8. Under a Different Sky
Chapter eight
Under a Different Sky
Two months later, when Roman sent a car for me one evening, it didn’t take me to a restaurant.
It carried me out of the city, north, until the buildings thinned and the sky opened up. I stopped asking the driver where we were going. He only smiled at me in the mirror and said Mr. Thorne wanted it to be a surprise.
We turned off the highway, then off the smaller road, then up a private drive. It wound through dark trees to the top of a hill. There was Roman, alone, no staff, standing beside a low arrangement on the grass.
He’d laid it out himself. I could tell because it wasn’t perfect. A wide, flat cushion, the kind you’d haul out of a den, with blankets folded at one end. A low table with a thermos and two cups and a plate of cut fruit.
A pair of those patio heaters angled so the warmth would reach us without the glare. And above all of it, once the driver’s headlights swung away and left us in the dark, the entire sky.
I hadn’t seen stars like that in years. The city ate them. Out here they were thrown across the black by the thousands, careless and bright.
“You said once that you wanted to be somewhere you didn’t have to perform.” Roman came to help me down onto the cushion, both his hands steady around mine. “I couldn’t think of anywhere with fewer people to perform for.”
I lowered myself carefully, one hand on the bump. He arranged a blanket over my legs without being asked, and tucked it around me. I faltered for a moment, caught off guard by how naturally the gesture came to him.
“You’re a billionaire,” I said. “You could have flown me anywhere. A yacht. A rooftop in another country.”
“I could have.” He settled beside me, close, his shoulder against mine, both of us leaning back to face the sky.
“But you’re seven months pregnant, and you get tired by nine.
A yacht is a lot of standing, a lot of people pretending not to watch us.
I didn’t want you managing a single thing tonight.
Not a dress code, not a waiter, not a view you had to be impressed by.
” He found my hand under the blanket. “I wanted you on your back in the dark looking at something that doesn’t care who we are. ”
I lay there thinking about the sheer thoughtfulness of it, the way he’d taken all his power and spent it on crafting something quiet.
Elliott’s idea of a gesture had always been the most expensive thing in the room, displayed so other people could see him holding it.
Roman had hauled a den cushion up a hill so a pregnant woman’s back wouldn’t ache.
“This is the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in a very long time,” I said. “And all you did was bring a blanket.”
“All I did was pay attention,” he said lightly, but it landed heavy, because it was true, and because nobody had paid attention to me in so long I’d forgotten it was a thing a person could do.
We lay quiet for a while. He pointed things out, the few he knew. A planet that didn’t twinkle, the smudge he said was another galaxy entirely.
I felt the baby shift and pressed his hand flat to the spot so he could feel it too. He went very still, the same as he always did when the baby moved, like it was the most serious thing in the world.
It was Roman who broke the quiet, eventually, and his voice changed before I understood the words. The careful tone of a man broaching a difficult subject.
“I want to give you a name,” he said. “And then I want to leave it completely up to you whether you ever use it.”
“A name.”
“A lawyer.” He shifted, propped on an elbow so he could see me.
“Julian Sinclair. The best divorce attorney in the state, and the coldest, which in this case is a compliment. When you decide to end it with Elliott, and I think you’ve already decided, you shouldn’t walk into that alone.
Elliott lies for a living. He’ll have someone.
You should have someone better.” He reached into his jacket and produced a card, plain, heavy stock, and held it out.
“That’s all this is. A name in your pocket.
You call him when you’re ready, or you never call him, and either way I never bring it up again. ”
I took the card. I couldn’t read it in the dark, but just having it in my hand felt like a small door opening.
“You’re very careful,” I said, “to keep telling me it’s my choice.”
“Because it is.” He lay back again. “I’ve watched a lot of powerful men solve a woman’s problem for her and call it ‘love’.
It isn’t. It’s just a quieter way of deciding she can’t do it herself.
” His voice flattened. “Elliott spent the last two years teaching you that you couldn’t do anything without him steering.
I’m not going to win you by being a better steering wheel. ”
That carried the same raw honesty his anger had, that first night at the bar.
“I do have a plan.” Admitting it out loud felt like setting down something I’d been carrying alone.
“It’s getting clearer. But I’m not going to hand it to you, and I need you to not be hurt by that.
Because the second I let you run it, it stops being mine.
And I have to be the one who does this. Do you understand? ”
“You point,” he said simply, like he’d already made peace with how he could be of use to me.
“I’ll be the thing you aim. I told you that and I meant it.
” He turned his head toward me in the dark.
“Take the lawyer, though. Aiming yourself at a man who fights dirty is easier with someone good in your corner.”
“I’ll take the lawyer.”
I put the card in my bag, and we lay quiet again as the sky wheeled slowly overhead.
For a while, neither of us said anything, and it wasn’t the kind of silence I’d learned to dread. In eight years with Elliott, I’d come to read every quiet as a test. A thing I was supposed to fill or fix, a temperature I had to keep watching.
This was nothing like that. Roman didn’t need me to perform the silence away. He lay there with his shoulder warm against mine and let it just be quiet. The baby turned over slowly under my ribs. A small light crossed the whole sky in a thin, patient line while we watched it go.
“Can I ask you something?” The dark made it easier. “You never actually answered me, that first night at the Velvet Lounge. You said it wasn’t about me being beautiful or interesting. So what was it, really? What made you stay in your seat that night instead of finding someone simpler?”
He was quiet a moment, and I knew he was deciding to tell the truth instead of something smooth.
“Because you never stopped being exactly that honest.” His voice had dropped to something quieter than I’d heard from him before.
“I told you once that not wanting anything from me threw me off balance. That hasn’t worn off.
If anything, it’s gotten worse, because now I know what’s underneath the honesty too, and I keep finding more of it I want.
