CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JULIA
MY PHONE FLARED WITH the incoming alert before the soft click of the front door reached me. Security Alert: Gate Entry.
Exactly on schedule. Ethan had promised he’d be home for dinner, bedtime stories, whatever else the girls had co-conspired in my absence, and despite everything simmering between us, there was one role I’d never doubted him in: father.
“Dad!”
Aria abandoned the rainbow-strewn LEGO carpet and launched herself down the hall, her pigtails bouncing like twin pendulums. Ellie’s little feet pitter-pattered close behind, her giggle trailing like a ribbon.
Ethan barely had time to set down his briefcase before both girls leapt at him, their arms wrapping around his legs in a coordinated assault that hadn’t been physically impressive since they were four but remained emotionally mandatory.
He stumbled back with a laugh, one arm cradling each daughter, their pajamas soft against his shirt.
I stayed half-buried in the plastic brick avalanche, watching them: my girls, their father, my husband.
My stupid heart softened anyway. Apparently, stupidity required more than a few seconds beneath another woman’s lips to erase eleven years of shared mornings and late-night whispers. Good to know.
Ethan’s gaze lifted over his daughters’ heads and met mine. Something in his expression wavered—softened—then he disentangled himself and crossed the room. I lifted an eyebrow; he paused, that tiny hesitation asking what words couldn’t.
I offered him my hand. His shoulders dropped, as though I’d exhaled for him. He took it, tugged me upright, then slid an arm around my waist, pressing warmth through the fabric of my shirt.
“Hi, bellissima,” he murmured, his voice a gentle rumble in the hush.
“Hi.” My pulse fluttered as his eyes searched mine and settled before he leaned in. Not a fierce claim, but a quiet greeting, a touch we both recognized. I kissed him back.
Aria groaned behind us, all melodrama. “Please stop.”
Ethan’s lips curved against mine.
Ellie pressed her small hands over her eyes. “I am never doing that,” she declared.
“That’s right, baby girl,” Ethan agreed immediately. “Never.”
I scoffed, and his hand squeezed my waist, lighter somehow, boyish instead of burdensome. I noticed instantly. “You’re in a good mood.”
“We finally got a new lead to follow from Ruiz.”
“Is that good?”
“Better than good. I only wish I had that luck with Cortez.”
Well. That made both of us. Meg’s spare bedroom looked like a conspiracy theorist’s fever dream.
Papers plastered half the walls, names circled and connected by colored lines that sprouted more questions than answers.
She wasn’t giving up. Neither was I. Soon I’d rope my parents in, though I still hadn’t decided how much they needed to know.
Ethan kissed my temple, rolled up his sleeves, and without a word dove into the LEGO chaos. He plucked out two pieces, then another, and bit by bit the familiar silhouette of the Stranger Things house rose from the pile.
I stared at him. His mouth turned with an infuriating, triumphant curl. I slipped him the finger behind the girls’ backs and silently mouthed, Fuck you. His grin stretched wider.
“Later,” I groaned, rolling my eyes.
“Such a guy.”
I left him to his LEGO architecture and slipped into the kitchen to finish dinner.
THE HOUSE HAD GONE quiet by the time I showered and pulled on my fleece robe. The girls were asleep, completely wiped out by another school day.
I checked on them before heading to find Ethan, pausing long enough to pull Ellie's blanket higher and rescue Aria's tablet before it slid off the edge of her bed.
Ethan's study light was still on, and I knocked lightly.
"Come in."
I pushed open the door. He sat behind his desk with an old Colt 1911 laid across a cleaning cloth in front of him. He was running an oiled patch along the slide with the kind of absent precision that told me his thoughts were somewhere else entirely.
The sight didn't bother me. It would've been strange if it did. My father's gun collection could've armed a small revolution, and Miss Morticia was currently secured inside my purse because I would never be caught out and about not carrying.
"You don't have to knock, bella."
