Chapter Two
Damon
I'll admit it: I'm an exceptional liar. To me, a well-placed lie isn't a moral failing—it's just the most efficient tool available for keeping the peace and keeping myself intact.
Take the night Nico cornered me at our own engagement party, arms crossed, demanding I name the exact moment I fell for Mandy. I shrugged. Told her I didn't remember one specific instant.
That was a lie. I remember every second of it. It's carved into me like a scar I run my thumb over on bad nights.
Three years ago, that afternoon, I was already three drinks past drunk before the sun hit its peak.
My life had come apart at the seams. I'd lost my first solo trial—a defeat so humiliating it took a chunk out of me I still haven't fully grown back—and Caroline had walked out the same week, like the universe wanted to make sure I got the message twice.
Watching the verdict land, watching the hope drain out of my client's face and turn to something closer to grief, I felt like someone had reached into my chest and yanked out my spine.
I'd been the golden boy since law school—untouchable, worshipped, incapable of losing.
That day I got my first real taste of failure, and it was bitter enough to make me question whether I had any business calling myself a lawyer at all.
And then Mandy showed up at my door.
Everyone else in my life either fawned over me or looked at me with pity dressed up as concern. Mandy did neither. She never once treated me like some untouchable prodigy. She saw straight through the performance, every time, and took a special kind of pleasure in puncturing it.
That day she stood over me, arms crossed, looking down at the wreck I'd made of myself with an expression that was half disgust, half something gentler she'd never have admitted to. And something in me—something I'd kept bolted shut for years—finally gave way.
Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was ten years of something I'd buried too deep to name, finally clawing its way to the surface.
I didn't trade insults with her the way I always did. I reached up, pulled her down by the back of her neck, and kissed that sharp, merciless mouth of hers until neither of us could breathe.
In that single second, I burned through every boundary I'd built around her. Nico's best friend. Off-limits. Don't. All of it, gone. I crossed a line I'd sworn for a decade I'd never touch.
The next morning, sober and clear-eyed, I regretted it. I'll admit that too.
Mandy wasn't a woman I could handle with a polite text and a bouquet of apology flowers.
She was Nico's closest friend in the world—if I wrecked this the way I wrecked everything else, Nico would have come at me with something sharper than words.
My lawyer's brain kicked in before my heart had a say in it, already drafting the damage control.
Then I walked out of the bedroom, and every ounce of that reasoning evaporated on contact.
Morning light was pouring gold across the living room floor.
Mandy stood in the middle of it wearing one of my dress shirts—tailored on me, swallowing her whole, sleeves rolled past her wrists.
No performance in it. No attempt to look good for me.
She had a piece of French toast crammed into her mouth in two enormous bites, cheeks puffed out like a squirrel defending its winter stash.
I laughed. Out of absolutely nowhere, from somewhere I didn't know I still had access to.
Not the smug laugh I gave a jury after a win.
Not the practiced chuckle I used to wrap up a one-night thing before it got complicated.
This was something unfamiliar—warm, unguarded, a little frightening in how simple it felt.
Standing there in yesterday's slacks, watching a woman demolish breakfast in my shirt, I thought: so this is what happy feels like.
That was the moment. Not a candlelit dinner. Not a scripted confession. Just a girl in an oversized shirt, syrup on her thumb, and the sudden, terrifying certainty that I was completely, irreversibly gone for her.
I never told her that. I told a room full of wedding guests I didn't remember.
* * *
Three years of marriage. I'm the most sought-after divorce attorney in New York—the man corporations and heartbroken heiresses alike call when a marriage needs to be surgically dismantled.
The case that put my name on the map was ugly and public: a battered wife against a billionaire husband with a legal team built to bury her.
I tore him apart on the stand and won her more than she ever thought she'd see again.
That case didn't just build my reputation.
It rebuilt something in me that had been in pieces since that first courtroom loss.
I know it unsettles Mandy, watching me swim in other people's wreckage every day—all that bitterness, all that betrayal, walking through my office in Chanel and tailored suits.
I hand out the polished reassurances at parties like tonight's without missing a beat.
But here's the truth I've never once said out loud to her:
I'm terrified.
Terrified that outside the leverage and the winning, outside the games I play with other people's broken marriages, there's nothing underneath me.
I could never do what Mandy does—fight for people who can't pay, who have nothing to offer but a case that matters.
I need the wins. I need the money, the trophies, even the stupid, petty domestic victories over hydrangeas, because somewhere under all of it is a man still terrified of losing again the way I lost that first case.
The way, some nights, I'm convinced I'll eventually lose her.
Mandy looks unbelievable tonight.
From the second she crossed the ballroom in those heels, I couldn't look away from her.
And when she went toe-to-toe with Chloe—chin up, that ring flashing like a warning shot, claiming me in front of a room full of people without raising her voice once—God.
It was the single sexiest thing I've watched a woman do in this city.
I loved every second of it. I loved being wanted like that, claimed like that.
It fills something in me I don't examine too closely, something that's been hollow since long before I met her.
All night I worked the room the way I always do—handshake, smile, small talk with a client who's paying my firm a fortune to bury her ex—while half my brain was already three hours ahead, picturing the two of us alone once the guests cleared out.
Just her. Just quiet. The whole rest of the night finally ours.
Then Caroline walked through the door, and every plan I had for tonight came to a dead stop.
My smile froze. Just for a second—half a heartbeat, nothing anyone but Mandy would ever catch—but it happened, and I hated myself for it before I even understood why.
Caroline was the longest relationship I had before Mandy.
But we both knew what she really was to me, even if neither of us ever said it out loud: soft, agreeable, endlessly adoring in a way that asked nothing of me and gave me everything I needed to feel like I was still winning at something.
I didn't love Caroline. I fed on her. Her devotion was fuel for an ego I didn't know how to run on empty.
I still carry that. Quietly, in the part of me I don't let anyone look at—not even Mandy.
I used a good woman's heart to prop up my own, and I never once thanked her for it before she finally had the sense to leave.
When I heard she'd married some French millionaire and was living some glossy, untouchable life on the Riviera, I felt something close to relief.
Like a debt I owed had finally, mercifully, been written off.
So why, three years later, on the one night I've built my entire evening around getting my wife alone—why was Caroline standing in my doorway in white satin, smiling at me like no time had passed at all?