I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 08

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 08

Nineteen days out, Julian escalated, and he did it with flowers.

Not to me. To the press.

VALE HEIRESS-BY-MARRIAGE UNDER INTERNAL REVIEW: SOURCES SAY AVA VALE MOVED $2.4M

FROM FOUNDATION ACCOUNTS

My phone went off like a car alarm. Ashgrove Auctions put me on “voluntary leave” by ten a.m. My mother called seven times. Some man on CNBC used the phrase gold-digger with a provenance degree, which,

honestly, would be a great band name in any other week.

I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and let myself have four minutes of self-pity.

At minute three, my husband sat down on the floor next to me.

Roman Vale. In a nine-thousand-dollar suit. On the tile.

“You’re going to wrinkle,” I said.

“I have others.” He handed me a glass of water and didn’t say anything for a while, which is his best language. Then: “The board called an emergency session. They want a statement distancing the company from you.”

“Give it to them.”

“I gave them my resignation instead.”

I choked on the water. “What?”

“Effective at the vote, if they move against you.” He was staring at the cabinets, calm as a man discussing

weather. “It’s a bluff. They’d lose forty percent of the institutional book without my name on the door. But it bought us nineteen days, and it put on the record, in front of eleven witnesses, that I choose my wife over

the chair.”

“Roman, that company is your entire-

“No.” He turned his head. “It’s my grandfather’s. It’s my father’s. It’s a very expensive thing I inherited and maintained because I had nothing else.” His eyes moved over my face like he was memorizing it. “You’re

what I chose.”

And there it was again-that free-fall feeling, the floor dropping out of my chest.

“Then let’s go to war,” I said.

“Let’s go to war,” he agreed.

We went to war like the most functional dysfunctional couple in Manhattan.

I built the evidence file. Paper, ink, toner, pressure indentations-thirty-one pages of forensic report on clause nineteen, notarized, sealed, and quietly couriered to two federal agencies and one very excited investigative reporter at the Times.

Roman built the trap. He let Julian win things. Small things, delicious things-a committee seat, a proxy fight over a Denver acquisition. I watched my husband lose deliberately for the first time in his life and

smile about it.

Nina wore the recorder. Sloane wore a catering uniform and a fake name.

And somewhere in there, without permission, the rest of it happened.

He started making my coffee. He’d hand it to me without a word and then walk away like he hadn’t just committed intimacy. One night I fell asleep on the library sofa and woke up under his jacket. He sat at the table now instead of at the end of it, and one night his ankle brushed mine and neither of us moved it for an hour and a half, and I have never been so aware of an ankle in my life.

Then, eleven days out, Beau Kingsley happened.

Beau is my work friend, a golden retriever in human form, and he has the survival instincts of one too. He turned up at the penthouse with a gift bag because he’d heard I was “going through it.”

“It’s a subscription,” he said proudly, in my foyer, in front of my husband. “To my app. Second Innings. It’s for women who are exiting cold marriages-”

“Beau.”

“-and I got you the premium tier because remember at the Christmas party, when you had the wine, and you said your husband was a total dud in the bed-”

The temperature dropped forty degrees.

Beau looked up. Up. Into the face of Roman Vale.

“Oh,” he said faintly. “Hi.”

Roman smiled. It was the most frightening thing I have ever seen, and have died.

“A dud,” my husband repeated softly.

Beau left. Quickly. Possibly he is still running.

Roman turned to me, loosening his tie with one hand, and his eyes were doing something molten and

dangerous that I felt in the soles of my feet.

“Upstairs,” he said. “Now.”