18. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
I don’t sleep.
The text glows on my phone every time I check, which is every few minutes, which is constantly. Unknown number. Nine words that feel like a blade pressed against my throat, and reading them again doesn’t dull the edge, and I keep reading them again.
I lie in my bed with my eyes fixed on the dark ceiling, tracking the headlights that slide across it as cars pass below, and I run through every person who might want to destroy me.
The list is shorter than I’d like. Violet, obviously, fired, humiliated, watching her carefully laid plans unravel in real time.
But who else? Who else watched me succeed yesterday and felt the need to tear it down?
The launch coverage plays on a loop in my head.
The applause. The trending hashtags. The look on Marisse’s face when I turned away from her, dismissing her completely.
For one shining afternoon, I won. I stood in front of the cameras and I proved everyone wrong.
I showed the world that Hannah Jasper is more than a footnote in her husband’s story.
And now someone wants to take that away.
By the time the sun comes up, I’ve convinced myself it’s a bluff. Empty threats from a woman who’s already lost everything. Cameron fired her months ago. She has no power anymore, no access, no way to hurt me except through words on a screen.
Then Cameron bursts through my office door just after nine, and I know I was wrong.
“I got the same text.” He holds up his phone, the threatening message glowing on the screen. Same unknown number. Same nine words. His jaw is tight and there’s a wildness in his eyes I haven’t seen before, desperate and protective, and it makes my stomach flip despite everything. “Violet.”
“That’s my guess too. I saw her once, a few weeks ago, standing across the street from the office, watching us through the glass. I told myself she was just passing by.”
“I’ll handle it.”
But he doesn’t leave. Instead he pulls a chair up to my desk, close enough that I can smell his cologne, that expensive stuff I used to hate, though right now it just smells familiar, smells like safety, and I hate how much I don’t hate it.
He shrugs off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves, exposing the forearms I’ve always loved, the ones that used to make me lose my train of thought in meetings when he’d gesture with his hands.
We work the leak together.
It takes hours. We call my lawyer’s office on speaker, the phone propped between us, and speak to three different people. Every document is locked down. Every assistant vetted and bonded. No leaks on their end, they assure us, voices tinny through the speaker.
I call Summer while Cameron takes notes. She swears on her grandmother’s grave that she hasn’t spoken to anyone, her voice rising with indignation at the suggestion. “Hannah, I would literally die before I betrayed you. You know that.”
I call my mother, who sounds so confused by the question that guilt twists in my stomach. “Who would I even tell, honey? I don’t know any reporters. I don’t even know how to find one. Is everything okay? You sound upset.”
Which leaves Cameron’s side.
We spread papers across my desk, our hands brushing as we sort through documents, and I pretend not to notice the spark of contact.
We build a timeline together, tracing information through every possible channel.
His assistant, the new one, hired after Violet.
His lawyer’s paralegal. The two people who handled his sabbatical paperwork.
The family who were told, the many who weren’t, the web of people who orbit a man like Cameron and absorb information through proximity.
“My parents knew,” he admits, running a hand through his hair.
The gesture tugs his shirt tight across his shoulders, and I force myself to look away, to focus on the timeline instead of the way his body moves.
“I told them about the divorce when I took the sabbatical. They needed to understand why I was stepping away.”
“And your mother hates me enough to leak it.”
“She hates you enough. But this isn’t her style.
” He shakes his head, frowning at the papers we’ve spread between us.
A lock of hair falls across his forehead, and my fingers itch to brush it back the way I used to, automatic and tender.
“Prentiss would never hand ammunition to a reporter she couldn’t control.
She’d want to manage the narrative, shape the story.
Not let some entertainment journalist run wild with it. ”
“Then how did Violet find out?”
“She saw the papers in my hand the day I fired her. The rest she never needed anyone to feed her. Five years of running my life, she knows how I think, who I call, what I sign.” His jaw tightens, that muscle jumping in his cheek, and I remember how I used to kiss that spot when he was stressed, press my lips to the tension and feel it ease.
We keep working. Cross-referencing dates, making more calls on speaker, hitting dead end after dead end.
Somewhere around noon, my lead developer brings us sandwiches we don’t eat, setting the bags down with a worried glance between us.
The UX designer refills our coffee without being asked, sliding the mugs into our hands like she’s afraid we’ll forget to drink.
The office moves around us like we’re the eye of a storm, everyone giving us space while pretending not to watch through the glass walls.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, tracing the sabotage together like detectives in the wreckage of our own marriage, arguing about timelines, finishing each other’s sentences the way we used to back when finishing each other’s sentences was effortless, I laugh.
It starts small. A snort, really, at the absurdity of the situation.
Cameron is mid-sentence, explaining some corporate chain of information, and I realize we’ve been talking for four hours straight without a single awkward silence.
Four hours of actual communication. Four hours of working as a team.
The snort becomes a giggle. The giggle becomes a laugh, bubbling up from somewhere deep, and suddenly I’m laughing so hard my shoulders are shaking and tears are streaming down my face and I can’t stop, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but let it pour out of me.
