Page 66 of The Marriage Blunder

“You are.”

I laughed again, and this time, it was closer to something real.

The rest of the day was a blur of fallout. Edward’s email went dark before noon. Pryce’s holding company sent a single terse letter, which Miles intercepted and redirected to the circular file. Carolyn, to her credit, did not try to contact me. If anything, the operation was so clean that, after the initial sting, I felt a grudging respect.

By noon, the legal team was in motion, the board briefed, and the press agent on ice. The penthouse was quiet, cold, the only motion the drift of Jude across the room, laptop in hand, hair messy and glasses fogged from the heat of the argument.

At two p.m., I sat in the study, looking at the city, and realized that the world had not ended, not even a little. Jude sat in the chair by the window, legs pulled up under him, and watched me with a kind of patience that I had never known from anyone else, least of all myself.

“You know what hurts the most?”

He said, “Tell me.”

“It’s not the betrayal. It’s that I didn’t see it coming.”

“You saw it,” Jude countered. “You just didn’t want to be right.”

I thought about that for a long time. Then I went to the kitchen, poured the last of the coffee, reheated it in the microwave, and drank it while standing at the island.

Jude joined me. He poured a glass of water, set it next to mine, and said, “You want to know the real secret?”

I looked at him. He looked tired, but there was something sharp in his eyes, a flicker that I had not seen before.

“You can lose a person,” he said, “even a person you trust, but you don’t have to lose yourself.”

I thought about it, then reached out and set my hand over his. The contact was light, but the message was clear: I was still here. So was he.

The city outside the glass had come to life, blue and white and cold as memory, but the room was warm, and the hand in mine was enough.

I had lost my executive assistant, my operational right hand, and a good part of my belief in human nature. But I had not lost the war, and I had not lost the thing that mattered.

I let the silence last.

The next move was mine.

* * * *

The kitchen was quiet, the kind of quiet you only get after a week’s worth of emergencies and the full attention of a Manhattan law firm. The noise had gone out of the day hours ago, and the only things still moving were the late sunlight on the marble, the spiral of steam off a cup of black tea, and the man I’d accidentally married, now installed at the kitchen table like a witness in a trial he knew he’d win.

Jude was working, or pretending to. His laptop was open, a spreadsheet on the screen, but he hadn’t touched the keyboard in fifteen minutes.

Instead, he was annotating a printout, left-handed, the pen perched behind his right ear when not in use. His glasses sat low, an inch from where they should be, and he kept looking over the frames at the paper like it was a misbehaving child.

He didn’t look up when I entered, just moved his coffee aside so I’d have space at the end of the table. He was giving me room, but not leaving.

I watched him work for a while, then made the choice. I sat across from him, not at the head of the table but on the long side, where we’d done most of our planning, our calls, our caffeine-fueled damage control. I folded my hands on the table and waited until he put his pen down.

He looked at me, brown eyes clear and direct.

“Let me finish,” I said.

He put the pen down.

I said, “You’re the first person I’ve met who calls my bluff and gets away with it. Every time.”

He started to smile.

I didn’t let him.