CHAPTER FOUR
Garbage bags.
Her entire seventeen-year marriage, reduced to a dozen black garbage bags lined up outside a gate she used to have the code to.
But that came later. First came Martin Lewis's office, all glass and gray carpet and a view of the marina Paul liked to brag about at dinner parties as though he'd dredged it himself.
"He can't simply erase you from this," Martin said, sliding a folder across the desk.
Inside were seventeen years of receipts Martina hadn't known she'd need—foundation galas she'd chaired, sponsor relationships she'd nursed along with birthday cards and personal calls, the entire map of Paul's devoted-husband brand, built brick by photogenic brick, by her.
"Your labor has a number attached to it. A large one. I’m afraid he is going to find that out the expensive way. "
"He's going to say I did nothing," Martina said. "That I just showed up to galas and smiled."
Martin slid a second folder across, this one thicker.
"Then we'll show them your calendar for the last decade.
Sponsor calls at six in the morning. Seating charts adjusted so no one's ex sat near their current spouse.
Foundation grant applications you wrote yourself at midnight while he was on road trips.
I've read it, read it all. It reads like a full-time executive position nobody bothered to put on a business card. "
It should have felt satisfying, hearing her own life laid out like evidence. Instead it just made Martina tired, the kind tired of realizing how much of yourself you'd handed over.
Martin began drafting emergency financial protections that afternoon.
Divorce papers by evening. Martina sat in his office long enough to memorize the exact shade of gray on his walls, because staring at paint was easier than thinking about the fact that she was, apparently, filing for divorce from a man who'd once cried actual tears proposing to her on this same stretch of coastline.
She should have expected what came next.
Paul changed the gate code.
She found out the way everyone eventually found out anything about Paul Weddington—publicly, and with an audience.
Her key card didn't work at the front gate, and when she called the house line, no one answered.
When she finally drove around to the service entrance, there they were: a dozen garbage bags heaped against the fence as if she'd been evicted from her own life, and a small cluster of reporters already setting up cameras a discreet distance away.
Later, she'd learn one of Paul's own security guys had tipped off a friendly sports blog, hoping to curry favor before the ship fully sank.
Paul, for his part, looked genuinely blindsided when the first camera flash went off, which told Martina everything about how carefully he'd actually thought this through.
Not carefully at all, as it turned out. Just angry, and cornered, and reaching for the nearest way to make her disappear.
Obviously, she did not disappear.
Martina walked up to the bags in full view of every lens present, crouched down, and opened the first one as though unwrapping a gift. Blouses. Shoes. The good jewelry Paul had bought her for their tenth anniversary, thrown in loose like costume junk.
And there, near the bottom, the foundation jacket. The one Cassidy had worn out of that recovery room, still faintly smelling of the dry cleaner because Martina had never had the chance to wear it since.
She held it up for the cameras.
"Ask my husband," she said, pleasant, "why his director of communications was wearing this the other night."
The clip was everywhere within the hour, though Martina still hadn't touched the footage that actually mattered. That was for later. That was for somewhere with better lighting and a bigger audience than a driveway.
Cassidy found her in the parking area before Martina made it back to her car, dressed like she'd come straight from a segment on team optics, which, okay, she probably had.
"He's chosen," Cassidy said. No preamble. "You do understand that, right? You've been irrelevant for years. You were just packaging, and not even the pretty kind."
Martina slapped her.
It wasn't strategic. It wasn't part of any plan Martin Lewis would have approved of. It was seventeen years of biting her tongue at galas finally arriving all at once, and it felt, in the moment, like the single most honest thing she'd done since walking into that recovery room.
Cassidy came back at her with both hands, grabbing a fistful of Martina's hair, and then they were genuinely fighting, the two of them slamming against the hood of Cassidy's ridiculous luxury car while every phone in a fifty-foot radius turned to film it.
Gabe got there first. Martina would think about that later, how fast he'd moved, how he'd apparently been close enough to see the whole thing unfold, hauling them apart by the shoulders with the calm efficiency of a man separating dogs.
Cassidy took one more wild swing at Martina, missed entirely, and put her fist straight through the car's side mirror instead, which shattered with a satisfying crunch. Martina swore she heard applause from several onlookers.
Paul came running from the house at the sound of the commotion.
He went to Cassidy.
Not to Martina. Not even a glance her way. He went straight to the woman bleeding from a smashed side mirror while his actual wife stood three feet away with a chunk of hair missing, and every single camera present caught the exact moment he made that choice.
Martina watched something in Cassidy's face flicker. It wasn’t triumph, not quite, but something closer to alarm, like she'd just realized what it looked like from the outside. That was until Paul reached her and the moment closed over.
Gabe's security team had already blocked Martina's own car in behind a delivery van, so he did the only thing that made sense: he put her on the back of his motorcycle and got them both out before anyone thought to stop them.
The ride through Miami was loud and reckless and, God help her, strangely freeing.
Martina held on with both arms, the wind tearing through what was left of her dignity, and for a brief moment she thought about absolutely nothing at all, which was the first mercy she'd been granted in two whole days.
At Gabe's apartment, the adrenaline finally broke. Martina cried against his chest in a way she was fairly sure ruined his shirt, but he let her, not saying anything useful, just being solid and present in a way Paul had stopped being roughly a decade ago.
Their faces drew close. Martina thought it was going to happen. For one long second, she was absolutely sure of it.
Gabe stopped it himself, pulling back just far enough to look at her properly. "When something happens with us," he said, low, careful, "it's not going to be because you're wrecked and I happened to be standing here."
It should have stung, but he was right. This wasn’t the time.
Martina sat back against his couch, hair still a disaster, hand still faintly aching under its bandage, and realized Paul had never once shown her that kind of restraint.