“Nothing but the girls,” I emphasized gently. “They’re the only reason I fought and I know he was just using them as a bargaining chip. Honestly, he only wanted to be a dad until we found out Lu was another girl. After that, he checked out and he really never checked back in. I don’t care about the houses or the money. The only thing I care about are the girls he never wanted and I got them. Everything else pales in comparison.”
The music swelled in the background and Jennifer laughed, Lu shouting something unintelligible at the screen. He didn’t even glance toward them, just looking at me like he was seeing me for the first time.
“This is the part they don’t put in the brochures, Zach.” I motioned vaguely around the apartment. “When arranged marriages are being negotiated, no one talks about what it looks like when they fail. When those contracts they spend entire days hammering out can’t be upheld. This is the dark side.”
He huffed out a quiet breath, but that iciness that had been in his eyes almost all along had melted. Maybe he was feeling sorry for me, or maybe that was just the cold medicine finally doing its job, but he finally seemed to warm up a little bit.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m starting to see that.”
As we sat there, locked in a silence that wasn’t of our own making but rather reality sinking in, I watched him, slightly flushed in my tiny kitchen but somehow not completely out of place, looking at the girls when they danced past like he was paying attention.
My own defensiveness melted a little as I saw him absorb the weight of what I’d said. Zach always had made me feel like he was really listening to me and hearing what I was saying instead of simply formulating a response, and it seemed like he hadn’t lost that ability.
“You didn’t deserve that,” he said suddenly.
I frowned. “I didn’t deserve what?”
“Any of it,” he clarified as he swung his eyes back to mine.
I held his gaze, not really knowing what to say or if there was even anything to say, but eventually, I felt my lips curve into a ghost of a smile. “Neither did you, Zach.”
Suddenly, it felt just a bit less like we were on opposite sides of what I’d broken. Like maybe we were even remembering how to be on the same side again. It felt good. Right.
Until he pushed the papers toward me. “Okay, then. If you’re sure you’re happy with the terms, nothing else jumped out at me. I think you can sign.”
I nodded and picked up the pen, not hesitating to put an end to this chapter of my life. Zach watched me from the other side of the counter, his edges softer now than they’d been since before I’d had that conversation with him so many years ago. “You don’t have to rush, Adeline. You can take another day, or hell, even another week.”
“I’m not rushing. I’m just not dragging this out any longer,” I said, glancing up at him. “I think I’ve done enough of that.”
I glanced at the line where my signature belonged and signed, surprised by how anticlimactic it was. There was no lightning bolt or giant, flashing neon sign that read FREE popping up above my head.
Just a quiet, sweeping sense of relief. I exhaled a long, slow breath, then pushed the papers back toward him. “There you go. That’s it, right? There’s nothing else to sign?”
He shook his head. “That’s it.”
Carefully sliding the papers back into the folder, he stood up and immediately swayed and grabbed the counter for balance. My eyebrows shot up. “Oh, good. You’re dying. You should’ve just taken that damn medicine sooner.”
“I’m not dying,” he argued lamely. “I just stood up too fast.”
“You stumbled like a Victorian woman in a corset,” I said. “Sit down before you hurt yourself.”
“I’m fine.” He took in a deep breath, then slowly released the counter and picked up the folder. “I’m returning these to your lawyer, then I should get back to the office.”
“You’re sitting down,” I countered. “Do you honestly think you can drive right now?”
Although he’d been turning toward the door, he suddenly stopped and looked back at me. Breathtakingly handsome as always, he also looked like complete crap. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot, his complexion totally off, and he didn’t seem very steady on his feet.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll stay, but I want it on the record that I don’t like this.”
“No one does.” I waved him toward the couch and watched as he dropped down beside the girls.
Within twenty minutes, I had fully committed to disinfecting every surface in the apartment while my head pounded and my body strongly disagreed with all the movement, but with all four of us sick and here, it had to be done.
Meanwhile, Zach kicked off his shoes and even undid the top few buttons of his shirt. He curled up under a blanket with Jennifer on the couch and was watching the movie with them.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I mean, that’s not possible.”
“It does make sense,” Jennifer argued without hesitation. “What’s so impossible about it?”
