Page 71 of The Marriage Blunder

“She says hi,” I offered, defaulting to the safety of neutral ground.

“Tell her hi back,” Kenneth said, and I believed he meant it. He uncapped his pen and set it down beside the pad, folding his hands in front of him, a gesture I recognized from a thousand meetings. It meant that something important was about to happen.

“She’s going to want to have you over for dinner.”

“Good,” he replied, instantly. “It’s about time that I officially meet my mother-in-law.”

I hesitated, a pause long enough for both of us to know I was thinking. “You don’t have to say that.”

He held my gaze, and there was nothing in it but certainty. “I know. I want to meet her properly. I want her to know I’m not a situation she needs to worry about.”

I felt something break, not in a bad way, but in the way an old, too-tight joint gives way and suddenly you have a full range of motion you didn’t know you’d been missing. I smiled, for real. “She already knows that.”

Kenneth stood, came across the room, and stopped in front of me. He cupped my face, gentle, both thumbs at my jaw, and kissed me once, slow and deliberate, with the focus of someone solving a problem and the ease of someone who did not need to prove a damn thing to anyone.

I brought my hands up and gripped the front of his shirt, holding him close, because I could, and because it was the first time in my life that doing so felt not just allowed but wanted.

When we broke apart, I rested my forehead against his shoulder, and he put his arms around me, strong and sure, and we stood like that for a long minute, the sun throwing angled light across the back wall, the city going on and on outside, the rest of the world held at bay by the simple fact of being held.

That night, I took the longest shower of my life, which was saying something, because I had survived grad school and more than one nervous breakdown. I was still wrapped in a towel, barefoot on the stone tile, when I saw my phone light up on the bathroom counter.

Kenneth was standing in the open doorway, phone in his hand, expression composed in the very specific way it got when he was trying to decide how to break bad news.

“Hey,” I said, instantly on alert.

He crossed to me, handed me my phone. “Miles called,” he said. “You should see this.”

It was a forwarded email, with an attachment and the subject line: VANCE—NEW RETAINER. The body was three lines, direct as a bullet: Got confirmation. Rosamund Vance left the Pryce case two weeks ago. No formal statement. She’s now on retainer with Carolyn Thomas. Sorry, kid.

I stared at the screen, the words swimming in a slow, sick spiral. I knew the name: Vance was a monster in court, famous for drawing blood on cross, the only person alive who had ever gotten Aldous Pryce to shut up for longer than ten seconds. She had quit, with no press. She was now working for my sister.

I looked up at Kenneth. “She didn’t stumble into Pryce,” I said, the truth settling into my gut like a stone. “She knew. She always knew how to get to me.”

He nodded. There was no comfort he could offer, and none that I would have taken. But he put his hand on the back of my neck and left it there, grounding, real, and it was enough.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said, eventually, and I let myself believe it, just for a minute, because to do otherwise would have meant giving in entirely.

We stood there, two grown men in a bathroom, the city lighting up below, my mother probably microwaving another cup of healing broth in a building across town.

The rest of it—the old pain, the unfinished fights, the sense that happiness was a thing you owed the world before you could claim it for yourself—could wait.

For now, there was this. Warmth, and the hum of the city, and the undeniable fact that I was not alone.

I could live with that.

Chapter Sixteen

~ Kenneth ~

The kitchen table in my penthouse had never seen as much traffic in a year as it had in the last ten days, but today it was just me, the dossier, and a mug of coffee that tasted like melted steel filings. I had let it go cold on purpose, which was not a decision so much as a consequence of reading the same eight pages until the letterhead blurred into the margin.

Miles had delivered the packet by courier at six AM, an hour that no longer counted as “early” in our present phase of operations. The label on the folder was precise, even for him: “Thomas—Vance—Pryce.” The narrative inside was less precise, in the way a disaster never really lines up with the blueprints.

First page: Carolyn, my former fiancée, had reached out to Aldous Pryce seven months before the engagement. The approach had not been casual—she’d come to him with an offer, detailed in legal print, promising enough leverage to flip his biggest rival’s position on the city council. The price was not money. The price was a partnership in whatever emerged from the ashes of my own company, provided the fire was “well-ventilated.”

Second page: Edward Taylor, my executive assistant, was named explicitly. Not as a co-conspirator, but as a pressure point. Carolyn had found something, or fabricated it. The report was careful on this point, but the implication was clear: she controlled Edward, and Edward had given her everything she needed to walk me right into the trap.

Third page: Rosamund Vance, the legal mind who could teach sharks to circle, had accepted a retainer from Carolyn three weeks before the bachelor party in Las Vegas. All public statements to the contrary. Billing records, as harvested by Delancy, suggested that Vance had not only prepared the engagement contract, but had also assembled the array of NDAs, dissolution clauses, and intellectual property reversion triggers that would become the detonation cord running right through my own R&D pipeline.