CHAPTER EIGHT
ETHAN
I PACKED MY brIEFCASE with deliberate efficiency, sliding papers into neat stacks while my phone's notification light blinked with Julia's latest text.
She'd be expecting me by seven-thirty. I'd promised to pick up that Thai food she loved so she wouldn't have to cook. All I wanted now was to get home To her cocoa butter scent, our girls' hugs, and their bedtime giggles.
A knock broke the quiet. Soft and hesitant. Three gentle taps, like someone testing ice.
"Come in," I called without looking up, my fingers still arranging documents by urgency.
The door opened with a whisper, and Lila stepped inside, a manila folder clutched against her chest. Her blazer was draped over one slender arm, dark hair still secured in the sleek bun she'd worn all day.
The sheath dress was professional enough for the office, but its cut hugged her waist and hips and her chest.
I noticed because I wasn't dead, and marriage hadn't rendered me blind. It was the same way Julia noticed attractive men. That wasn't betrayal. What mattered was what happened after noticing.
"Do you have a minute?" she asked, her voice carrying its slight Spanish lilt.
I straightened, my lower back protesting after hours spent hunched over depositions. "This about the Caldwell securities case?"
She nodded. "Yeah. Serena left a few hours ago, so I wanted to run it by you instead of bothering her."
I checked my watch. "Make it quick. Julia's expecting me."
Lila crossed the room and set the papers on my desk, leaning forward just enough for the scent of jasmine perfume to reach me. Her manicured nails, short, practical, glossed with dark polish, tapped against the manila folder as she spread the documents out.
I studied her notes, scanning the angles she'd marked in precise blue ink, her handwriting small and slanted to the right.
"Here." I tapped the margin. "You're missing two options that could buy you time if discovery drags.
I'd frame it like this." I picked up my Montblanc and jotted a quick line in the margin before glancing at the clock again.
"Also, you don't have to wait for Serena if you get stuck on something.
You can come to me, Rafa, or Knox. That's what we're here for. "
Her eyes lifted to mine. "Are you sure?"
The question was innocent enough. Something about that irritated me, although whether the irritation belonged to her for looking at me as uncertain as she was when she was normally so confident, or to myself for recognizing it so easily, I couldn't say.
"Any of the partners," I clarified as I capped my pen. "Leave this with me. If I've got time later, I'll take a deeper look. Serena's already kept me in the loop, but I'll see if there's a cleaner way to handle it."
Her nod was quick, knocking a loose strand of hair free to nearly brush her collarbone. "Thank you."
"Of course."
She didn't leave. She simply stood there, watching me, her lips parted slightly as though words were forming behind them. I waited. When another second passed, I lifted my eyes from the papers and met her gaze directly.
"Is that all?"
She startled, embarrassed color spreading across her cheeks. "Oh. Yeah. Of course."
She gathered herself quickly, fingers fumbling with the edge of her blazer before she slipped out. The door shut behind her with a soft click and silence settled over the office again, but now the faint scent of jasmine remained.
I shook off the funk and headed out. Julia was waiting.
My daughters were waiting. Dinner was waiting to be picked up.
A few associates were still at their desks when I finally left, heads bent over filings despite the hour, the scratch of pens and the occasional soft clack of keyboards the only sounds in the corridor.
Laurel had been gone for hours, her desk dark, her chair pushed in at a precise angle the way she always left it. Frankie and Tobias were gone too, their shared corner of the floor dim and abandoned.
I crossed the glass bridge toward the parking deck.
Below me, the city had shifted into its nighttime register, the steel and neon bleeding together in long wet smears across the pavement where earlier rain had pooled.
I'd walked this path a thousand times, heels against tile, briefcase in hand, the hum of the building fading behind me.
Tonight the quiet pressed in heavier than usual.
At the lift, I sensed someone behind me. I turned and spotted Lila, briefcase in hand, her pace easy, dark hair still up, a single loose strand catching the fluorescent light. Something in her expression told me she'd known I'd look back.
"I'm not stalking you, I swear," she rushed out.
My lips twitched despite myself. I pulled out my phone instead of answering and sent Julia a text.
Leaving now. Be home soon, bella.
The lift doors slid open with a soft chime, and we stepped inside.
I kept to one side. Lila took the other.
The doors closed and the car began its descent, the silence between us broken only by the tinny bleed of elevator music from an overhead speaker and the low grind of cables somewhere above us in the dark.
