Chapter 3: Five Days

Alexander picked up on the third ring.

Regina didn't look away. She had promised herself she wouldn't.

"Evelyn." His voice changed the moment he said her name — not dramatically, just softer. The ease of a man who never had to choose his words carefully with her.

That was what hurt most. Not the late nights. Not the missed calls. The fact that he was effortless with her.

"Alexander, the doctors want to run more tests." Evelyn's voice traveled clearly across the table, thin and unsteady. "They want me to stay overnight and I can't be here alone. I need you to come."

"What did they say exactly?"

"That they need to monitor me. Please, Alexander. I'm scared."

Regina picked up her wine glass and finally drank from it.

Alexander stood and turned slightly away — not fully, just enough to suggest privacy in a room that no longer had any left.

"I'll send someone—"

"I don't want someone." Evelyn's voice dropped. "I want you."

Silence.

Regina set the glass down and straightened the edge of the divorce papers with one finger, the way you straighten something that is already straight, just to give your hands somewhere to go.

"I'll call you back," Alexander said, and ended the call before she could answer.

The room settled.

"You should go," Regina said.

"We're not finished."

"We've been finished a long time." She looked at him directly. "We're just the last two people to say it out loud."

He sat back down. She hadn't expected that.

"Rosalie was my fiancée." He said it plainly, the way people speak of things they've turned over so many times the sharp edges are gone. "Four years together. I was going to marry her. Six years ago there was a fire. She didn't make it out."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not telling you for sympathy. You asked, and you've been patient enough to deserve a real answer." He looked at the table, not at her. "And because I've spent three years giving you everything except honesty, and I know what that's done to you."

Regina studied his face. He wasn't managing her. He was simply telling the truth, and somehow that was harder to receive than any argument they'd ever had.

"Did I remind you of her?"

He didn't answer right away. The pause was its own answer.

"Yes."

She had already suspected it — had known it, even, the night she found the letter. But knowing something and hearing it said plainly across your own dinner table were two different things entirely.

Her fingers brushed the edge of her handbag, resting against the chair leg. Inside it sat an envelope she had carried all evening, certain that tonight would be the night she opened it with him beside her. She left it exactly where it was.

"How much?"

"The first time I saw you, I stopped moving for a moment." He met her eyes. "It frightened me."

"But you married me anyway."

"I married you because you weren't her." Something moved across his face. "You were steadier. Quieter. You made everything around you feel like it could hold still. I told myself that was reason enough."

"Was it?"

"I don't know." He said it without hiding behind it. "I never learned how to separate what I felt for you from what I lost with her. I still don't know how."

"What was she like?" Regina asked, surprising herself with the question.

Alexander considered it for a moment, like he hadn't expected to be asked something so simple after everything else.

"Loud," he said. "In a good way. She filled a room without trying. She never let me get away with hiding behind my father's name." A small, unwilling smile touched his mouth. "You're quieter than she was. But you do the same thing in your own way. You see straight through whatever I try to put up."

"That's not exactly a compliment."

"It's the truest thing I know about either of you."

Regina looked down at the table for a moment, turning that over. It should have hurt, hearing him compare them so easily. Strangely, it didn't. It felt like the first honest thing he had ever told her about who Rosalie really was, instead of just a name attached to grief.

"I wasn't losing you to Evelyn," Regina said quietly. "I was losing you to a woman who's been dead for six years. There's no competing with that, Alexander. You cannot love someone back from a grief that's already become part of who they are."

He said nothing. But something shifted in his face — not the practiced blankness she'd learned to read over three years, but something rawer. The look of a man hearing the truth about himself for the first time and finding he had no argument left against it.

She reached for the pen beside the papers.

"Don't." His voice came out rough — nothing like the tone he used in boardrooms.

"Don't what?"

"Sign it tonight." His eyes hadn't moved from her hand. "Not like this. Not because of her."

"Then because of what?"

"Give me five days." He said it the way he negotiated everything else in his life — except his hand, when it finally covered hers on the table, was not steady at all. "If nothing has changed by Friday, sign it. I won't stop you."

Regina looked down at his hand over hers. Three years of marriage, and she could count on one hand the number of times he had reached for her first.

"Why does it matter now?" she asked. "It didn't matter for three years."

"Because for three years I told myself I had time." His grip tightened slightly. "Tonight you proved I didn't."

She should have pulled her hand away. She had every reason to. Instead she let it stay a moment longer than she meant to — and hated herself a little for it.

"Five days," she said finally. "And I want the truth. All of it. Not just her name."

"All of it," he agreed.

Outside, the rain had not stopped.

Neither of them noticed.