My eyes sting. Fifteen years, and he’s just now telling me he saw through me the whole time.
“That’s why I want to be in the room,” he says. “Not because I need to see other men fuck you. Because I need to see you like this. Real. Alive. Not the woman everyone else gets.”
“Robert—”
“Mine.” He holds my gaze. I want to bottle the look on his face. Pride. Desire. Love so deep it makes me dizzy. “Yours. Always.”
We finish breakfast. Robert goes to refill his coffee. Everything is warm and golden.
My phone buzzes on the table.
I glance at it, expecting Wellington Foundation committee spam or a reminder about something I’ve agreed to and forgotten.
Tony:Someone’s been asking about you.
Every nerve in my body goes still. I go cold so fast it’s like someone opened a window in January.
A second message. An image this time, grainy, clearly from a security camera. A man at the bar, leaning in to talk to someone out of frame.
I recognize him immediately.
James Whitmore. Robert’s colleague. Robert’s friend. The man who offered to take Robert home from the Wellington Foundation Gala, the same gala that started all of this.
A third message:
Tony:His name is James Whitmore. He described you pretty well. Said he saw you at the bar before heading to the elevator. Asked Diana if she’d seen a woman matching your description around the casino. She played dumb.
I stare at the screen. My hands have gone cold. The phone is shaking, or maybe my hands are shaking. I can’t tell.
James was at the casino. James saw me. James asked about me by name.
My mind spins through possibilities. He could have been there gambling. He could have seen me in passing and thought nothing of it. He could have—
He noticed me going to the elevator. How much does he know? How much can he guess?
My stomach lurches, and for one awful second I think I’m going to be sick right here at the kitchen table. I press my hand flat against the surface to stop the trembling. My ring catches the light.
If James tells Robert he saw me at the casino, that’s fine. Robert knows I go to the casino.
But if James saw me when I came back down from Tony’s office… if he noticed the wrecked hair, the smeared makeup, and connected the dots…
“Everything okay?”
Robert is watching me from across the table with his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. His gray eyes are attentive. Concerned.
Tell him.
The thought is loud and obvious. Tell him right now. Show him the texts. He knows about Tony and Adrian. He’ll understand why James being there is a problem, and together you can figure out what to do.
Tell him, Shannon. This is what you promised. This is what makes everything else work. Since when does Shannon Matthews lie to the man she loves?
I open my mouth.
The first word is right there—sitting on my tongue, ready to drop into the space between us. I’ll turn the phone toward Robert, and we’ll look at James’s face on that grainy security footage together. We’ll figure this out the way we figure everything out now. Together.
And selfishness hits me right in the ribs. Because if I tell Robert that his colleague was at the casino asking about me, Robert might decide the risk is too high. He might want me to stop. He could suggest finding somewhere else, someone else, and the thought of never walking down that hallway to Tony’s brass nameplate again, of never feeling Adrian’s hands grip my hips or having him deny me…
My mouth closes.
