Chapter 2: Ten O'Clock

Isadora’s phone screamed at 9:14 a.m.

Not a normal alert. The calendar notification she had set herself, red and flashing: MEETING — OSSORIO TOWER — 10 AM — DO NOT BE LATE.

She shot upright, heart slamming before her eyes even focused. The other side of the bed was empty, sheets cold. Rafael was already gone.

Forty-six minutes. She had forty-six minutes to get across Madrid, and she still did not know why she needed to.

She grabbed her phone, scrolling for a text, an explanation, anything. Nothing. Just his last message from an hour ago: Don’t forget. 10AM sharp.

Her hands were shaking as she pulled her dress off the chair. She thought about last night, the way he had pulled her against him in the dark, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world. The way he kissed her forehead afterward and murmured against her skin, “Meet me at the office tomorrow. Ten in the morning.”

“Why?” she had asked, still catching her breath.

“Something important.” That was all. He kissed her once more, slow and certain, then pulled her against his chest and closed his eyes like the conversation was finished.

She did not argue. She never argued with Rafael. She waited, and eventually he told her what he wanted her to know — nothing more, nothing less.

But something about the way he said was important had sat wrong in her stomach all night. Not urgent. Not excited. Careful. Like a man rehearsing a sentence before he had to say it out loud.

Forty-three minutes later, the glass doors of Ossorio Tower slid open before her.

The Ossorio Tower doors opened at 9:58.

Two minutes to spare.

Inside the executive floor, her heels echoed down the marble hallway, past the skyline photographs, past Marco’s empty desk, straight to Rafael’s office.

He was standing at the window when she walked in, hands in his pockets, back to her. Not sitting behind his desk like he usually did when they discussed anything remotely business-shaped. Standing. Waiting.

“You’re here,” he said, without turning around.

“You told me ten sharp. I do not do late.” She set her bag down, scanning the room. No assistant, no laptop open, no charts on the table. Just him, and a folder sitting square in the center of his desk.

“Rafael, you are scaring me a little. What is going on?”

“Sit down, Isadora.”

“I would rather stand.”

A pause. He nodded, like he expected that answer. “All right.”

He walked to the desk and opened the folder. Slid it toward her — not shoved, not thrown, placed, carefully, the way you set down something you have thought about for a long time.

She looked down. Legal paper. Her name at the top. His name beneath it.

“PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE.”

The room tilted slightly.

“What is this?”

“You know what it is.” His voice was quiet. Not cold, that was the strange part. Not the flat or the sharp tone he used in board meetings. Just quiet. Careful. Like he was handling something breakable. “The contract expires this week. You knew that when you signed it three years ago.”

“I know the contract expired.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “I did not know you already had papers drawn up before I even had coffee this morning.”

“I wanted you to hear it from me. Not from a lawyer’s letter.” He met her eyes and held them, which was somehow worse than if he had looked away. “I am not going to make you sign this, Isadora. I know what we have been to each other the last three years was not just paper. I am not pretending it was.”

Her throat tightened. “Then why—”

“Because it has to end. Because it was always going to end, and every day past this week makes it harder for both of us.” He exhaled, and for a second, just a second, something cracked in his composure. “I need you to sign it. Today. I would not ask if I had another way.”

“Another way from what?” She stepped closer, searching his face for the thing he was not saying. “Rafael, if you tell me why, maybe I could—”

“Isadora.” Just her name. He always said it like it cost him something. She used to think that meant he cared. Now, staring at a folder with her married name printed in black ink, she was not sure what it meant at all.

She thought about the medicine bottle in her purse, the one his assistant refilled every month without being asked. She thought about the way he rearranged the whole dining table if the sun hit her eyes wrong, the night her father almost died and he sat on the edge of their bed until she stopped shaking.

None of that was in the folder.

“Tell me it was not real,” she said. “Any of it. Just tell me, and I will sign right now.”

