I close the door behind me and follow her into the small living room. She sinks onto her couch and curls into the corner, pulling her knees to her chest.
The defensive posture sends alarm bells screaming through my head.
"Talk to me." I sit on the coffee table across from her, close enough to touch but keeping my hands to myself. "What happened, baby?"
For a long moment, she just stares at her hands. Then, quietly: "Victoria and I had a little chat today."
Every muscle in my body goes rigid. "What?"
"At the cafe near here." Emma's voice is flat, reciting facts. "She sat down like we were old friends. Told me all about your twenty-year history together. How she was there for every acquisition, every success. How you have patterns—a love of shiny, new things that you always get bored of."
White-hot rage floods through me. Victoria. Of course it was Victoria. I’m sure Samantha told her all about our conversation yesterday.
"She said—" Emma's voice wavers. "She said you always come back to things of real value. As opposed to me. The temporary distraction."
I'm going to kill her. I'm actually going to kill my ex-wife.
"Emma—"
"And the thing is, Grant, she wasn't wrong about everything." Emma finally looks up at me, and the pain in her eyes guts me. "I am significantly younger than you. People are going to look at us and see exactly what she implied—some naive girl who got herself pregnant to trap a rich man."
"That's not?—"
"And your daughter." Her voice breaks. "Samantha already hates me. Victoria just reinforced it. I'm the horrible woman that got myself knocked up. The mistake you'll regret when the excitement wears off."
The full picture crystallizes. Samantha's hostility, Victoria's calculated cruelty. They coordinated this. Tag-teamed Emma from both sides, knowing exactly where she's vulnerable.
My hands curl into fists. "Okay. Here's what we're going to do. I'll call Samantha first thing tomorrow, make it clear that her behavior was unacceptable. I'll have my lawyer send a cease-and-desist to Victoria—she can't just harass you like this. And I'll issue a statement to the press, make our relationship public on our terms. We can?—"
"Stop."
The word is quiet but firm. I look at Emma, and she's staring at me with something that looks like disappointment.
"Stop trying to manage it, Grant." Her voice rises slightly. "This is my life. Our life. And you can't just—you can't fix it with lawyers and press statements and your money."
She's right, as usual. My first instinct—my only instinct—was to solve the problem. Deploy resources. Control the situation.
Exactly what she's been afraid of from the beginning.
"I'm sorry." I unclench my fists, force myself to breathe. "You're right. I just—Emma, I'm so angry right now. At Victoria, at Samantha, at myself for not protecting you from this. And when I'm angry, I want to fix things."
"I know." She sounds tired. "But you can't fix this. We can't make Victoria stop hating me. We can't force Samantha to accept us. And we definitely can't control what people think when they find out about the pregnancy."
"So what do we do?"
She looks at me for a long moment. "You could sit with me. Stop trying to solve it. Just... be here."
It's such a simple request. And somehow, it's the hardest thing she could have asked.
Because sitting with someone's pain, just being present for it without trying to make it go away—I don't know how to do that. I've spent my entire adult life solving problems. Fixing what's broken.
But Emma's not broken. She's hurt. And those are two different things.
I move from the coffee table to the couch, settling beside her. "Okay. I'm here."
She leans against me, her head on my shoulder, and we sit in silence. Outside her window, the city hums—sirens, music, the perpetual motion of New York. Inside her small apartment, we're still.
After a while, she says, "Tell me about your marriage."
