Too Late To Beg (Cheating Billionaire Second Chance #12)

Chapter 1

The grocery list was on the tablet.

Nell had left it open on the kitchen island that morning, propped against the fruit bowl with the screen still glowing, because she'd meant to add lemons before she forgot and then forgot anyway.

Now it was almost four, and the light through the west-facing windows had shifted from white to gold, and she picked the tablet up to finish the list before the store closed.

Cassian's photo stream had synced while she was out.

She didn't notice at first. She opened the grocery app and typed lemons and then the good olive oil, not the one from last time because Cassian always bought the wrong one and she'd stopped correcting him years ago and started just buying it herself.

She added shallots, a block of parmesan, ground pork for the ragù she was planning for Saturday.

The house was quiet. Their house — the Pacific Palisades place they'd bought eleven years ago when Parallax had its first real year, four bedrooms and a yard that sloped down toward a canyon view, the kind of house where money showed in the quality of things rather than the size of them.

Good tile. Real plaster walls. A kitchen that had been remodeled once and didn't need to be again.

She swiped out of the grocery app and the photo stream was sitting there, a notification badge she hadn't dismissed. Twelve new photos synced from Cassian's phone.

She almost didn't open it. She almost set the tablet down and went to find her shoes and driven to the store.

Later she would think about that — the ordinary moment when a different woman would have kept scrolling, would have bought her lemons and come home and started the ragù and lived another month or another year inside the life she thought she had.

But she tapped the badge because she had three minutes and because the photos were usually from Parallax events, and sometimes there were ones of her she hadn't seen, and she liked looking at those.

The small vanity of it. Seeing herself the way other people's cameras did.

The first four were from a development meeting.

A whiteboard covered in sticky notes, color-coded by project.

Cassian standing at the head of the table with his sleeves rolled, the silver at his temples catching the overhead light, his hands mid-gesture.

He looked good. He always looked good — tall, dark-haired, forty-two years old and wearing it the way men with money do, like aging was something that happened to other people and landed on him as texture.

Two more of the whiteboard from different angles.

One of Anders Kellner laughing at something off-camera, his pleasant, forgettable face doing the thing it always did at Parallax events: looking like a man who belonged everywhere and nowhere.

Then a photo she had never seen.

Cassian at a restaurant. Not a restaurant she recognized — low light, candles, the kind of dark wood and exposed brick that said downtown, or maybe Silver Lake, somewhere with a wine list and no dress code.

He was sitting across from a woman. The angle was slightly elevated, taken from someone standing above the table — a hostess, or another diner passing by, or maybe one of those automatic cameras some restaurants used for social media.

The woman had dark skin and close-cropped hair and she was leaning forward with her chin resting on the heel of her hand, and she was laughing.

Not a polite laugh. A real one. And Cassian was watching her laugh with an expression Nell knew.

She knew it from twenty years ago, from the bar in the Village where they'd met when she was nineteen and he was twenty-two and he'd leaned across the table and said something about her shoes and she'd told him his jacket was ridiculous and he'd looked at her exactly like this. Like a man seeing something he wanted.

The woman was Soleil Marchant.

Nell knew the name before she placed the face.

Development executive at Parallax — she'd met her at a company screening six months ago, maybe longer, a quick handshake and a professional smile in a crowded lobby.

She was young. Thirty, thirty-one. The kind of put-together that read as competence in an industry that didn't draw a line between the two.

Nell looked at the photo for a long time.

She did not set the tablet down. She did not call anyone. She tapped the photo and opened the metadata — the small gray text at the bottom of the info panel that most people never looked at because most people had no reason to.

Date: May 8. A Thursday.

Location: a restaurant on Sunset, an address she didn't know.

Time: 9:47 PM.

May 8 was three weeks ago. She remembered May 8.

Cassian had texted her around seven to say he was heading to the Sundance satellite office for a late meeting with a distributor.

