Chapter Eleven
Damon
The knock on my office door came while I was staring blankly out the window at a sky the color of wet concrete.
Edward Redson walked in.
Black coat, tailored close, a thick stack of legal documents tucked under one arm. He crossed to my desk with the kind of unhurried grace that made everything he did look deliberate, and set the papers down on the marble surface between us.
"Summons for divorce proceedings, Mr. Walker." His voice stayed flat, businesslike, like he was delivering a lunch order. "As Mandy's counsel, I wanted to bring it myself."
I stared at the court seal stamped across the top page, my fingers curling into fists below the desk where he couldn't see, forcing down the cold, bitter churn rising in my stomach.
When I finally looked up, I kept my voice professionally level.
"As Mandy's first love, Redson, doesn't handling her divorce personally strike you as a conflict of interest?"
The words first love didn't so much as graze him. He just smiled.
He stepped forward, planted both hands flat on the edge of my desk, and leaned down until he was looking directly into me. Whatever professional courtesy he'd been wearing dropped away entirely, and what was left underneath was sharp, unguarded, and completely without apology.
"Conflict of interest?" One eyebrow lifted. His tone had gone almost brutally honest. "I'm not here purely as her lawyer today, Mr. Walker."
I held his stare and made myself breathe evenly.
"Let's be clear about something. I never once stopped thinking about Mandy."
Every word landed precise, deliberate, like he'd rehearsed this exact moment for years.
"When I got back from Europe and found out she was married, I respected that. I stayed away. I never expected fate to hand me a second shot—and I certainly didn't expect to find out, the same week I ran into her, that she was already halfway out your door."
His smile went cold, his eyes glinting with something close to certainty.
"You couldn't make her happy. You drove her to the point where tearing her entire life apart looked better to her than staying with you." He straightened, adjusted his collar with two fingers, unhurried. "So, this time, I'm not letting her go."
A short nod. "See you in court, Damon."
He turned and walked out. The door clicked shut behind him with a finality that felt worse than if he'd slammed it.
I sat there in the sudden silence, Edward's words still detonating somewhere behind my sternum, and stared at the summons like it might rearrange itself into something less final if I looked hard enough.
I'd planned to use litigation as a leash—drag this out, buy myself time, force her to keep looking at me across a courtroom. Instead, I'd handed Edward Redson a stage and a spotlight, and he'd walked onto it without breaking stride.
My phone buzzed against the desk before the thought could finish landing. Mom.
I dragged in a breath, smoothed the shake out of my voice, and picked up. "Mom."
"Damon." Her voice came through warm, bright, laced with an excitement that felt like it belonged to a different universe than the one I was currently living in.
"Your father's retiring next week. Nico and I are throwing him a surprise party this weekend. You and Mandy will come, won't you? He's been asking about you both. He'd be over the moon if you showed up together."
Something jolted through me, sharp and sudden, cutting through the fog. A family party. My father's retirement. Two families who'd watched us grow up side by side, who'd celebrated every good thing we'd ever had together.
Mandy loved my parents. She wouldn't skip this, wouldn't let them down in front of everyone who mattered. And this—this could be my one shot at getting her alone, away from courtrooms and lawyers and Edward Redson's calm, certain hands.
Maybe the weight of everything we'd shared could still reach her. Maybe there was something in her soft enough to hold on to, if I could just get close enough to find it.
Fear and desperation folded together into something reckless.
"Of course, Mom." I didn't let myself hesitate. "We'll be there."
I hung up, stared at my own white knuckles around the phone case, took two slow breaths, and dialed a number I still knew by heart even though she'd blocked every other way I had of reaching her.
It rang twice. She picked up.
"Mandy." My voice came out tighter than I wanted, edged with a plea I hadn't meant to let show. "It's me. Dad's retiring next week. Mom's throwing him a party this weekend—both families will be there. I know things are bad. I know. But please come with me. For them. Don't let them worry."
I'd already braced for silence, for a flat no, for a dozen more apologies I'd have to work up the nerve to give.
Instead, after a pause just long enough to make my heart stop, her voice came through calm and even.
"Fine. Send me the details. I'll be there."
No sarcasm. No hesitation. Just that simple, unadorned agreement, like I'd asked her to confirm a dentist appointment.
