Page 68 of The Marriage Blunder

“Understood,” I said. “Keep going.”

We hung up. For a minute, I just stared at the phone, the glass reflecting back the blue of the city and the red of Jude’s shirt.

“It’s Carolyn.”

“Could be,” I said. “Or she’s the next layer out.”

He shrugged, as if to say: It doesn’t matter. You already knew this would happen.

I laughed, dry. “Is there anyone in this city who isn’t working an angle?”

He didn’t answer, just set the food on the table and sat next to me, not across. He put his hand on my knee, warm and real and so solid it made the rest of it feel like a bad joke.

“What would you do?”

He thought about it, took his time, then said, “Burn it all down. Then build something better.”

I grinned. “You really are the worst influence.”

He squeezed my knee. “You married me.”

I set the phone on the table, next to the folder labeled “Strategy,” and picked up my fork. We ate in silence, the world outside reduced to lights and motion. For once, the war felt winnable.

The rest would come in the morning.

Chapter Fifteen

~ Jude ~

I woke up at four-thirty to the gentle, familiar panic that I might have forgotten to pay a quarterly estimate for Kyue’s real estate portfolio. This is not a feeling most people experience, but I am not most people.

Most people, for instance, have not optimized the notification settings on their bank app to produce a soothing chime that says “you are still solvent.” I had, and it’s how I kept my heart rate below a hummingbird’s.

It was pre-dawn, the city a faint, expensive bruise through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Kenneth’s penthouse, which I had not really meant to occupy but seemed to be occupying with increasing regularity.

The kitchen was perfect in a way that made it hostile to human life: no visible crumbs, the coffee maker gleaming with an edge of stainless that could have cauterized a wound, and all the counters aligned to the grid lines of the subway map below.

I was the only thing out of place, hunched over the kitchen table in Kenneth’s white undershirt and my own rumpled joggers, a spreadsheet pulled open on my laptop and a mug of cold coffee at my elbow.

There were probably better ways to spend your first hour awake, but none that gave me the satisfaction of finding an error in a ledger before the man who paid my retainer could.

I’d been working in that focused, compulsive trance for long enough to forget that time existed, when I heard the sound of deliberate silence. You have to live with Kenneth to understand what I mean by that. He does not tiptoe. He does not “make an entrance.” He simply appears in the frame, as if the room realizes only at the last moment that it has been missing something important and corrects itself.

He crossed the kitchen barefoot, wearing dark slacks and a crisp shirt open at the collar, with nothing about him to suggest he’d been asleep, and stood by the window for a moment, surveying the city like he was mentally rearranging it for better efficiency.

Then he moved to the counter, refilled the coffee maker, and set a fresh mug beside my elbow. He didn’t ask if I wanted more. He didn’t have to. He knew how to interpret the world through the negative spaces: the empty mug, the tightness at my brow that meant the caffeine had run out before the problems did.

I did not look up. It was a power move, or possibly the only form of self-preservation I had left. I scrolled through the invoice tab, highlighting a block of questionable expenses, and tried not to notice the way my own presence was starting to accumulate in the apartment.

There was a stack of client folders on the far left corner of his desk, where I always left them after hours; a backup glasses case I’d begun keeping next to the coffee grinder; the fact that the concierge called now if I didn’t retrieve the dry cleaning by eight.

I had not meant to colonize the space, but it was happening, as all invasions do, by small acts of convenience and a long denial that anything strategic was occurring.

Kenneth sat across from me at the table, with his own mug and his own tablet, and opened his inbox with a kind of priestly calm. There is a specific heat to sharing a silent forty-minute work sprint with another person who lives in your orbit. Not intimate, not cold—just a cohabitation of focus.

I was aware of him the way you are aware of a radiator in a New York apartment. Not by direct sensation, but by the constant reminder that the room’s climate is being managed by something beyond your control.

We worked like that, parallel and unspeaking, for almost an hour. I tracked his progress only in the micro-expressions he did not know he was making. The slight crease at the bridge of his nose when an email annoyed him, the perfectly silent exhale when a meeting had been moved rather than cancelled, the way his thumb ran over the rim of the mug after a particularly dull report.