She'd eaten leftover soup and watched a documentary about a ceramics artist in Oaxaca and gone to bed at eleven.

He'd come home sometime after midnight. She'd heard the front door and the alarm resetting and his shoes on the hardwood in the hall, and she'd thought distributor meetings always run late and gone back to sleep.

The tablet was warm in her hands. She held it the way she always held it — balanced on her fingertips, the screen tilted toward her — and nothing about the way she was standing had changed. She was still in the kitchen. The light was still gold. The lemons were still on the list.

She opened the calendar. Their shared calendar, the one Cassian's assistant synced every Monday with his Parallax schedule. She found May 8 and tapped it.

7:00 PM — Distributor meeting (Sundance Satellite). Runs late.

She scrolled back. April 22. A Tuesday. She remembered that one too, but only because she'd had dinner with Zadie and Cassian had said he was working late.

She opened the photo stream again and looked for photos near that date.

Found one — not a restaurant this time, but a parking lot, shot from inside a car.

Cassian's profile through a windshield, streetlights behind him, a shape in the passenger seat that could have been anyone but had a jawline Nell was now looking for.

She checked the calendar for April 22.

6:30 PM — Script notes with development team. Office.

She looked at one more date. April 3. A photo from the stream that she'd seen before and dismissed — Cassian at what she'd assumed was a work dinner, a large table with several people, the frame cutting off at the edges.

She looked more carefully now. Soleil was at the far end of the table.

Not next to Cassian. Not even looking at him.

But her hand was on the table and his hand was on the table and the space between them was the kind of space two people leave when they've already closed it in private.

The calendar for April 3: Networking dinner — industry contacts. Home by 11.

Three dates. Three lies. Each one bland enough to slide past without a sound — a late meeting, a work session, a networking dinner. The kind of lies that worked precisely because they were boring. Nobody questioned boring.

Nell set the tablet down on the island. The grocery list was still open behind the photo app. Lemons, olive oil, shallots, parmesan, ground pork.

She stood in the kitchen for a while.

The house made its sounds around her — the air conditioning cycling on, the tick of the sprinkler system starting in the yard, a car passing on the street outside.

Sounds she had lived inside for eleven years.

The kitchen she had chosen, the tile she had picked, the windows she had insisted on because she liked the way the afternoon light came in.

All of it the same as it had been ten minutes ago and none of it the same.

She didn't cry. That surprised her later — not the absence of tears but the absence of the impulse.

What she felt was not grief, not yet. It was the cold, specific sensation of seeing something clearly for the first time and recognizing that it had been there all along.

Like adjusting the focus on a lens and watching a blurred shape resolve into an image that had always been sharp. She just hadn't been looking.

Eight months. That was her guess, though she wouldn't have called it a guess.

It was the kind of estimate her brain produced automatically, the same way it estimated the running time of a documentary sequence or the distance between two points on a map.

She'd been making films since she was twenty-four.

She knew how to read evidence. April to May was recent, but the ease of it — the smooth calendar lies, the practiced choreography of late meetings and early returns — had the feel of something that had been running longer.

Since September or October, maybe. Since Soleil had come to Parallax, or close to it.

She thought about what she knew. She knew her husband was having an affair with a woman who worked for him.

She knew the affair had lasted months. She knew the lies were small and competent and built on the assumption that she would never look, because she never had, because he had never given her a reason to — or because she had never wanted a reason to, which was a different thing and worse.

She thought about what she didn't know. She didn't know what she was going to do about it.

At six-fifteen, Cassian's car pulled into the driveway.

The low mechanical sound of the garage door opening.

His keys in the bowl on the hall table — a habit she'd asked him to start years ago because he used to leave them everywhere.

His footsteps on the hardwood, the particular rhythm of them: a man who walked like he owned whatever floor he was crossing, which, in this house, he did.

"Hey." His voice came from the hallway. Warm, easy, the voice of a man who had no idea he was being listened to differently than he'd ever been listened to before. "Something smells good."