I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 05

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 05

We had the prenup on the dining table in four minutes flat, a hundred and eighty pages of cream linen paper under the pendant lights, my hands in cotton gloves I keep in my purse like a lunatic.

“Turn off the overheads,” I said. “Tneed the raking lamp. And a loupe-there’s one in my bag.”

Roman didn’t ask a single question. He killed the lights, dragged a floor lamp over, and held it at the angle I pointed at without being told twice. It was, I realized dimly, the first time we had ever done anything

together.

Page thirty-one. Clause nineteen.

I’d looked at ten thousand documents in my life. It took me eleven seconds.

“There.” I sat back. “It’s not even good.”

“Show me.”

“Look at the paper. The rest of the document is Crane’s Crest, 32-pound, laid texture. Page thirty-one is a 28-pound wove-it’s from a different ream. Under the lamp you can see the sheen difference.” I slid the loupe to him. “Now the type. Everything else was printed on the same laser unit; the toner’s sitting identically in the fibers. Page thirty-one has a different dot pattern. Different printer, Roman. Probably a different year.”

His jaw had gone to granite..

“And the initials.” I turned the page toward him. My own initials, A.B., tiny in the margin. “That’s my hand for about the first stroke. Then it’s not. Whoever traced it pressed too hard. There’s an indentation channel on the back of the sheet. I initialed a hundred and seventy-nine margins that week with a pen I wasn’t pressing into, because I was exhausted and half in love and I wanted to get to the champagne.” My voice broke somewhere in there. “This one was pressed like someone was concentrating.”

Silence.

Then Roman stood, walked to the window, and put his palm flat against the glass. When he spoke, it was so quiet I almost missed it.

“Six years.”

“Roman-”

“You were nineteen feet down a hallway.” He said it to the window. “Every night I heard your door close,

and every night I told myself she asked for this, she doesn’t want you, she wants the merger and the name and you will not be the man who makes his wife dread her own house.” He laughed. It was a horrible sound. “I built my entire marriage on a page from the wrong ream of paper.”

I crossed the room. I made myself do it.

“Look at me.”

He wouldn’t.

“Roman Vale.” I took his wrist and turned him around, and his pulse under my thumb was going like a hunted animal. “You want to know what I did every night? I sat on the floor of my closet and googled ‘how to make your husband want you.’ I bought three hundred dollars of lingerie I wore for exactly no one. I cried at a Costco once because a man kissed his wife by the rotisserie chickens.”

“Avia-”

“I thought you found me repulsive.”

“Repulsive.” He said the word like it had physically injured him. His hand came up, hovered, then very slowly cupped my jaw-the first time in six years, and his fingers were shaking. “You are the only thing in my life I’ve never been able to think about rationally. Do you understand? Not the company. Not my father. You.”

My breath went thin.

The distance between us closed to nothing. His forehead touched mine. He smelled like cedar and paper and six wasted years.

“Tell me to stop,” he murmured.

“Don’t you dare stop-”

The front door beeped.

The family code.

We broke apart like teenagers and Julian Vale walked into my dining room with a bottle of Burgundy and that bear-trap smile, and his eyes went straight to the open prenup under the lamp.

I watched his smile stay exactly where it was while something behind it died.

“Ava, sweetheart,” he said warmly. “Bit of light reading?”

And then his phone buzzed in his hand, and I-standing close enough to see the screen-read the name of the sender before he flipped it face down

E. HALLORAN – RESULTS READY.
The lab.

He knew Roman had tested my hair.

Which meant Julian wasn’t going to wait thirty days anymore.