Lexy
Her hands wouldn’tstop shaking.
Lexy stared at them—her own hands, familiar and foreign all at once—as they fumbled with the zipper of her suitcase. The mechanism caught on fabric. She yanked too hard. The zipper held.
Stop it. Just stop.
She forced her fingers to slow, to breathe, to function like they were supposed to. One item at a time. Fold the blouse. Place it in the suitcase. Reach for the next thing.
The hotel room felt too large around her. Too quiet. The afternoon light slanting through the floor-to-ceiling windows turned everything golden and soft, completely at odds with the sharp-edged confusion tearing through her chest.
In the car ride back from Shayla’s office, she’d tried to make sense of it. Tried to logic her way through the impossible equation that didn’t balance.
An amendment to their marital agreement.
Six years ago.
With her consent.
But she had no memory of consenting. No memory of discussing a mistress. No memory of agreeing to monthly financial provisions for another woman’s residential and personal expenses.
She couldn’t see Leonidas lying to her. Forging her signature. Eight years of marriage, and he had never once broken his word. Never once deceived her. Their entire arrangement was built on honesty, on promises kept, on mutual respect for the boundaries they’d drawn together.
And Tio Samuel...no. Impossible. The older man had been a friend to both her late father and to Leonidas’s family for decades. He’d held her when she cried at her father’s funeral. He’d walked her through every clause of her marital agreement with patience and care, making sure she understood what she was signing.
He would never deceive her.
Which left only one possibility.
She had signed it herself.
Too humiliated to call Tio Samuel and confirm what she already suspected, she’d asked Shayla for a copy of the amendment instead. The lawyer had provided it within the hour, sent directly to Lexy’s phone as a PDF.
And there it was.
Her signature. Dated six years ago. Witnessed. Notarized.
She remembered signing it. Or rather, she remembered sitting in Tio Samuel’s office, jet-lagged from a research conference in Tokyo, listening to him explain something about “updated terms” and “standard provisions” while her mind was still half-occupied with calibration formulas she’d been working on during the flight.
She’d trusted him. Trusted that whatever needed signing was routine, administrative, nothing that required her full attention.
She’d signed without reading.
Because she trusted.
Was this some kind of conspiracy? Had they planned it together, the three of them? Leonidas, Tio Samuel, and the faceless woman in Milan whose existence had been carefully hidden from her for six years?
No.