For half a second, something moved behind his eyes.

The door opened before he could answer.

“Oh — sorry.” A woman’s voice, warm and unbothered, like she belonged in the room more than Isadora did. “I did not realize you were in a meeting.”

Isadora turned — and the room seemed to hold its breath.

The woman standing in the doorway had dark hair loose over one shoulder, a coat draped over her arm like she had just stepped out of somewhere important. And her face —

Isadora’s stomach dropped.

It was almost identical. The woman’s jaw sat sharper, her brows a shade darker, her posture carried a confidence Isadora had never once managed to fake. But the eyes. The pale grey of them. The exact tilt of the mouth right before it decided to smile. The same faint crease between the eyebrows that Isadora saw in every mirror she had ever owned.

The woman had gone still too. Her gaze moved over Isadora slowly, staring, and something flickered across her face — not recognition exactly, but the ghost of it. Confusion dressed up as politeness.

“I am sorry,” the woman said again, slower this time, “have we met?”

“I do not think so.” Isadora’s voice came out thinner than she wanted.

Neither of them moved. For one absurd, suspended second, it felt like looking into a mirror that had aged differently, lived differently, a version of her own face wearing someone else’s certainty.

“Rosalind.” Rafael’s calm cracked for the first time all morning. “You are early.”

“Am I?” Rosalind blinked, pulling her eyes away from Isadora like it took effort. “You told me ten thirty.”

“I said Thursday.”

“Did you?” A soft laugh, though it landed unsteady. “You always mix up the days when you are stressed. Have you eaten? You get those headaches when you skip breakfast, and then you refuse to admit it until someone forces aspirin down your throat.”

Isadora’s stomach turned to ice and it had nothing to do with the aspirin this time.

He hates admitting when something is wrong. Someone has to catch it before he pretends everything is fine. That was what she had told Rafael’s assistant Marco, months ago, the first time she noticed the pattern. She thought she had discovered something about him. Something private. Something hers.

A moment later, Marco appeared in the doorway holding a cup of water and two white pills, exactly as Rosalind had instructed earlier.

He held them out. Not to Isadora. To Rosalind, who took them without looking and passed them to Rafael like it was choreography rehearsed a thousand times before this morning, before Isadora, before any of it.

“Thank you,” Rafael murmured, swallowing them dry.

Isadora watched the exchange happen in under four seconds. Nobody explained. Nobody needed to.

“You carry his aspirin?” she asked quietly. “In your bag? Already counted out.”

Rosalind’s eyes cut back to her, and for a moment the resemblance was unbearable again — two women observing each other across a room, both looking for an answer neither of them had. “Habit,” she said, not unkindly. “Old habit.”

“How old?”

Rafael’s eyes closed briefly. “Isadora—”

“I am not asking you to shout this time.” She picked up the pen from beside the folder. Her hand was steadier now than it had any right to be. “You wanted my signature. Here it is.”

She signed her name across the last page. Ossorio. The name she carried for three years, written for the final time.

Then she slid the ring from her finger and set it on the folder, careful not to let it roll.

“There,” she said. “You’re free.”

Without waiting for another word, she walked past Rosalind on her way out, close enough to catch her perfume— warm, familiar, like it already belonged in this office, in this life she was leaving behind. Close enough, too, to see the fine details up close: the same shape of the ears, the same small scar-like mole behind the left one that Isadora had always assumed was hers alone.

Rosalind was staring at her back as she walked away. Isadora could feel it.

Outside the office, the elevator was already waiting.

She stepped inside and turned, some small, stupid part of her still hoping he followed.

He had not moved. He was watching her  not Rosalind, not the folder, but her — with an expression caught between relief and regret.

The doors began to close.

And then she heard Rosalind’s voice, pitched just low enough that Isadora did not think she was meant to catch it at all.

“Now that she’s gone… Can we finally tell her the truth about her us?”

The doors sealed shut before she heard Rafael answer.