"You deserve privacy sometimes."
He grinned, setting the Colt down to hold out his arm. I crossed the room, and he pulled me between his knees rather than onto his lap, his hands settling around my hips. I eyed the large envelope lying on his desk.
"What’s that?" I asked.
His expression changed. "We got a tip to head out to a closed off construction site a little out the city, and a key that opens something."
I frowned. That didn't inspire confidence. “Where is the tip from? Are you sure it’s legit?”
His thumb moved absently against me. "The information came from Santiago Ruiz—junior."
"Saint?"
Ethan nodded. "He sent someone to the firm himself."
This was apparently significant judging by his expression, but something about that sounded off to me. Saint tended to be pretty hands-on for anything involving his father’s case. A fact I was doubly aware of because Ethan was not his biggest fan. Now he was sending errand boys?
“Are you sure this tip came from Saint? Have you spoken to him or his father about where it came from?”
"Who would be foolish enough to walk into my law firm and use his name freely? Doesn't matter who delivered it, bella. If Saint wants to hand me a loaded weapon on his father's behalf, I'm not going to argue with the gift."
"Uh, I still think you need to confirm he’s the one telling you to follow this tip."
He chuckled, the sound low and arrogant, tipping his chin up with a familiar edge of defiance. "I don't need anyone's permission to follow anything. Least of all from a man who spends half his time pretending he doesn't watch you at every society function."
My brow arched. "Is that jealousy I hear?"
"What you hear," he replied, tightening his grip on my hips, "is me reminding you that I don't take marching orders from the Ruize’s—junior or otherwise.
Saint dropped a lead in my lap. I'm going to follow it because I should, not because he told me to. We’ve already checked it out and it is a legit site. "
I wasn’t going to waste my breath telling him he’d just missed my entire point. "Are you going alone?"
The arrogance in his smile softened by a fraction. "No. Eric and Knox are already briefed. We leave tomorrow evening, as per the lead, so we will be home late."
I studied the envelope again, and this time reached for it.
Inside was a key with no markings and looked old enough to belong to something my grandmother would've used.
Bless her. More intriguing was the notecard with the name of what I assumed was the construction site, sets of numbers, and a time in EST written next to them.
"Coordinates," I confirmed, tapping the card. "These are GPS numbers."
Ethan's thumb stilled against my hip. “I forget sometimes.”
I glanced at him. “Forget what?”
“How fucking quick you can figure things out.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Was it a compliment? “Right. Well, did anything else happen today? How was court?”
For a long moment, he didn't respond, his gaze fixed somewhere past my shoulder—the way it did when words were lining up behind his teeth, waiting to be released in the order he'd rehearsed.
"There is something else," he said finally.
The timbre of his voice shifted, and I knew before he said another word. My chest tightened, a familiar cold curl settled beneath my ribs.
"Lila crossed paths with me today."
I stayed perfectly still, the fleece of my robe suddenly too warm against my skin. "At the courthouse?"
He nodded, his jaw working. "She apologized. Said she knows I'm happily married. Offered to sign anything, enter a probationary period—whatever it took to keep her job."
"And what did you say?"
"I told her the boundaries had shifted. That if you ever suspected something between us—" He paused, swallowed. "I made it clear there was nothing there."
"Was there?"
"Julia." His hands tightened on my hips, not possessive—pleading. "No. There wasn't. There isn't. I know I should never have let her near me."
I believed him. That was the maddening part. I believed every syllable, and still the ache refused to dissolve, and my intuition was not satisfied. I set the envelope back on the desk with deliberate care, aligning its edge with the blotter.
"If I could let her go, I would, but we still don't know what Cortez wants with her, and if she's innocent, if she's just a woman who got caught in the crossfire of her father's bullshit, then destroying her career because of a mistake she regrets would make me the kind of man I don't want to be."
“A mistake she regrets? Was she crying?" I asked quietly.
