I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 10

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 10

The Vale Foundation Gala is two hundred of New York’s sharpest people in one glass atrium, eating tiny food off silver trays while the shareholder vote happens upstairs at ten.

Last time, I died at 11:52 p.m.

This time, I arrived at eight in the green dress, with Roman’s hand at the small of my back and a pouch of

activated charcoal in my clutch like a total maniac.

“Comms check,” Sloane said in my ear, from somewhere behind a canapé tray. “Wife, say something.”

“I feel like I’m wearing a wire to my own funeral.”

“Mm. Relatable. Husband?”

“Copy,” Roman murmured, not moving his lips, smiling at a senator.

Here was the plan, and it was a bad plan, and I knew it was a bad plan:

Julian’s dose was already in the house. It had to be. In my old life, whatever finished me was in something I ate or drank that night, and his people had been prepping this room for eleven hours. We couldn’t find it in

time. We couldn’t stop it.

So we weren’t going to stop it. We were going to accept it.

Nina had already told him the capsules were working beautifully. Julian believed I had a heart three weeks

from failure. He believed his cousin was a beaten man with a resignation letter in a drawer. He believed the

vote at ten was a coronation.

All we needed was for him to say one true sentence out loud.

“There he is,” Roman said.

Julian crossed the floor in steel gray, silver tie pin, smile like a door opening onto nothing. He kissed my hand. His lips were dry and cool and I thought about them touching my hair while I stopped breathing.

“Ava. Six years!” He beamed. “You look” a flicker, a scan, checking his investment “-radiant.”

“I feel incredible,” I said. “Truly. Never better.”

Something passed behind his eyes. Recalculation.

“Wonderful,” he said. “A toast, then. Before the vote.” He lifted two flutes from a passing tray-not Sloane’s tray; a waiter I didn’t know, who did not make eye contact with anyone-and pressed one into my hand. “To six years of marriage. However they end.”

The glass was cold in my fingers.

In my earpiece, Sloane said, very quietly: “That waiter isn’t on the staff list.”

I looked at the champagne. Beads of it climbing the crystal.

I looked at Julian, watching me with the patient pleasantness of man who has done this before and expects it to work.

And I thought about the marble floor. About Roman’s tears hitting my cheek. About six years of a locked drawer full of grocery lists.

Roman’s hand tightened on my back-don’t-and I felt his whole body go rigid with the knowledge that if he lunged now, if he knocked the glass out of my hand in front of two hundred people, we’d have nothing. A scene. A rumor. A man who’d get to try again next month, and the month after, forever.

I smiled at my murderer.

“To six years,” I said.

And I drank it.

All of it.

Roman made a sound beside me that no one else heard.

Julian’s face did something extraordinary. For one unguarded half-second, before the mask came down, it opened with pure, greedy, animal delight.

“Attagirl,” he said softly.

I set the empty glass on the tray, dabbed my mouth, and leaned in like I was sharing a secret.

“Julian,” I whispered. “Do you know what the funny thing is?”

“Mm?”

“I’ve done this before.”

And then the room tilted, the lights smeared, and I felt my knees let go.

The last thing I heard before the marble came up to meet me was two hundred people gasping at once-

-and my husband screaming my name.