When the doors opened onto the parking level, the air hit cold and smelled of concrete and exhaust. I stepped out first.
"Have a good night," I said, my tone deliberately neutral.
Her answer came softly, almost tentative, trailing behind me as I walked. "You too."
I didn't look back. I kept walking, past a row of dark sedans, until I reached my car. The door shut behind me with a solid thud that cut off the garage and everything in it. I let out a long breath and dragged a hand through my hair and let myself.
I could reassign her to another floor, move her under Knox or Rafa’s supervision, make it so she never had to step foot on this side of the building again.
But that was fucking overkill—a sledgehammer where a scalpel would do.
She hadn’t crossed any lines, hadn’t said a thing out of turn, and neither had I.
My hands were clean. My intentions were too. So why was I even considering it? The impulse felt foreign, almost panicked, like the quickened beat of my heart when the elevator doors closed and her perfume still hung in the air.
I even briefly considered Serena, but then promptly reconsidered.
Any redirect would make me look guilty of something I wasn't. I was not a damn animal.
My sister, on the other hand, I thought of the way Serena had once reduced a second-year associate to tears in the middle of a deposition prep, her voice never once rising above a pleasant, almost musical register as she did it.
She'd smiled at me afterward like she'd done the kid a favor.
Absolutely fucking not.
Our firm's reputation was too valuable. Rumors moved fast in legal circles, passed between assistants at the coffee station and partners at charity dinners, and they didn't need to be true to do damage. All it took was one raised eyebrow, one overheard comment in the wrong hallway.
I thought of my desk. Julia's photo in its silver frame, the one from Positano where she was laughing at something off-camera, her hair loose and wild in the sea wind.
Our daughters in the other frame beside it and on the wall directly behind my desk, yet another portrait.
My wedding band, black tungsten, which I'd never once removed.
There was nothing ambiguous about any of it.
I intended to keep it that way.
"DON'T FAST-FORWARD," Julia mumbled, her voice thick with sleep as her lashes fluttered against her cheeks.
I froze mid-reach for the remote, caught like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. Her eyes cracked open just enough to pin me with suspicion. I smirked, dragging my hand lazily along her thigh beneath the hem of my T-shirt she'd stolen.
"I wouldn't dream of it."
"Mm-hmm." Her side-eye could've cut glass, even half-asleep. "Last week, you skipped an entire episode and acted like I wouldn't notice."
"You saw half of it, so that wasn't skipping," I countered, letting her weight settle more fully against me. "Besides, we had the recap."
Her head dropped back onto my shoulder, auburn hair brushing my jaw and carrying the faint scent of coconut from her shower. The cotton of my shirt had slipped from one shoulder, her bare legs tangled with mine.
This was my favorite place in the world. Here. With her, in the quiet between everything else. The television flickered, blue light chasing shadows across the room, but I wasn't watching Ozark anymore.
I was watching her. I had been for an unreasonable amount of time. I brushed a strand of auburn hair away from her face. My thumb lingered against her cheekbone before I cupped her jaw, gently tilting her face toward mine.
Her lips parted slightly, a soft breath escaping as her eyes searched mine in the flickering blue light. The faint scent of coconut from her hair mixed with the familiar warmth of our bed. I could feel the steady rhythm of her heart where my hand rested against her side.
Maybe it was the lingering tension from the office, that strange, charged quiet in the elevator. Maybe I just needed to feel the solid truth of her after a day of posturing and polished lies. Or maybe it was this—the way love for her carved out a quiet space in me that no one else ever touched.
“You know you mean the world to me, don’t you?” I murmured, my voice low, the one I used only here, in the dark with her.
Her expression softened, the last traces of sleep giving way to something deeper.
Her hand came up to rest against my jaw, her thumb brushing the stubble there.
Then I kissed her. Not hurried or hungry, but slow, deep, like relearning a language I’d never forgotten.
Her mouth was warm and tasted faintly of mint from her toothpaste.
I kissed her because Julia was where the noise stopped.
The depositions, the clients, the meetings—it all fell away here, with the weight of her against me and the quiet certainty of her kiss.
She kissed me back, soft and sure, her fingers tangling in my hair.
It wasn’t habit. It wasn’t obligation. It was the anchor I’d been swinging toward all day without realizing it.
It was home.
And there was nowhere else I would rather have been.