Her eyelashes are wet. They clump together when she blinks. “You’re being kind to me again. And I’m not sick.”
“You’ve been kind to me. Sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” she echoes, and there’s a smile in her voice. A tiny one, but a smile, nonetheless.
“You can be angry at me again later,” I tell her, “if you really feel the need to be.”
“I wanted you to tell me yourself. About the layoffs. It felt… I just wish you’d told me.” Her voice wavers a little, and I hate that sound. I hate that I caused it.
“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t, darling.” I smooth my hand over her back again. “Will you tell me more about what happened after you lost your parents?”
“After?”
“Yes. You were only nineteen.”
She takes a deep breath. “I had to handle everything. All the logistics. The house, the funerals… Ben helped. He really did, Rafe, I promise. He paid for the lawyers and let me start working at the company as soon as I graduated. You see, I knew everyone who worked there. I found a small apartment by the ocean and spent every single day with the people who make our bags and loafers, or organize photoshoots and campaigns, who oversee the financials.”
“They’re your family,” I say simply.
She nods. Her fingers are walking over my chest. Boats pass by in the distance, on the busy lake. “They were all there for me. And they all… knew. If I would start feeling terrible on a random Tuesday, four years after it happened, and all of my friends had long since stopped asking me about my grief. They knew, and they let me have my space.”
I run my free hand over my face. It’s too close to home, and yet I can’t stop the words coming out of me. “Grief takes time. That’s what they’ve told me, anyway. But I don’t think it ever really heals.”
“Me neither,” she says. “It just becomes easier to bear.”
I stroke away a tear on her cheek and think of how she’s killing me every single day, and how I can’t find it in myself to blame her for it.
Her eyes meet mine. They’re glossy from her tears, but steady again, her panic receding. “Are we agreeing on something?”
“It seems like it, darling.”
“I don’t think I need to be angry at you again later.” She digs her teeth into her lower lip. “We worked it out pretty well.”
My mouth curves. “Yeah. I’d say so.”
“It was a fun way to argue.”
“Yes. It was.”
“But,” she says, and lifts herself up on an elbow, “I stillwant you to tell me all about the potential layoffs, and I want to be involved in deciding who and why and when. I want it to be alastresort. You’re not leaving me out of the decisions again.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I tell her, and it’s the truth.
CHAPTER 61
PAIGE
It’s deeply confusing to have feelings for your enemy-turned-husband and not know where to place them. He feels like the only person in the world I can talk to about it, and also the absolute last. How would I phrase it? I barely understand it myself.
We sleep in the same bed that night. Again.
After talking it through more, I understand what he said about the potential layoffs. It was something I knew might happen one day, and flagging for it early and giving all employees a timeline is the responsible thing. I’ve been assured I’m going to be involved in the process.
But still. It hurt that he didn’t tell me himself, didn’t run it by me, and it hurt a surprising amount.
Without me realizing it, he’s slipped beneath my skin. Between the arguing and the bantering, the pretending and the posturing, we’ve developed something real.
And that terrifies me.
