The Prenup Evaluation That Ended Five Years Chapter 02

I drove us home along Riverbend Boulevard.

In the rearview mirror, my father leaned into my mother’s shoulder. Neither of them said a word. I could hear only their breathing, slow, heavy, and spent.

My mother was still clutching that cashier’s check. Five thousand dollars. Her entire retirement.

I walked them up to their apartment, then came back down and sat in the car until morning.

At first light, I drove to the office.

A scrolling announcement lit up the lobby’s digital board: we’d won the Downtown Revitalization Project.

My project. Six months of late nights. Forty-plus revisions. Every line drawn by my hand.

Sloane’s name sat at the top of the credit list. Lead designer.

My name was on the very last line.

Documentation assistant.

A cluster of interns near the front desk had been whispering. The moment they saw me, they went quiet and scattered.

The blinds in Gavin’s office were half drawn.

I pushed the door open.

Gavin was at the coffee machine, frothing low-fat milk.

Sloane was sitting behind his desk, flipping through my original design drawings like they were junk mail.

The second he spotted me, Gavin handed me a warm latte.

“Here, drink this while it’s warm. You look terrible. You’ve got dark circles. Did you sleep at all?”

He pointed to the notice board outside.

“Sloane’s firm is bidding for a massive city contract. She needs her name on a major project to boost her portfolio.”

“You’re about to be my wife. What’s mine is yours; what’s yours is mine. Why fight over whose name goes where?”

“I know exactly how much you put in. Once this wraps, I’ll take you to Maui. A few days, just us.”

Without looking up, Sloane spoke. “Miss Vale’s linework is timid. No sense of the bigger picture.” She tossed the drawings onto the desk with a slap.

“If Gavin hadn’t pulled an all-nighter fixing the structure, the reviewers wouldn’t have looked at it twice.”

“I agreed to put my name on it as a favor so you wouldn’t be out there embarrassing yourself in front of the industry.”

“So maybe try seeing this for what it is instead of making it about you?”

I looked at the latte, still steaming.

A year ago, I would’ve thrown that cup in both their faces and burned the room down.

Instead, I walked over, picked up the cup, and set it on the shelf.

“I understand.”

I turned back to my desk. Behind me, Gavin let out a quiet laugh.

He thought he’d won.

“See? I knew Tessa would come around. We’re about to be family. There’s no reason to keep score.”

He followed me out and reached to drape an arm over my shoulders.

I sidestepped him and opened my desk drawer.

A silver USB drive sat buried at the bottom.

I plugged it into my computer.

Years ago, I’d started a habit: every single draft got tagged with embedded metadata and a tamperproof timestamp.

I selected every timestamped original and dragged them onto the drive.

The progress bar crawled from one percent to a hundred.

I pulled the drive out and slipped it into my blazer pocket, pressing it tightly against my chest.