I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 09

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 09

I went up those stairs like the building was on fire.

He caught me on the landing. One hand braced on the wall beside my head, the other still holding that half-undone tie, and six years of hallway collapsed into eight inches of air.

“A dud,” he said.

“I’d had wine-”

“Six years of cold showers.” His voice had dropped somewhere subterranear. “Six years of listening to your door close. Six years of learning the exact sound your bare feet make on the floor above my study so I’d know when you were awake and when I could finally stop pretending I was working.”

“Roman-”

“And you told your coworker-”

“What was I supposed to say?” I was breathing like I’d sprinted. “That my husband is a perfect gentleman with the self-control of a marble saint who won’t touch me? Nobody believes that! It’s not a personality, it’s a hostage situation-‘

He kissed me.

I want to be very clear: it was not a gentle kiss. It was six years of restraint failing catastrophically. His hand fisted in my hair, my back hit the wall, and the sound he made when I kissed him back-ruined, is the only word-undid something in my chest permanently.

He broke away first, forehead against mine, both of us shaking

“Clause nineteen,” he said hoarsely.

“Is a forgery.”

“It’s still signed.” His thumb dragged over my bottom lip and I nearly dissolved. “Ava. If I touch you and you regret it-if any part of this is gratitude, or fear, or that thing you won’t tell me that you knew about Hartwel

“It isn’t.”

“Then say it when it’s over.” His eyes closed. “After the gala. After he’s in a cell and you’re safe and there is nothing in this house I haven’t told you. Then say it, and I’ll never stop.”

“You,” I said, “are the most infuriating man alive.”

“I’m aware.” He kissed my forehead and it somehow undid me more than the first one. “Eleven days.”

Eleven days.

We spent them in a strange, glowing, terrible domesticity. He taught me to shoot at a range in Jersey. I taught him to identify a forged signature; he was annoyingly good at it immediately and I hated him for eleven minutes. Nina’s recordings piled up, each one worse: she looks gray, doesn’t she? Stress. Keep her

on schedule. Sloane memorized the gala floor plan. My mother sent me a garment bag with stockings in it

and a note that just said SIEGE.

Four days out, Roman told me the rest.

We were on the terrace. He was looking at the harbor, not at me.

“You don’t remember me,” he said. “From before.”

“Before what?”

“You were nineteen. Second year, Columbia. There was a car accident on Amsterdam-a delivery van and a cab, and a girl was on the sidewalk between them.

The world went very quiet.

“Someone pulled me out of the way,” I said slowly. “I never saw-they were gone when the ambulance came, everyone said I imagined-”

“I had a torn rotator cuff and a business school interview in forty minutes.” He still wouldn’t look at me. “You were holding a bag of oranges and you laughed. You’d nearly been killed and you laughed at the oranges rolling down the street.” His jaw worked. “I thought about that sound for six years. When your father’s firm came looking for a merger partner, I was the one who suggested the marriage clause. I engineered this whole arrangement to be near you, Ava. And then I found a page in the prenup that said you wanted nothing from me, and I decided that was what I deserved for buying my way into your life.”

I turned him around by the shoulders.

“Roman Vale,” I said, “you are an idiot, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life telling you so-”

His phone rang.

Unknown number. He put it on speaker.

“Cousin.” Julian, warm as a fireplace. “Congratulations on the resignation letter. Very romantic. I’ll accept it Saturday, after the vote.” A pause. “Do bring Ava. I’d hate for her to miss her own anniversary.”

Click.

Roman looked at me.

Saturday. Four days.

The night I die.