I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 03

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 03

I made it to my bathroom before my legs gave out.

Twice, lately. I’d looked my murderer in the face and flirted with it. My hands were still vibrating. Under the running tap I flushed every capsule in that amber bottle—except six, which I sealed in a sandwich bag and buried in a tampon box, because I’d learned one thing at the auction house: never destroy the evidence, just make it boring enough that men won’t look.

That’s my job, by the way. Was. Is. Provenance specialist at Ashgrove Auctions. I authenticate documents. Give me a letter and I’ll tell you whether the ink was laid in 1840 or last Tuesday, whether a signature was written or copied—the tremor’s different, the pressure’s different. Forgers always press too hard.

For six years, that skill had made me excellent at my job and useless at my marriage.

You asked me to, he’d said, dying-me, bleeding-out me. I loved you from the other side of a hallway because you asked me to.

I never asked. So somebody told him I did.

And there was exactly one place in this penthouse I’d never been allowed.

Roman’s study smelled like him—cedar, paper, the faint ghost of the cologne I’d bought him three anniversaries ago and assumed he’d thrown out. The desk was obsessively clean. Three drawers unlocked. One wasn’t.

I’m not proud of what I did next. I’m also not sorry. The woman who politely respected locked drawers died on a marble floor, and I had twenty-nine days.

The key was taped under the lamp base. My husband is a genius about hostile takeovers and an absolute amateur about hiding things from his wife.

I opened the drawer.

And then I sat down on the floor of his study, very suddenly, because my knees stopped working.

It was all me.

A cocktail napkin from the Carlyle with a doodle I’d drawn our first week married, when I was nervous and drawing helped. The grocery lists I left on the counter, dozens of them, flattened and stacked like they mattered. The hair clip I’d torn apart crying in a hotel bathroom in Milan and left in the trash—taped back together, missing one tooth. Ticket stubs from movies I went to alone. A photo of me asleep on the library sofa with a book on my face, taken from a doorway, badly, by someone who didn’t want to wake me.

Six years of a man collecting the crumbs of a woman who slept forty feet away.

There was a pill bottle in there too. Prescription. His name.

R. VALE — 50MG — INSOMNIA. TAKE AS NEEDED. Refilled eleven times.

And underneath everything, a cream envelope, sealed, in his handwriting.

For Ava. If anything happens to me.

My thumb was under the flap when I heard the door.

I looked up.

Roman stood in the doorway, jacket over his arm, absolutely still. His gaze went from my face to the open drawer to the napkin in my hand.

I have watched this man be threatened with a federal subpoena and yawn.

He had never, in six years, looked like this. Caught. Skinned. Terrified.

“Ava,” he said, and his voice came out wrong. “Get out of my study.”

“Roman—”

“Please.” He crossed the room in three strides and shut the drawer, gently, like he was closing a coffin, his hand trembling an inch from mine. “It’s nothing. It’s clutter. I’ll have it thrown out tonight—”

“You kept my grocery lists.”

“Ava.”

“Six years.” My throat closed. “Six years, and you couldn’t say one word to me, but you kept a hair clip out of the garbage—”

“Because it was the only part of you I was allowed to have!”

It detonated out of him. The whole room rang with it. Roman Vale, who had never raised his voice in my presence, stood over me breathing hard, and the mask was off, and what was underneath it was so much worse and so much more beautiful than I’d imagined.

Then he closed his eyes. Rebuilt himself, piece by visible piece.

“Forgive me,” he said flatly. “Dinner’s at eight.”

He walked out.

And I sat there on his rug, shaking, holding a cocktail napkin from six years ago—

—and realized the envelope was still in my hand.