” He turned his head toward me. “I built a whole life around never letting that happen twice. After enough years of people angling, you stop expecting anyone to walk in clean. You build the walls, and you stop checking whether they’re still necessary.
You’ve broken through them anyway, every week, a little further.
I keep waiting to feel the old instinct kick in, the one that pulls back before it costs me anything.
It hasn’t come. I don’t think it’s coming.
” He exhaled slowly. “I’m not used to losing that particular argument with myself, and I’m even less used to not wanting to win it. ”
I lay there in silence, struck by the sheer rarity of being wanted for nothing but myself. I felt my eyes sting in the dark where he couldn’t see.
“That’s the most honest thing a man’s said to me in years.” I meant it more than I expected to.
“Get used to it.”
I almost believed I could.
The quiet warmth faded a moment later when he turned serious again, and I felt the sudden shift in his posture as he braced himself.
“Can I share a thought with you?” he said finally. “And you can tell me to drop it. I mean that completely. Drop it and we never speak of it again.”
“That’s an ominous way to follow up a blanket.”
He didn’t laugh. “It’s about how this ends for Elliott.”
I waited.
“You’re going to win the part that matters,” he said.
“You already are. You’ve seen exactly what he is.
You’re getting free of him. You’ll have your child, your own life, the truth.
That truth is yours and nobody can take it from you.
” He paused, choosing his words. “But here’s what I keep snagging on.
To the rest of the world, he walks away from this fine.
Maybe better than fine. He divorces quietly, tells everyone it just didn’t work out, finds the next wife, makes partner, climbs.
The affair, the things he said about you, the cabana...
none of it ever touches him out there. He pays nothing.
Everyone nods. He keeps winning. And the only person who’ll ever really know what he is, is you. ”
I looked at the stars as a familiar dread gripped my stomach, because he’d just described the exact future I’d been waking up afraid of at three in the morning. Elliott, somewhere across town in a year, polished and unscathed, the whole thing folded neatly into the past behind him.
“I’ve thought about that,” I said. “More than I’ve told you.”
“I figured.” He took a moment before he went on. “So here’s the thought. Tell me to drop it.”
“Say it.”
“There’s a client choosing a new wealth management firm right now.
An enormous account, the kind that makes a man partner.
” His voice stayed level, conversational, like he was still naming constellations.
“I know the people who’ll make that decision.
One word from me in the right place, and that account goes to Elliott’s firm.
To Elliott, specifically. The hungry junior who lands the whale of a lifetime. ”
I turned my head and stared at the dark shape of him. “You want to help him?”
“No.” A sharp note of pleasure entered his voice. “I want to give him exactly enough rope. Maeve, the client is Hearthwell.”
The name hung in the dark, altering the shape of everything he was offering.
Everyone knew Hearthwell. I knew Hearthwell. There was a box of their stuffing in my own pantry, the one my mother had used every Thanksgiving and hers before that. The pie crusts, the Sunday-supper commercials, the whole empire built on the face of Eleanor Hearth.
The silver-haired grandmother who’d started it in her kitchen and put her own smiling face on every package. ‘Family first’. ‘A home-cooked meal’. The most wholesome brand in the country, run by a woman famous for pulling sponsorships over the mildest whiff of scandal.
I lay in the dark and thought about that last part for a long moment.
“Hearthwell,” I repeated.
“A brand that lives and dies on its image. A founder who vets the people she trusts with her money like she’s choosing godparents.
” He stayed quiet for a moment, letting the implications of the name sit between us.
“They’d want a clean-cut family man to front the account.
Does Elliott strike you as a man who’d look a gift horse in the mouth?
Or would he take what’s handed to him and never once consider the fallout if anyone learned who he really is? ”
I understood then exactly what he was holding out to me. Not a favor to Elliott. A noose, gift-wrapped, that Elliott would knot around his own neck because he was too greedy to read the label.
“He wouldn’t think twice,” I said slowly. “He’d see the size of it and nothing else.”
“That’s my read too.”
I looked up at all those stars and recognized how flawless the trap was, and how much the scale of it frightened me.
“I want to be honest about something,” Roman said, and his voice gentled.
“This is yours. Completely. If you tell me to drop it, I drop it, and I won’t think any less of you.
” He found my hand again. “I’ve done enough business to know the difference between giving someone a tool and forcing it on them.
I’m putting this in your hands. What you do with it is the only part that was ever going to matter. ”
That restraint was exactly what lowered my guard. He could have simply done it. Made the call, steered the account, presented me the finished trap like a gift I never asked for. Plenty of men would have and called it ‘love’. Instead, he laid it in the grass between us and took his hands off it.
I thought about the clean break. I genuinely did, lying there.
I could take it. Sign the papers, take what was mine, walk out into this enormous, wide-open world and never look back.
Let Elliott keep his career and his story.
There was a version of me from a month ago who’d have leapt at that escape out of pure exhaustion, grateful just to be let go.
But I kept landing in the same place. The cabana.
The sound of him laughing when she called me an ‘incubator’ like it was clever.
The certainty in him that I’d never dare, that I was too small and too soft to be anything but managed.
A clean break would let that certainty stand.
He’d go on believing he’d read me right.
I was done letting him be right.
“Do it.” I didn’t let myself hesitate over it.
Roman went still. “You’re sure?”
“He’s spent his whole life being rewarded for hiding what he is. I’m not going to watch him get rewarded one more time.” I laced my fingers through his in the dark. “Give him the rope. I’ll decide the rest. The how, the when, all of it. That part’s mine.”
“That part’s yours,” he said, lifting my hand to his mouth. Above us the stars stayed cold and bright. And somewhere across the city, my husband was asleep, dreaming of a future I’d just agreed to hand him so it could become the thing that ruined him.