I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 14

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 14

I tore it open standing up, heart slamming.

It wasn’t from Julian.

Mrs. Vale,

My name is Daniel Reyes. Nina’s brother. I’m the reason she did what she did, and I’ve been in a federal facility in Otisville for nine months on charges your husband’s cousin arranged, which nobody believed until yesterday, when two hundred people watched him get put through a marble floor by a caterer.

My attorney says I’m out in six weeks.

I don’t have anything to give you. So all I’ve got is this: thank you for not throwing my sister away. She said you looked at her like she was a person, and she hasn’t been looked at like that in a year.

I’m a decent chef. When I get out, I’ll cook you dinner. Anything you want.

Just-maybe let me shop for the ingredients myself. Ha.

– D.R.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and cried for the second time that week, which for me is practically a

nervous breakdown.

Then I went downstairs and found my husband at the kitchen island in a gray T-shirt, barefoot, reading three newspapers at once with my name in all of them, and I thought: I get to keep this.

Here’s how it all landed, for the record.

Julian Vale pled out at eleven months and got twenty-six years. He tried, twice, to sell his story. Nobody bought it. Turns out attempted murder recorded live on a financial news channel is a difficult thing to spin.

Nina Reyes is my chief of staff now. She still cries at birthdays. She also caught two separate journalists

trying to bribe our doorman and got them both blacklisted from every building on the Upper East Side, so I consider the tears a fair trade. Danny cooks for us on Sundays. He does shop for the ingredients himself. He also makes a joke about it every single time, which Roman finds genuinely funny, which is how I know my husband is happy.

Sloane Marsh runs Vale Group security and has a framed tabloid photo of herself “seducing” my husband

hanging in her office over the caption MOST BORING AFFAIR IN HISTORY.

Beau Kingsley’s app has four hundred thousand users. He credits me. I have asked him, repeatedly, to

stop.

My mother got her grandchild in eighteen months, a furious little girl named Cecelia with her father’s gray eyes and my capacity for holding a grudge My mother claims full credit for the stockings. I have decided not to fight her on this.

And clause nineteen?

Roman had the original prenup-all one hundred and eighty pages, forged sheet included-professionally framed. It hangs in his study, where the locked drawer used to be.

“Why would you keep that?” I asked him, the night they hung it..

He came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist, chin on my hair, and we both looked at page thirty-one in its shadow box: the wrong paper, the wrong toner, the pressed-too-hard initials that cost

us six years.

“Because a man wrote one page,” he said, “and I believed it over you. I never want to forget how cheap it

was.”

“Roman.”

“Mm?”

I turned around in his arms and put my palm flat over his heart, feeling it beat-steady, unhurried, alive, forty feet closer than it used to be.

“Ask me the thing,” I said. “You’ve been chewing on it for a year.”

He hesitated. Then: “Do you ever think about it? The other one. The life where you’

“Every day,” I said. “Not the dying part. The other part.”

“Which part?”

“The part where you were on your knees on that floor telling a dead woman you loved her, and I was too late to say it back.” I went up on my toes and kissed him. “That’s what I came back for. Not revenge. Not the company. Just that one sentence, out loud, while you could still hear it.”