching to see if I crack.
But I don’t crack. I pull it together and finalize the luncheon I’ve been working on.
I call the florist. I send Gideon’s assistant a revised program timeline.
I do my job, because my job is the one thing in my life right now that I built with my own hands and put my own name on, and no engagement photo from the Amalfi Coast can take that away.
Gideon finds me at the end of the day.
Not in the corridor this time. On the terrace off the forty-second floor, where I’ve gone to eat a granola bar in quiet because the break area felt like a fishbowl. The sun is low. The city softens at this hour, all the hard edges going amber.
He doesn’t mention the phone call. He doesn’t mention Bella or the budget or the any of it. He sits in the chair next to mine and sets his glass of amber liquid on the little table between us, and for a minute we just watch the light change.
“I brought my wife up here sometimes,” he says. “She liked this time of day. Said the buildings looked like they were deciding whether to stay or go.”
“How long were you married?”
“Twenty-two years. She died four years ago. Pancreatic cancer. She went fast.”
I don’t say I’m sorry. He’s heard it enough, and the word has gone thin from overuse. Instead, I say, “Tell me something about her.”
He looks at me. Not the almost-smile this time. Something more open, more unguarded than I’ve seen from him.
“She read the ends of books first. Drove me crazy. She said she couldn’t relax into the story until she knew how it turned out.
I asked her once if she needed to watch the end of a movie first, too.
She said no because she wasn’t a psycho.
” The corner of his mouth pulls up but it flattens back out, almost like for a moment he could forget she was gone before it all came rushing back. “She would have liked you.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t wait for someone to hand you the ending. You build it yourself.”
I look at the skyline. The granola bar wrapper crinkles in my fist, and I smooth it flat against my knee because I don’t know what to do with my hands.
“She gets the world,” I say. “Amalfi Coast, seven carats, wedding in Capri. I got a Thai restaurant and a tiny ring because it’s all he could afford.”
“You know what Shelly would have said about a seven-carat ring?”
“What?
“‘Who’s he trying to convince?’ She always said the size of the diamond tells you how much convincing he thinks he needs to do.”
“She sounds like someone I’d have gotten along with.”
“She sounds like you.”
The sentence sits between us. He doesn’t rush past it.
I don’t deflect. We just let it be there, warming in the last of the daylight, and something shifts in the space between his chair and mine.
Not closer. Not a lean or a look or any of the things that come before a moment in a movie.
Just a settling. Like two people who’ve been circling each other in a crowded building finally sat down in the same quiet place and stopped pretending they ended up there by accident.
“Gideon.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not going to be the woman who falls for her ex-husband’s boss... Or her own boss. That’s not a story I’m willing to live inside.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“What are you asking then?”
He picks up his glass and turns it in his hand. “I’m asking you to let me sit here and enjoy your company. That’s all.”
I look at him for a long time. The light catches the silver at his temples. His hands are still.
“Okay,” I say.
We sit here until the sun drops behind the skyline. Neither of us moves to fill the silence. It doesn’t need filling. For the first time in months, quiet feels like something I chose instead of something that was left behind after someone walked out.
Below us, the city fills with headlights. Somewhere out there, Jason is with a fiancée, a credit card balance, and a version of himself he built from borrowed parts. And I’m on a terrace with a man who sits in silence like it’s a gift he’s offering and doesn’t need back.
I finally gather my things and stand.
“Rayna.”
“Yes.”
“For what it’s worth. He didn’t deserve the parking lot proposal either. But at least that one was real.”
I stop. I look back at him. He’s still sitting, glass in hand, the city behind him going dark, and I realize he actually listens to me like I’m a real person with real feelings and thoughts instead of a prop to help him get to the next level.
I walk inside before my face gives anything away.