Chapter Ten
Mandy
I hadn't expected Damon to lose control like that. Not in public. Not over a page of asset division.
"If you actually want this over—sue me." His voice had gone hard, almost reckless, loud enough that the couple two tables over had stopped pretending not to listen. "We're both lawyers. You know how this works. You file, I answer, and we finish this in front of a judge."
I opened my mouth—to say what, I honestly didn't know. Some clipped, professional line to shut this down before it turned into a scene neither of us could walk back from.
I never got the chance.
"Fine."
The voice came from behind me, low and unhurried, and something in it made the back of my neck go warm before I'd even turned around.
A man rose from the corner booth—I hadn't clocked him sitting there at all—and crossed the few feet to our table like he had every right to be part of this conversation.
Charcoal suit, tailored close. Fair hair.
And then his hand settled on my shoulder, warm and certain, like it belonged there.
"Mandy." He said my name gently. "If Mr. Walker won't settle, let him have his litigation. I'll represent you."
I blinked up at him, and for a second my whole body forgot what it was supposed to be doing. "Edward?" It came out before I could stop it, disbelief plain in my own voice. "What are you doing here?"
Edward Redson. I hadn't said that name out loud in years. Hadn't let myself think it, most days. College. The law library at two in the morning. A boy who used to walk me home in the rain without ever once making it feel like a favor.
"Client meeting nearby." He said it easy, like running into your ex-boyfriend in the middle of your almost-ex-husband's ambush was nothing at all.
His eyes flicked to Damon, and whatever warmth had been in his voice for me cooled into something perfectly, deliberately professional.
"Caught some of this on my way past. Sorry—didn't mean to eavesdrop."
I glanced at Damon and immediately wished I hadn't. His jaw had gone tight, his eyes fixed on Edward's hand on my shoulder like it had personally wronged him.
"Mr. Walker." Edward's nod was polite, unbothered, the kind of calm I used to find unbearably steady and now, in this moment, found almost like being handed a lifeline.
"Edward Redson. Old friend of Mandy's." A pause, deliberate enough that I caught it even through the fog of my own shock.
"Since the two of you can't reach an agreement, I'll be stepping in as her counsel. You'll have paperwork at your office by end of week."
He lifted his hand from my shoulder, shifted his stance just enough to put his body between me and Damon's line of sight, and lowered his voice for me alone.
"Let's go. It's coming down hard out there. I'll drive."
I felt strangely weightless, like the last ten minutes had happened to someone else and I was only now catching up to my own life.
I looked back at Damon once—just once, not even sure myself what I was looking for in his face—then let Edward's hand find the small of my back and steer me toward the door.
* * *
The cold hit me the second we stepped outside, rain slicing sideways off the awning, and I shivered hard enough that Edward's hand tightened briefly at my back before he let go.
I hadn't expected this. Any of it. Not Damon choosing a courtroom over a signature—dragging our dying marriage out into the light rather than letting it end quietly, the way I'd wanted.
And certainly not Edward, materializing out of a corner booth like the universe had decided I hadn't had enough surprises for one week.
Sue me. I turned the words over as we crossed the wet sidewalk to Edward's car.
How fitting. Even now, at the very end, Damon still only understood two outcomes—winning and losing.
That flat, lawyer's ultimatum hadn't sounded like a husband trying to hold on to his wife.
It sounded like a man who'd spent his entire career on top declaring war on an opponent, convinced that if he just dragged the process out long enough, he could still control how it ended.
Fine. If he wanted a fight, I'd give him one. This time I wasn't going to retreat into hesitation. This time I wasn't going to read a single ounce of feeling into whatever performance of unraveling he put on next.
Edward opened the passenger door for me without a word, and I slid inside into air that was blessedly warm, the wipers beating a slow, steady rhythm across the windshield.
"Sorry about that back there." He pulled out into traffic, eyes on the road, his voice as level as I remembered it being a decade ago. "I overstepped—taking your case without asking first. If you're not comfortable with it, fire me any time. No hard feelings."
I turned to look at him properly for the first time since he'd stood up from that booth. The years had sharpened his features, added a certain gravity to a face I used to know as well as my own—but the steadiness in his eyes, the quiet respect underneath it, hadn't changed at all.
"No, Edward." I shook my head, watching the city smear gold and red through the rain-streaked glass. "There's no one I'd trust more with this."
Damon wanted litigation. Fine. I'd give him exactly that.
The car smelled faintly of cedar and rain, an old, half-forgotten kind of comfort. Edward drove the way he always had—easy, competent, unbothered by silence, asking nothing about Damon or what had happened between us in that café. He'd always known which questions to leave alone.
Watching his profile against the passing streetlights, I found myself drifting back to college without meaning to.
Getting together with Edward, back then, had been an escape route.
A way to outrun a hopeless, consuming crush on a boy who never once looked at me the way I looked at him.
Damon, back then, had been proud and cold and impossible to hold onto—wind you could feel but never catch.
Edward had been almost his exact opposite.
Steady. Grounded. Gentlemanly in a way that never once felt like a performance.
Before me, he'd had exactly one serious relationship—three clean, uncomplicated years, nothing messy left behind.
For a while, wrapped in the quiet, undemanding warmth of him, I actually believed I'd healed. I'd pass Damon in a hallway or catch him across a crowded party and feel nothing accelerate in my chest. I told myself, more than once, that I'd finally made peace with it.
It didn't last.
I noticed it creeping in slowly, then all at once, with a kind of quiet horror—I was hoping Damon would notice.
Hoping he'd see me with Edward and feel something.
I wanted to parade him in front of Damon like a trophy I'd won in a game only I knew we were playing, waiting for even the faintest crack in that maddening composure of his.
God, how childish that was. How pathetic, dressing up jealousy as a relationship and calling it moving on.
I'd been using one man to try to provoke a reaction out of another, and the moment that truth landed, I understood exactly how far my obsession with Damon had already traveled past anything as innocent as a teenage crush. It had become something else. Something closer to sickness than love.
I knew what I owed Edward, and it wasn't this.
He deserved a woman who wanted him for himself, not as a weapon aimed at someone else's indifference.
So, when he told me he was leaving for graduate school in Europe, I let him go without a single word of protest.
Freed him from whatever I'd been quietly turning him into.
And walked myself straight back into the wreckage that was Damon.
"Penny for your thoughts?"
Edward's voice pulled me back into the present. He'd stopped at a red light, glancing over at me with quiet, unhurried concern.
I blinked the memory away. "Nothing important." I gave him a small smile, equal parts grateful and guilty, the same combination I'd owed him for years and never quite managed to pay off. "Just old things surfacing."
"What's past is past, Mandy." He reached across the console and pressed a clean handkerchief into my hand, his voice even, steady, entirely without judgment. "Right now, we focus on what's in front of us."