My Billionaire Husband Asked Me for a Divorce for Another Woman (Her Marriage on the Edge #6)
1. Tuesday
One
Tuesday
The dinner had been on my calendar for three weeks.
I knew the venue, the guest list, the exact shade of green I’d chosen for my dress because Sebastian liked me in green, said once, years ago, that it made me look like I belonged outdoors somewhere wild instead of in a private dining room on the forty-first floor of a building he owned a piece of.
I did not know about Vanessa.
“Cole Capital is thrilled to be partnering with the Whitfield Group on this,” Sebastian said, standing at the head of the table with a glass of wine he wasn’t drinking, the way he never drank at these things, always half a step ahead of everyone else in the room even when he looked relaxed.
“And I want to personally welcome someone who’s going to be central to making this deal work. ”
I was checking my phone. A text from Lucy about a dinner reservation she was trying to move. I looked up when the room’s attention shifted, all at once, toward the door.
“Vanessa Whitfield,” Sebastian said.
My stomach dropped the way it does on the back half of a rollercoaster, before you’ve consciously registered the hill. I didn’t know who she was yet. I only knew that my husband’s voice had changed shape around her name.
She was tall, dark-haired, wearing the kind of black dress that costs more by being simple.
She crossed the room like she already knew where the good light was.
And when she reached Sebastian, she didn’t shake his hand.
She touched his forearm, briefly, familiar, the way you touch someone you’ve touched a thousand times before you ever learned not to.
“Sebastian Cole,” she said, smiling. “Look at you. CEO now. I always knew.”
“Vanessa runs strategic partnerships for Whitfield,” Sebastian said to the table, to me, to no one. His voice had a brightness in it I hadn’t heard directed at me in longer than I wanted to admit. “We go back a long way.”
I smiled, because that’s what nine years of marriage teaches you to do in rooms like this. I smiled and I said it was wonderful to meet her, and I meant it, mostly, because I didn’t yet know what I was meeting.
It was Lucy, three days later, over coffee she’d shown up to my studio with unannounced, who told me the rest, the way you hand someone something sharp.
“You didn’t know,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Sebastian and Vanessa were engaged. Before you. I thought — everyone who’s been around Cole Capital long enough knows. I assumed you did too.”
I stared at the fabric swatches spread across my studio table for a long moment, three weeks behind on a hotel lobby I couldn’t focus on anymore, and thought about the particular brightness in Sebastian’s voice, and the way Vanessa had touched his arm like her hand still remembered the shape of him.
I didn’t say anything to Sebastian that night. I told myself it didn’t matter. People have exes. People have histories. I had history too — a broken engagement of my own at twenty-six, a man named David I hadn’t thought about in years.
But David had never once changed my husband’s voice.
That was Tuesday.