Chapter Six
Damon
I was in Paris, buried in custody filings and a translator who couldn't keep up with how fast I needed things moved, when my phone buzzed once against the hotel desk.
A text from Mandy. No paragraph. No fury spelled out in capital letters. Just five words, flat and final as a verdict:
I'm leaving. It's over, Damon.
Something dropped through my chest and kept falling. I called her back immediately—straight to that dead mechanical tone that only means one thing. Blocked.
Before I could even get a full breath in, my phone lit up again. A message from Nico this time, no greeting, just fury typed in a hurry:
Damon, if you have even one ounce of feeling left for Mandy, drop that case right now and get on a plane.
I read it twice, frowned, and swiped it away.
Nico had always run hot—every small crack between Mandy and me turned into the end of the world in her eyes.
And if Mandy had gone straight to my sister, that told me something too: this was hurt talking, not a decision.
People who are truly done don't send five words. They send silence.
We had three years behind us. A house. Friends who'd stopped inviting one of us anywhere without the other. Our lives were braided together too tightly to just—unravel. She couldn't actually mean it.
I told myself that on a loop through every meeting for the next six days, and some stubborn part of me almost believed it.
But underneath that, something colder was already spreading. Because in three years, Mandy had never once gone quiet on me. She fought loud, fought fair, fought until we'd worn each other down into an apology. Five cold words and a blocked number wasn't Mandy losing her temper.
It was Mandy closing a case file.
I found myself hoping, absurdly, that she'd be screaming when I landed. I'd have taken hysterical over silent without a second's hesitation. Screaming meant she still cared enough to want me to hurt. Silence meant she'd already stopped.
I compressed a week of custody hearings into four brutal days, slept in airports, closed the case, and boarded the first flight home I could get a seat on.
Fourteen hours later, wrecked and unshaven, I came through the arrivals gate at JFK and found Nico waiting in the crowd. Her eyes were swollen red, her face caught somewhere between fury at me and a grief that looked almost too big for her.
"Nico—where's Mandy—"
Crack.
The slap cut through the terminal noise like a gunshot, sharp enough that three strangers turned to look.
My head snapped sideways. My ears rang. For one full second I couldn't process anything at all except the sting spreading hot across my jaw.
Nico stood in front of me shaking, tears finally spilling over, her voice breaking apart with a rage I'd never once heard from her in thirty years.
"You selfish, arrogant bastard." Her hand was still raised, trembling. "Mandy's divorcing you, Damon. Are you happy now?"