BURNT PAGE

Daniel's Pov

Fourteen hours. That was the day, start to finish, back-to-back meetings, a deal in Singapore that needed handling at three in the morning my time.

The elevator opened onto something different.

Flowers sat in a vase on the entry table that had been empty since I moved in. White and yellow, fresh enough that water still clung to the glass. The air smelled like garlic, like something warm had been cooking hours ago and hadn't fully faded yet.

I stood there a moment longer than I should have.

"You're late." Greta appeared from the kitchen, a stack of mail in her hands.

"Singapore ran long."

"Rosa's in her room." She set the mail down on the counter. "She made dinner. Saved you a plate, covered it twice so it wouldn't dry out."

"I already ate."

"Did you."

"Greta."

"I'm just making an observation, Mr. Gosling." She didn't smile, but something close to it tugged at her mouth. "The flowers were her idea too. Said the place needed color."

"It's fine the way it is."

"If you say so."

She left the mail and disappeared toward the back of the apartment. I took the plate from the refrigerator the second she was gone, ate standing at the counter alone, told myself it didn't mean anything that the food was good, that someone had clearly tried.

My office light stayed on past midnight.

James called at half past, the screen lighting up my desk before I could ignore it a third time.

"You look like hell," he said the moment I picked up, video already on.

"Thanks."

"Singapore?"

"Singapore." I rubbed both eyes with one hand. "What do you have?"

"Security flagged something an hour ago." His tone shifted, all business now. "Johansson's jet landed at Teterboro tonight."

My hand stilled on the desk. "She's not due back for another two weeks."

"Apparently she changed her mind." James pulled up something on his end, the screen reflecting in his glasses. "No official statement yet. No public appearances scheduled. She just landed and went straight to a town car."

"Where'd the car go?"

"Still tracking that part."

"Find out."

"Already on it." He paused. "There's something else."

"What."

"Word's getting around. Vegas, the marriage, all of it." His voice dropped lower. "Someone talked. I don't know who yet, but it's moving fast through the wrong circles."

My jaw tightened. "How fast."

"Fast enough that I'd start thinking about a statement before someone else writes one for you."

"Not yet."

"Daniel—"

"Not yet." I closed the laptop halfway, just enough to soften the conversation without actually ending it. "Find out what Johansson's doing in New York. That's the priority tonight."

"You sure that's the priority?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means your wife is three rooms away making you dinner, and you're sitting in your office at midnight asking me about an ex who flew home early for no reason." James leaned back, arms crossed. "Just an observation."

"Noted."

"You're impossible."

"Goodnight, James."

"You also need to talk to her before some reporter does."

I didn't answer that. He hung up first, which told me exactly how unconvinced he was.

I sat alone in the office for a long while after that, the city lights doing their usual slow crawl across the windows. The silence pressed in around me the way it always had before, except it didn't feel the same tonight. The apartment had a different shape now, a different sound underneath the quiet.

I reached into the drawer for my sketchbook without fully deciding to.

The page filled itself the way it always did when I let it. Line after line, the curve of her jaw, the way her hair fell loose when she wasn't paying attention to it, the soft stubbornness that lived permanently around her mouth. I drew until my hand ached, until the page held more of her than any photograph could have managed.

Then I looked at what I'd made.

This wasn't a sketch anymore. This was a confession in pencil, the kind of thing that gave away exactly how far gone I already was, and I had no business keeping evidence like that lying around in a house where she slept three doors down.

I picked up the desk lighter, hesitated once, then touched the flame to the corner of the page.

The paper curled black at the edges first, her jaw disappearing into ash, then her mouth, then the rest of her one line at a time. I watched the whole thing burn down to nothing in the metal tray I kept for exactly this purpose, told myself this was discipline, not cowardice.

It felt like cowardice anyway.

My phone buzzed against the desk just as the last corner of the page burned out.

A news alert. The kind that usually meant nothing, some headline about markets or weather I never bothered reading. I almost ignored it.

Then I saw the actual words on the screen.

GOSLING HEIR SECRETLY MARRIED? MYSTERY WOMAN EXPOSED.

My stomach went cold.

I opened it before I could think better of it. A grainy photo loaded first, the Las Vegas chapel sign visible in the corner, Rosa's wedding dress unmistakable even half-hidden under that borrowed jacket. Someone had been close enough to get a clear shot of both our faces.

The article speculated everything. Gold-digger. Desperate. A woman who'd seduced a billionaire days after being jilted at her own wedding, conveniently pregnant only weeks later.

None of it was true and all of it would spread anyway, because that was how this worked, because people who wanted me ruined knew exactly how to make a lie outrun the truth before the truth had even gotten its shoes on.

I called James back before I'd finished reading it.

He answered on the first ring. "You saw it."

"I saw it."

"This isn't staying contained, Daniel. It's already on four sites."

"Get legal in here first thing." I stood from the desk, walked to the window, watched the city below ignore the entire disaster unfolding three floors above its sidewalks. "I want to know who leaked this before sunrise."

"My money's on someone close to the chapel staff. Or the hotel."

"Find out which."

"And Rosa?"

I looked down the hall toward her closed door. Light off underneath it. The apartment finally quiet around both of us, the flowers still sitting in their vase by the elevator like nothing had changed in the last ten minutes.

"I'll handle Rosa," I said.

"You keep saying that."

"Because it's true."

"Sure it is." A pause, softer this time. "For what it's worth, the photo's not bad. You two look happy in it."

"That's not helpful, James."

"Wasn't trying to be helpful. Just honest."

I hung up without answering that one.

I stood at the window a long time after, phone still in my hand, the headline burning brighter in my mind than the page I'd just turned to ash.

She was going to wake up to this whether I warned her tonight or not.

I had absolutely no idea how to walk down that hallway and be the one who told her.