"Thank you." The words came out rougher than I meant them to. "Thank you, Mandy."
After I hung up, something in my chest cracked open just slightly, letting a little light in for the first time in days.
Both families, together, watching us the way they always had. And she'd agreed to come—set aside everything I'd broken, at least for one afternoon. Maybe under all that careful, controlled distance, there was still a thread between us that hadn't fully snapped.
A small, stubborn kind of hope flickered back to life in my chest, and I let myself hold onto it, even knowing exactly how dangerous that was.
* * *
The party was held at a private estate outside the city, sunlight pouring gold through the glass walls of the conservatory, catching dust motes drifting lazy in the air.
When Mandy stepped out of the car, my breath caught somewhere in my throat and stayed there.
Cream-white pantsuit, sharp-cut, elegant, radiating a careful, deliberate distance that somehow made her more striking, not less.
Just the sight of her loosened something in my chest that had been clenched tight for a solid week. She came. She actually came.
I moved toward her on instinct, hand already reaching for hers, for her waist, for anything.
She sidestepped without breaking stride, angling toward her bag for something that didn't exist, avoiding my hand so naturally that anyone watching would have missed it entirely.
I didn't.
In front of everyone else, she was flawless.
Warm laughter for my mother's questions.
Easy conversation with the guests. The devoted wife, the perfect daughter-in-law, every gesture polished and correct.
But every single time I tried to close the space between us—even just to stand close enough that our shoulders brushed—she found somewhere else to be.
A sip of wine that needed refilling. A strand of hair that needed tucking.
A cousin across the room who suddenly required her full attention.
That half-step of distance she kept between us felt wider than the whole width of the room. She was polite. Controlled. Utterly unreachable. And it was suffocating me by inches.
After the toasts, my father delivered a retirement speech that had half the room wiping their eyes. Glasses clinked. Laughter rose and broke apart into smaller conversations scattered across the garden and the living room.
I was working up the nerve to pull Mandy aside, to force one real conversation out of this entire performance of an afternoon, when I caught my father watching me from across the room.
He stood slightly apart from the crowd, his smile gone, his face set into something grave and unreadable. A short, deliberate nod toward the hallway.
"Damon. My study. Now."
* * *
The heavy door swung shut behind me, sealing off the party's noise until it was nothing but a distant murmur through the walls.
My father settled into the chair behind his desk and didn't offer me one. He looked at me with an expression I'd genuinely never seen on his face before—cold, immovable, and disappointed in a way that hit harder than anger ever could have.
"You and Mandy are getting divorced." No preamble. It landed flat, like a verdict already decided.
I stiffened, my hand tightening on the back of the chair in front of me. "Dad—it's your retirement party. Can we not do this today—"
"Nico told me." He cut through me without raising his voice. "Not just separated, Damon. She told me Mandy's hired counsel. She's filing against you. Is it really that far gone?"
Shame hit me first, hot and immediate, at being seen this clearly by someone I'd spent my whole life trying to make proud. I looked away from him. "I'll fix it. It's a misunderstanding. I haven't agreed to any divorce."
"A misunderstanding." He exhaled, long and heavy, and what came through underneath it wasn't anger. It was something quieter and far worse—grief. "Damon. If you don't love her, have the decency to let her go with some dignity intact. Give her at least that much."
The words hit me square in the chest, hard enough that I felt it in my teeth.
"What are you saying?" My voice cracked on the way out, sharp with disbelief. "That I don't love her? Dad, how could you even say that to me? I've been doing everything I can think of to keep her—"
"Have you?" His gaze stayed level, cold, and the question that followed went through me like ice water straight into my veins. "Or did you marry Mandy in the first place because she was the safest choice available? The one that fit neatly into everything you'd already planned for your life?"
My voice died somewhere in my throat and refused to come back.
If my own father—the man who'd raised me, who'd watched me grow up alongside Mandy in the first place—genuinely believed I'd never loved her, then how much more certain must Mandy herself have been? How alone had I let her feel, for how long, without ever once noticing?
Standing alone in that quiet, book-lined study, with the party still murmuring cheerfully on the other side of the door, I understood something for the first time with total, sickening clarity: I had been loving her wrong from the very beginning.
And every single choice I'd made inside that wrongness had pushed the one person I actually couldn't survive losing further and further out of my reach.