Page 39 of The Marriage Blunder

I said, “You’re sure about this?”

Jude looked up, right at me, and for the first time all week there was no hesitation. “I’m not walking anything back, Kenneth. I made the choice. I’m here.”

It was as close to a declaration as I’d ever gotten from anyone, and it landed harder than I’d expected.

Dinner ran on autopilot. We worked the strategy, went through the list. Cranston needed the full picture. Kincaid should be looped in on the shareholder angle.

The photo evidence from Carolyn’s hotel room—the one with the bridesmaid, the sash, and enough implied conduct to blackmail a sitting judge—needed to be off my phone and into a real secure repository.

Jude pulled out his own device, transferred the file, and encrypted it with a password I recognized: a string of numbers I’d once used for a hotel room in Tokyo, back when he was just a business manager and I was just a client.

He caught my look and smirked, “You use the same passwords for everything. I’m not saying it’s a weakness, but—”

“It’s efficient,” I said.

He finished the glass, set it down, and leaned back in the chair. The fireplace was running, but the chill from the window still crept in, settling over the room like a warning.

“You’re good at this,” I said.

He glanced up, and there was the faintest blush at the edge of his jaw. “Data management?”

I shook my head, once. “All of it.”

He looked at the wall, then at the table, then at me. “Don’t make it weird, Kenneth.”

I didn’t reply. Instead, I poured the last of the wine and watched the liquid curl in the glass, slow and unhurried.

We drifted from the tactical to the personal without marking the border. He mentioned his mother, briefly, a sentence that cost him more than he was willing to admit. I let it go, didn’t try to fix it, just listened the way he’d listened to me for the last year.

At eleven, Jude stood, stretched, and put on his coat. Adams was already gone for the night, the apartment a vacuum of polished silence. At the door, we paused. The city outside was as cold as it had been at six, but the air in the hallway was warm and close.

I said, “Same time tomorrow?”

Jude said, “You could just ask me to come back.”

I said, “I just did.”

He smiled, a real one, the kind that was a fraction too wide to be comfortable, then stepped out into the hall.

I watched the door until it clicked shut. I stood there for a while, not moving, then went back to the dining room. The table was cleared, the wine was gone, the only evidence was the warmth still radiating from where he’d sat.

I checked my email before bed. There was a message from my board liaison, flagged urgent. Below it, from an address I didn’t recognize, was a forwarded screenshot.

Carolyn’s message: a private line to someone in my own shareholder group, suggesting in the kind of language that only the truly practiced can muster that my “judgment had been compromised” and that “certain parties” might want to consider their positions while there was still time to extract value.

She was working the inside.

I read it twice, then sent it to Miles with the subject line, “We have a leak.”

I texted Jude before I could talk myself out of it: “She’s not just playing to the crowd. She went private.”

The reply came in less than a minute: “Miles needs to see this tonight.”

“Already forwarding,” I texted back. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

Then, three seconds later: “Get some sleep, Kenneth.”

I put the phone down and sat on the edge of the bed, looking out at the city. Someone was feeding her information. We did not yet know who. But I knew, with a certainty I’d never had before, who was on my side.