I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 12

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 12

I told him on the terrace at two in the morning.

All of it. The divorce papers. The foyer. The way my heart had stuttered and quit. Julian patting my hair. And my husband on his knees in a five-thousand-dollar suit, begging a dead woman not to leave him alone

in that house.

“I heard you,” I said. “That’s the whole insane truth, Roman. I heard you say it and then I woke up thirty days

earlier with your voice still in my head.”

I braced for the look. The she’s had a psychotic break look. The gentle hand on the arm, the discreet call

to a doctor.

Roman didn’t move for a long moment.

Then he said, very quietly: “What did I say?”

“Roman-”

“What did I say, Ava.”

“You said, ‘Six years I loved you from the other side of a hallway because you asked me to.” My voice. broke in half. “You said, ‘Please don’t leave me alone in this house. You said ‘I love you’ three times and I couldn’t say it back because I was already-”

He crossed the terrace and pulled me into him so hard the air went out of me.

He was shaking. My unshakeable husband, the Glass King, had his face in my hair and was coming apart

at the seams.

“I dreamed it,” he said into my neck.

I went rigid. “What?”

“Three weeks ago. Before Hartwell. Before any of it.” His arms tightened. “I dreamed you were on the foyer floor and I couldn’t make your heart start, and I woke up at four in the morning and got dressed and stood outside your door for an hour like a lunatic.” He pulled back. His eyes were red-rimmed and wrecked. “The next day I sent

hairbrush to a lab. I couldn’t have told you why. I’ve never been able to tell you why.”

The city hummed under us, eleven million people, none of them us.

“Then it was real,” whispered.

“It was real.”

“Roman-” My throat closed, “I wasted it. The first one. I spent six years three rooms away from you, googling how to make you want me, and I filed divorce papers because I was too proud to walk down one hallway and ask-”

“Stop.”

“I wasted six years of you-‘

“Ava.” He took my face in both hands. “You came back. Do you understand what that means to me? Some version of you died in this building and the universe offered you an exit and you came back into the house with the man who killed you in it.” His thumbs brushed under my eyes. “You didn’t waste anything. You spent

On me.”
And then my husband, who had kept my grocery lists in a locked drawer for six years, said:

“Say it now. He’s in a cell. The clause is void. There’s nothing left in me you don’t know.”

The wind came off the harbor. I thought about a girl on Amsterdam Avenue with a bag of oranges, and a boy with a torn shoulder who never told her his name, and six years of a marriage built on the wrong ream of paper.

“I love you,” I said. “Not because you saved me. Not because I died and got a do-over. I loved you on a Tuesday three years ago when you left the hall light on for me and pretended you hadn’t. I loved you when I was crying at Costco.” I laughed, and it came out as a sob. “I have loved you the entire time, Roman, and

want six hundred more years of it, and I want to start tonight.”

He kissed me.

And somewhere behind us, in the doorway, Sloane Marsh said, “Oh, thank God,” and my mother said, “Finally,” and Nina Reyes burst into tears, and Beau Kingsley said, “Wait, is this a bad time to mention the app?”

Roman didn’t stop kissing me.

He just reached back, found the door, and shut it in all of their faces.