I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 02

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 02

I came down the stairs in a bathrobe with wet hair and no divorce papers, which was already a violation of at least four previous-life traditions.

Roman was in the kitchen, sleeves rolled to the elbow, pouring coffee he wouldn’t drink. Six-foot-three of charcoal suit and glacial restraint. He glanced up—and for one hundredth of a second, before the mask snapped back into place, I saw his eyes drop to my bare feet on the cold floor and something in his jaw tighten.

Six years I loved you from the other side of a hallway.

God. I’d been reading him wrong for two thousand days.

“You’re not dressed,” he said.

“I’m not going.”

The coffee pot stopped mid-pour. Three full seconds. For Roman Vale, that was a scream.

“The appointment is at eleven.”

“Cancel it.”

He set the pot down very carefully, like a man defusing something. “Ava. If you need more time, or a different firm, or—” His voice did something almost imperceptible. Roughened. “If you need me to be out of the country while it processes, I’ll go.”

He’s giving me an exit. Six years of ice, and the man’s entire strategy had been to make leaving easy for me.

I took a breath. “Roman. At nine forty-two this morning, Hartwell Industrial is going to halt trading. Their CFO’s been cooking the receivables since January. It breaks on Bloomberg at nine forty-two exactly.”

He looked at me like I’d started speaking Latin. “Where did you hear that?”

“Nowhere. Wait nine minutes.”

I sat on the barstool and drank orange juice out of a carton in front of my husband, who hated that, and watched the clock.

9:41.

9:42.

His phone buzzed. Then his second phone. Then the landline in the study.

Roman didn’t move to answer any of them. He was staring at me, and for the first time in our marriage, he was the one who looked unbalanced.

“Explain,” he said quietly.

“I can’t.”

“Ava—”

“I can’t, Roman, and I need you to let me not explain, for thirty days.” My voice wobbled. I hated that it wobbled. “After that I’ll tell you everything. Every insane word of it. But right now I need one thing from you.”

He was around the island before I registered him moving. He stopped a careful arm’s length away—always that arm’s length, that maddening, respectful, hallway of a distance—and his gray eyes searched my face like he was looking for a fever.

“Name it.”

“Fire your household staff. All of them. Today.”

“…What?”

“And I want new locks, new codes, and nobody—nobody—touches my food, my water, or my medication but me.”

The silence stretched. Something moved behind his eyes, fast and dangerous, like a shark passing under ice.

“Someone’s threatened you,” he said. Not a question. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. “Who.”

“Roman—”

“Who, Ava.” And there it was—the thing I’d never once seen in six years. Raw. Uncovered. His hand came up like he was going to grab my shoulders, and then he stopped himself mid-air, fingers curling into a fist, and lowered it. “Tell me who and they’ll be gone by dinner. I mean that in every sense of the word.”

My eyes stung. There you are. You were in there the whole time.

“I don’t have proof yet,” I whispered. “Give me thirty days.”

“You have thirty years.” He said it fast, too fast, like it escaped. His ears went faintly red. He turned away. “I’ll call security. And the locksmith.”

I was still sitting there shaking when I heard the front door open—the private code, the one only family had.

“Cousin! Did you see Hartwell?” Julian Vale strolled into my kitchen with two coffees and a smile like a bear trap, and every hair on my body stood up. “Ava, darling. You look pale.” He set one of the coffees in front of me and kissed my cheek. “Are you taking your pills?”

I looked up into the eyes of the man who had patted my hair while I died.

And I smiled at him.

“Every single day,” I said. “Twice, lately.”