Cameron freezes mid-sentence, staring at me like I’ve lost my mind.
“What? What is it?”
“Nothing.” I wave my hand, trying to catch my breath, wiping tears from my cheeks. “It’s just that we’re finally communicating. Actually working together on something. Talking, really talking, for the first time in years. And it only took the complete destruction of our marriage to make it happen.”
He doesn’t laugh. His eyes are too soft for laughter, too full of what looks dangerously like hope. The afternoon light catches the gold flecks in his brown irises, the ones I used to study when we lay in bed together, and I have to look away before I drown in them.
“There she is,” he says quietly.
I catch myself hoping too. And for just a second, I let myself.
Then both our phones explode.
Notifications flooding in, one after another, the specific cascade that means something has gone viral. Cameron’s face drains of color as he reads, the tan fading to gray, and when he turns his phone toward me, I understand why.
BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET AFFAIR: HOTEL PHOTOS EXPOSE DOUBLE LIFE
I take the phone from his hand with fingers that have gone numb.
The images are grainy but unmistakable. Cameron leaving a hotel room well after midnight, his jacket slung over his arm, his tie loosened, his hair mussed in a way I recognize from a thousand mornings of waking up beside him.
And behind him, emerging from the same doorway with her hand on his arm, her body angled toward his with unmistakable intimacy: Violet.
Timestamped eight months ago. During our marriage.
I stare at her hand on his arm. The proprietary curl of her fingers around his bicep, the same bicep I used to grip when he was above me, inside me, making me forget everything except his name.
The way she’s leaning into him, her shoulder brushing his, her face tilted up with a smile that says mine.
“Hannah-” His voice is desperate, cracking on my name. “It’s not what it looks like.”
“You said nothing happened.”
“Nothing did! That hotel, it was a conference, the whole team stayed on the same floor. Those photos are fake, Hannah. Have someone pull the originals, check the metadata, the timestamps, anything-”
“How convenient.”
“Check the metadata yourself! I can prove-”
But I’m not hearing him anymore. I’m hearing my mother’s voice. My grandmother’s. Every woman in my family who loved a man who kept another life hidden.
I reach for the divorce papers.
They’re in my top drawer, where I put them the day he left them on my desk, and I’ve opened that drawer every morning for weeks to look at them anyway.
Looked at his signature line, blank and waiting, on the final pages my lawyer drafted, the ones that need both our names before any of it becomes real.
Looked at my own empty spaces and wondered if I had the courage to fill them.
I pick up a pen.
“Hannah, please-”
I sign the first page. My name, neat and deliberate, in the space above my printed name. The pen feels heavy in my hand, final, like signing a death warrant.
“The photos are fake-”
I flip to the second page. Sign again. My hand is steadier than I expected.
“Hannah-”
Third page. Fourth. Fifth. I don’t look at him. I can’t look at him. If I look at him, I’ll see the desperation on his face and I’ll waver, and I can’t waver. Not again. Not anymore.
Sixth page. Seventh. Every page that requires my signature, I give it. The scratch of pen on paper is the only sound in the room.
“Every time I start to trust you,” I say, my voice cracking on the words, “something surfaces and I remember why I left.”
“I didn’t do this. Violet doctored those photos-”
“I don’t care!” The words explode out of me, loud enough that I see my lead developer’s head snap up through the glass wall.
“I don’t care if Violet forged every image!
I don’t care if every timestamp is fake and every pixel is photoshopped!
I care that I spent three years treated like furniture while you built your empire, and now I can’t tell what’s real anymore! ”
I shove the signed papers into his hands.
He looks at them. Looks at my signature drying on every page. Looks at his own line, still blank, still empty, still refusing to end what I’ve been trying to end for months.
And he gathers every page together. Slowly, deliberately.
Folds them with careful precision, like they’re something precious instead of the death certificate of our marriage.
His hands are shaking, I notice. His beautiful hands that I’ve watched sign million-dollar contracts without a tremor.
Shaking now, folding our marriage into thirds.
He slides the papers into his jacket pocket.
“If you want them signed,” he says quietly, “you’ll have to take them back from me.”
He walks out.
I stand there watching the door close behind him, watching the space where he used to be, and whatever was holding me together finally breaks.
I sink into my chair. The sobs come then, ugly and raw, my whole body shaking with grief and rage and the exhaustion of loving someone who keeps finding new ways to hurt me.
Through the glass wall I can see my team pretending not to watch, pretending to work, pretending their boss isn’t falling apart ten feet away.
An hour later, the office is quiet. Everyone’s gone home. The sun has set and I haven’t moved, haven’t wiped my face, haven’t done anything except sit here in the gathering dark.
I pull open the top drawer and stare at the empty space where the papers used to lie, the spot I’ve checked every morning for weeks.
My signature on every page. His line still blank.
He took them. He took them and he still won’t sign.
Summer’s aunt keeps reminding me I don’t need his signature to end this - that I could push it to a default judgment and be free in a month. I keep not telling her to do it. The excuse is that I’m busy. It isn’t the real one.
And somewhere out there, Violet is watching. Waiting. Planning her next move.