Chapter 13
CADE
“He won’t leave it downstairs,” my assistant says from the doorway. “It has to be you. Signature and photo identification.”
I look up from the brief in front of me.
She has worked for me long enough to know when I have stopped listening, and she waits.
“What delivery?”
“A legal envelope.”
The dread arrives ahead of the command. “Send him up.”
The courier arrives carrying a rigid envelope against his chest. He checks my license, watches me sign the screen, and hands me the envelope. The law firm printed in the corner means nothing to me.
I know what it is before I get the tab up. I close the office door.
The tab tears unevenly. I pull the papers free and see her signature before I understand any of the words around it. Small. Upright. The first letter slightly larger than the rest. The same hand that signed the register on our wedding day has signed a petition to end the marriage.
My name is typed below hers. The space above it is empty.
I sit down.
The agreement gives her the paintings and her books. Her grandfather’s trust stays hers. Her share of the company stays hers. Everything else stays with me. The house, the cars, the accounts, the jewelry she left on a dresser I have not been able to look at since.
Page two of the prenuptial agreement promised her enough money to change the shape of a life if the marriage ended early. She has waived it. She has waived maintenance too, beneath language stating that her attorney explained the consequences and advised her not to do it.
She still said no.
There is no demand for compensation for the years she gave me. No interest in the money I once believed was the best thing I brought to the arrangement. She wants nothing, absolutely nothing, that could be mistaken for a reason to remain connected to me.
I go back to the first page because something has to be missing. A demand. A condition. One sentence that makes this an argument instead of a departure. There is nothing. She is taking back the life she had before me and leaving everything I ever gave her behind.
I had believed the worst pain of my life happened outside Ashley’s house in the rain.
For years, that night was the measure. Anything survivable had to hurt less than standing beneath her awning and asking her not to marry another man.
I understand now how little I knew about pain. Ashley refused me before I had built a life around her. Sienna built a life around me, and I gave her almost nothing that made it worth staying.
“Don’t get up,” Ashley says, and she is already through the door.
She comes in carrying two coffees. There is no pause at the threshold, no question about whether this is a good time.
There never has been.
She sets one cup near me and takes the chair across from the desk. Her gaze drops to the papers. “Oh.”
The softness arrives in her voice a moment later. “Oh, Cade.”
I pull the agreement closer.
“I’m not going to insult you by pretending I’m sorry,” she says.
The sentence is so close to what I said to Sienna the night she left, when she asked whether I loved her. I thought honesty made it kinder. Hearing the same cruelty in Ashley’s voice strips that excuse away.
“Ashley.”
“I’m not. She was never going to survive that life and everybody could see it. And now it’s done.” She leans forward. Her voice warms up the way it does when she thinks she is giving somebody something. “You’re free.”
“It isn’t done.”
“It’s paperwork.”
She says it lightly. The end of my marriage reduced to processing time.
Her phone is already in her hand.
“Come to the coast in September. We can take the house near Porto Ercole. No staff except the couple who maintain it. No calls unless the building is actually burning.” She scrolls while she talks, discarding dates and choosing others, moving through my future as easily as she walked into the office.
I look at her. She did not come here to comfort me. She came prepared to collect what she believed had become available.
Ashley reaches across the desk and rests her hand on the settlement agreement.
“Move your hand.”
Her eyes lift. “What?”
“It’s covering her name.”
She removes it, more puzzled than embarrassed.
And that is what finally reaches me. There is no shame in her face. No recognition that Sienna is a woman she humiliated in public. No thought that perhaps she should not be sitting here before the ink on the petition has dried.
I have watched Martin Solheym’s business for a long time, in that petty, human way one watches a rival fail, and I know without checking that his empire has thinned to a shadow of what it was the night I stood in the rain and begged.
Jesus Christ.
She came back when the numbers changed.
She weighed me against another man’s money once and I came up short, and I have spent every year since making sure it could never happen to me again. Every hour I did not give my wife, I gave to that. And here the woman sits in a chair in my office, waiting to claim what she thinks is owed.
“He faltered and I didn’t. And now you’re here,” I say.
“Cade.”
“You didn’t come back for me. You came back because this time I’m worth more.”
Her chin lifts. “You loved me once.”
Once. She says it like that should still matter.
