I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 06

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 06

Here’s what I learned in life number one: Julian Vale never does anything with his own hands.

He has people. Debt-shackled, terrified, replaceable people.

Which is why, at 6:40 the next morning, was standing in a Chelsea coffee shop watching my personal assistant Nina Reyes stir a latte she wasn’t drinking, with a burner phone face-down beside her like a loaded gun.

I slid into the seat across from her. She jumped so hard she knocked over the sugar.

“Mrs. Vale! I-you’re-it’s so early-”

“Nina.” I set the sandwich bag on the table. Six white capsules. “How much does he pay you?”

Her whole face crumpled, instantly, like a building with the supports pulled. It’s the fastest confession I’ve ever gotten from anyone.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God, is it bad? He said it was-he said it was a supplement, a stress

thing, he said you were burning out and you’d never take vitamins from him because you two aren’t close-”

“It’s thallium.”

Nina put her hand over her mouth and made a sound like a kicked cat.

“My brother,” she said, and the tears came all at once, ugly and honest. “Danny. He owes a hundred and ten thousand to people who don’t take payment plans, and Julian bought the debt, he bought it just to have it, and he said all I had to do was swap a bottle once a month and he’d-” She grabbed my hands across the table. “Mrs. Vale, I swear on my life, I swear on Danny’s, I thought it was vitamins, I thought I was the worst thing I’d ever be was an idiot-”

I let her cry for exactly ninety seconds. I don’t have time for more; I have twenty-seven days.

Then I said: “Do you want out?”

She stared at me.

“I can’t make the debt disappear,” I said. “But my husband can, and he will, on one condition.” I leaned in. “You keep swapping the bottles.”

“What?”

“With these.” I put a second bottle on the table. “Calcium. My pharmacist made them look right. You keep reporting to Julian, you keep taking his money, you smile, and every single thing he says to you from now on lands on a recorder.” I stid a small black rectangle across the table. “He’s very careful in writing and very sloppy out loud. Men like him always are.”

Nina looked at the recorder for a long moment. Then she wiped her face with a napkin, straightened her

spine, and picked it up.

“Mrs. Vale,” she said thickly. “He calls you ‘the inventory.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Get it on tape.”

I got back to the penthouse at nine and found my mother in my kitchen.

Miriam Bennett, in red, eating my husband’s imported cheese.

“Darling! I let myself in with the code.”

“We changed the code.”

“I know, I called Roman and asked for the new one and he gave it to me in under four seconds, which, frankly, is the most emotionally available that man has ever been.” She popped a grape. “Now. The gala is in twenty-six days, you look like a Victorian ghost, and I’ve decided the problem is strategy.”

“Mom-”

“Black stockings.”

“What?”

“Six years, no grandchildren. I did the math, sweetheart, and the math says a man is a fortress, and a fortress falls to patience, siege, or black stockings.” She sipped her espresso serenely. “We are out of time

for patience.”

“He is not a fortress, he’s-” a man who kept my grocery lists in a locked drawer and wrote me a letter in case he died “-shy.”

My mother looked across the room at my husband, six-foot-three of bespoke menace, who had just walked in and was currently glaring at the delivery guy standing three feet too close to me.

“Shy,” she said. “Yes. A timid woodland creature Stockings, Ava.”

She kissed my cheek and swanned out.

Roman shut the door on the delivery guy and turned around, and something in his expression stopped my

heart.

“Ava,” he said. “The safe deposit box. Wexler and Coyne, box forty-one.”

“What about it?”

“I just got the call.” His voice was very, very level, which is how I now know he’s terrified. “It was opened at

eight-fifteen this morning. Emptied.”

“By who?”

“By me,” said Roman. “According to the signature.”