“You’ve changed.”
“I’d hope so.”
The conversation was shorter than I expected. Seraphina told me what Dominic had already told Miley. A party. Too much alcohol. One night, stupid and reckless. She’d woken up horrified. So had Dominic. Neither of them planned it. Neither of them wanted it. It happened because two people who should have known better didn’t, and by the time morning came, the damage was permanent.
“I should have told you,” she said. “Instead of running. Shame made me a coward. You deserved the truth and I gave you silence.”
I listened. I’d believed for years that my brother had deliberately seduced the woman I loved, that it was calculated, that it was Dominic doing what Dominic always did, taking what belonged to Christopher because it was there and because he could. The truth was smaller, messier, more human than the story I’d built—two drunk people making a foolish mistake. A failure rather than a betrayal, ugly, ordinary and painfully human.
“Do you still feel anything for me? I shouldn’t ask… I mean…” she eyed me.
I searched for the feeling. I went looking for it the way you search a house for something you’re sure you left somewhere. I found the memory. The shape of what it used to be. The place where it used to live, behind my ribs, the spot that used to burn when I heard her name.
The spot was occupied now. By someone else. By flour on a collar and sticky notes and a laugh with an overlapping tooth.
“I loved you once,” I said. “And it’s over.”
“The wife?”
“Miley is the love of my life. And there’s no one who can take her place,” I said it simply. Factually.
Seraphina smiled, sad and genuine. “She’s lucky.”
“I’m the lucky one.”
We parted with a handshake. It felt like a period at the end of a sentence that had run on too long. I walked out of the hotel bar and into the Miami evening and the air felt lighter and the sky felt wider. I drove home thinking about yellow gold and round-cut diamonds and the woman I was going to ask to stay.
Miley
The photos arrived that night.
Unknown number. Two images. A text underneath.
UNKNOWN
He’s back with his ex. Your marriage was fake after all.
I opened the first photo. A hotel bar. Dim lighting. Two people at a table. Christopher and a woman. She was striking, dark-haired, and effortlessly elegant. They were sitting close. Not touching, but close. The body language was intimate. Familiar. Two people who had history and weren’t hiding it.
I opened the second photo. Same bar. Different angle. Christopher leaning toward her. The woman’s hand on the table near his. His face in profile, attentive, focused, the same way he focused on me when I talked about food, like the person in front of him was the only thing in the room.
I knew who she was. After Dominic’s confession at the cafe, I’d done what any rational adult would do when confronted withthe name of her husband’s ex-lover. I searched the internet for three hours. Seraphina. Model. London-based. Christopher’s ex from his early-twenties. There were old photos of them together at premieres and events, and in every one, they looked like a couple from the cover of a magazine.The perfect duo.
She was beautiful enough to make you look at your own reflection and think:Well, that’s not going to compete.
I sat on the bed and stared at the photos until the screen went dark. Then I lit it again and stared some more. The text underneath them pulsed like a heartbeat:Your marriage was fake after all.
I could already guess who sent them. Esmeralda. She was the only one who possessed that kind of intent.
I got up and walked to his study. I don’t know what I was looking for—proof, denial, something that would explain the photos without invoking the word I was trying not to think.
The divorce papers were on his desk.
Printed. Official. The contract dissolution agreement. Ready to be signed. The ninety-day timeline was ending and Christopher had already prepared the exit paperwork.
I picked them up and read them. My name was on the signature line beside his. The lump sum was listed. The terms of dissolution—clean, professional, exactly as he’d described it the night he laid out his rules. A transaction. Ninety days. Then separate ways.
I read the document twice. Looking for something between the lines. A note. A deviation. Some small sign that this wasn’t what it looked like. That the man who held me every night and kissed my forehead every morning and whisperedstayinto my hair after the first time we made love hadn’t already printed the paperwork to let me go.