“You were different then,” she says. “Something went out of you after you married her. Everyone could see it.”
For years I called what I felt for her the great love of my life because I had no better name for it. It was not love.
I wanted her to choose me. I could not bear that she had looked at me, looked at another man, and decided I was the lesser prize. I carried that humiliation for years and mistook the fact that it still hurt for proof that I still wanted her. I did not want Ashley.
I wanted to undo the night she did not choose me.
“Something did go out of me,” I say. “You’re right about that much.”
She stops. “So you admit it.”
“It wasn’t Sienna. It went out the night I stood under your awning in the rain and asked you not to marry him.”
Her expression changes, but only slightly. “You’re going to bring that up now?”
“You blamed Sienna for it.”
“I said you changed after you married her.”
“No. I changed before I ever met her.”
I look at the woman I once begged to choose me. “You were there when it happened.”
Ashley gives a small, disbelieving laugh. “That was a lifetime ago.”
“I built my life around that night.”
“Cade—”
“And to you it was just another day.”
Her mouth closes.
For years, some part of me has still been trying to prove something to her. That I became richer. Harder to dismiss. Impossible to choose second. Looking at her now, I cannot remember why I ever needed her to know any of it.
“You need to leave.”
She stares at me. “You’re upset.”
“No.”
“You just received divorce papers.”
“That is not why you need to leave.”
She sits very still now.
“Do not come to my office again,” I say.
“Under any circumstances. My office does not invite you. If we are both put somewhere by another host, you will not be next to me. And if you call me at midnight because you need a car, call a car. If you’re ill, call a doctor.
If you’re frightened, call someone you have not taught to mistake your need for love. I will not answer.”
“Cade.”
“I will not come.”
She stands. The movement is controlled, but the coffee shivers in her hand when she reaches for it.
“My grandfather sits on your board. My family is inside your deals. There are people in this city who take my calls before they take yours.” No heat in it. She reads it the way a lawyer reads terms back at a closing. “You understand what you’re risking.”
“I do.”
“You don’t. You’ve never had to find out what it costs when my family stops being generous.”
“I don’t care what it costs.”
For years, the possibility of losing Ashley’s approval shaped decisions she never knew she was still influencing. Now she stands in front of me and threatens to take everything that remains of her goodwill. I feel nothing except the need to have her out of the room.
She searches my face for some sign that I’ll change my mind. At the door she says my name once, warm, an appointment she is confirming for later. I don’t answer it.
I call the front desk myself. “Ms. Vauclair doesn’t come up here again. Under any circumstances.”
A pause on the line. “Understood, Mr. Belluomo. Should I take her off the standing list?”
Something in me goes very quiet.
“There’s a standing list?”
“Yes, sir. She’s been on it since before I started here.”
My wife came to this office twice during our marriage. Both times, security called to ask whether I was expecting her. Both times, I said yes and returned to whatever was on my screen.
Ashley could walk through the building and open my door.
Sienna had to be announced.
“Take her off,” I say. “And add Sienna Belluomo.”
The silence is short but I hear it.
“Of course, sir.”
She may never come here again. She may sign away my name before she has any reason to use the privilege. I add her anyway, years too late.
I put the phone down and look at the papers again.
For the first time, I try to imagine what comes after them.
Sienna is in every picture my mind gives me.
In the passenger seat. At the far end of the table.
Walking into a room and looking for me before she looks for anyone else.
I try again without her. There is just a man alone in a building he owns, holding a truth he learned too late.
I spent our marriage refusing to imagine a future with my wife. Now I cannot imagine one without her.
My hand goes to the pen beside the agreement. It stops.
Not because I mean to trap her. She has asked for an ending, and I will not use these papers to keep her where she no longer wants to be. But I am not signing my name and disappearing from her life without finally giving her what I withheld while she was still beside me.
I am going to fight for my wife.
A knock. “Halloran is in the small conference room,” my assistant says.
Halloran does not wait. People move their day for Halloran. I have moved mine for him every time he has asked.
I look at Sienna’s name. “Move the meeting.”
She doesn’t answer straight off. “To when?”
“I don’t care.”
It is the first time in my adult life that the work has asked for the hour and not been given it. The door closes, and I sit alone with the end of my marriage spread across the desk, and for once I let it hurt without going looking for a task that will make it stop.