He blinked, caught off guard by the question. "What?"
"When she apologized. Was she crying?"
A flicker of something—guilt, maybe, or recognition—crossed his face. "No. She was steady. Composed and professional."
I absorbed that, turning it over like a stone in my palm. Composed was worse than tears. Tears were reactive. Composed could be rehearsed, but I wasn’t going to share that with Ethan.
"Okay," I said.
He studied me, his dark eyes searching mine for the anger he expected, or the accusation he'd braced for. I gave him neither despite wanting to choke and shake some damn sense into him.
"Okay?" he repeated.
"I'm not going to scream at you for talking to her, Ethan. You're right, we need to know what Cortez is doing, and she's the only line we have for him that isn't behind prison glass."
Relief softened the tension in his shoulders, and his thumbs resumed their slow circles against my hips.
I hated how quickly his body responded to permission, as if I'd handed him a reprieve instead of a piece of myself, he'd already chipped away.
"I need you to hear something."
His brow lifted. "Go ahead."
"She didn't kiss you because she was drunk. Drunk people stumble, they slur, they say things they shouldn't. They don't calculate when to cross a line."
His mouth opened, then closed. I watched him reassemble the argument he had in response. "Lia—"
"Let me finish." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "She didn't kiss you because you were tired. She didn't kiss you because the door was open. She kissed you because she wanted to, and she chose the exact moment when you were both most vulnerable to do it."
Something shifted behind his eyes, not disagreement, but the uncomfortable recognition of a fact he hadn't wanted to examine.
"I'm not saying she's evil, but she's not a helpless damsel either and every time you tell me about her—the apology, the professionalism, the boundaries—you're describing a woman who knows exactly what she's doing."
He was quiet for a long moment, his gaze dropping to where his hands rested against my hips. "You think I'm defending her."
"Are you?"
"No." His answer came fast, almost too fast. "I'm telling you what happened because you deserve to know."
"I do deserve to know, and I appreciate that you're telling me.
" I pressed my palm flat against his chest, feeling the steady thud of his heart beneath the fabric.
"But every time Lila's name comes up, you have an explanation ready.
She's upset about her father. She's drunk.
She's remorseful. She's professional. She's innocent until proven otherwise.
And every single one of those explanations is reasonable enough that I can't argue with any of them individually. "
His jaw tightened. "That's because they're true."
"Maybe they are." I held his gaze. "But when you string them all together, it sounds like you're building a case for her."
I watched him cycle through it, the lawyer's instinct to rebut, the husband's instinct to soothe, the man caught somewhere between both.
"I'm not building a case. I'm being careful. There's a difference."
"Then show me the difference."
His hands slid from my hips to my waist, pulling me closer until his face was level with my chest. He pressed his forehead against the fleece of my robe, and I felt the warmth of his breath through the fabric.
"I'm sorry," he said, the words muffled against me.
But what was he apologizing for, exactly? I traced the edge of the envelope with one finger, wondering how we’d gotten here.
Maybe that drunken kiss and his sheer stupidity only highlighted the hairline fractures we’d never noticed before.
I was starting to think that somewhere along the way, my husband had gotten a little too comfortable with the version of me who packed lunches, organized permission slips, and then crawled into his arms when he came home at night.
To the point he expected me to be some demure housewife who nodded and smiled like every one of his words was gospel.
I was in fact none of those things, but maybe his belief was partly my fault. Marriage had filed down some of my edges. Motherhood had quietly moved others, but neither had touched where I came from. If anything, being a mom made how I handled whatever happened between us more important than ever.
They were watching me.
That alone was reason enough to teach them that loving a man never meant kneeling for him.
"Hey," he said softly, fingers pressing once against my hip. "I love you."
I looked at him for a moment. "I love you too."
That was the cruelest thing about love. It didn't care that you were disappointed.
It just sat there, unchanged, and waited for you to find somewhere to put the hurt.