Chapter Thirteen
Damon
Mandy didn't wait for me after the party ended. Didn't stay for goodbyes, didn't glance my way—just called a car and disappeared back into the city alone.
The finality in the way she left felt like a door closing on the very last thread still connecting us.
I stayed at my parents' house that night. So did Nico. And in the house that had watched every version of us grow up—every scraped knee, every holiday, every version of the family we used to be—a rare, grim family meeting convened in the living room.
Nobody turned on the main lights. We sat in the low gray of a single lamp, shadows pooling in the corners of a room that had never once felt this cold to me before.
My mother sat at the center of the sofa, eyes red-rimmed, exhaustion carved into every line of her face. She looked at me without a trace of her usual warmth—just disappointment, and underneath that, something worse. A quiet, hollow kind of defeat.
"Damon." Her voice cracked clean down the middle. "You've truly ruined this."
Each word landed like a stone dropped into still water.
"I tried to talk to her today. In the garden. I tried to plead your case, ask her to give you one more chance for all those years behind you two."
My mother closed her eyes, breath shaking on the way out.
"But when I actually looked at her—looked at her as a woman, as a mother myself, not just as your mother—I couldn't finish the sentence. I had nothing left to offer her that she hadn't already given away for free."
"She's loved you since she was fifteen years old."
Nico's voice cut in, cold and precise as broken glass.
"Her entire adolescence, Damon. Every year of it, in love with you. And after three years of marriage, you think she filed for divorce on a whim? You think a woman who loved you that long walks away unless you'd shoved her past every single line she had left to hold?"
Her words went through the careful logic I'd built around myself like a blade through paper.
My father spoke last. Where my mother's voice carried grief and Nico's carried fury, his came out flat. Almost clinical.
"Since it's come to this—sign the papers, Damon. End it cleanly."
He rose, crossed to the window, and stood with his back to the room, staring out at a sky gone completely black.
"The Walkers and the Smiths have been closed for three decades. That history, those business ties—they run deeper than one marriage. Let her go with some dignity. Give her that much, at least. So,
both families can still sit at the same table without this hanging over every conversation for the rest of our lives."
End it cleanly. Three words, spoken so lightly, so reasonably—and they shattered the last thread of hope I'd been quietly rationing out for myself.
Nico's eyes stayed locked on mine, her voice low, relentless, giving me nowhere left to hide. "Did you ever actually love her, Damon? Be honest. For once in your life."
That was what finally broke through.
Weeks of pressure. Weeks of quiet, grinding terror, all of it compressed down under my ribs until there wasn't anywhere left for it to go—it came apart all at once.
My vision blurred without warning. Heat spilled down my face before I even registered, I was crying.
I couldn't remember the last time my family had watched me cry—not since I was a child, maybe not even then.
But I stood there in the middle of that dim room, fists clenched at my sides, shaking with a regret too raw to keep contained any longer.
"I love her." My voice broke apart on the words, thick and unrecognizable even to me.
"I love her, Nico. More than anyone else alive. From the second we were actually together, she was everything to me. She was never a safe second choice. She was the only woman I ever wanted—the only one I've ever wanted."
My mother stared at me, stunned into stillness. My father turned from the window.
I dragged both hands through my hair, tears streaming freely now, and let the ugliest, truest parts of me spill out in front of the three people who knew me best.
"I was just—stupid. We'd known each other our whole lives. I thought that meant something permanent. I thought she'd always just—be there, no matter what I did, because she always had been. I thought being my wife meant she'd never actually leave.
I thought she could see straight through all the noise outside our door—the clients, the cases, all of it—and know it was just performance. Just business. I thought we had forever to figure the rest out."
Nico watched me come apart. Slowly, the sharp fury in her eyes dissolved into something I'd never once seen from her in thirty years—a deep, aching pity that somehow hurt worse than her anger had.
Finally, she just shook her head, her voice dropping to something barely above a whisper.
"Damon." A long pause, heavy with everything she wasn't saying. "When it comes to love, you are the single biggest fool I have ever known."