The ride home

*Alexandria's POV*

The drive back was quiet.

Not the usual quiet — the kind Jamie manufactured deliberately, that particular silence he used like a tool to remind you that he was thinking about something more important than you. This was different. Unsettled. Like neither of us knew what the air between us was supposed to be doing now.

I watched the Strip blur past the window. All that light, all that noise, all those people convinced that Las Vegas owed them something wonderful tonight. I used to feel that way about this city when we first moved here. I used to think the energy of it meant something. Now it just looked like a lot of electricity refusing to turn off.

Jamie's hand was on the center console between us. Not reaching for me. Just resting there, open, which for Jamie was practically a declaration.

I looked at it and looked away.

"The article," he said. We were almost home. "The one about infrastructure. When did you write it?"

"Seven months ago."

He absorbed that. "Before or after you started the account?"

"After."

Another silence. The city lights were thinning out as we turned into our neighborhood, the chaos of the Strip giving way to the wide, quiet streets of the kind of wealth that didn't need to announce itself.

"I want to ask you something," he said. "And I need you to actually answer it."

I kept my eyes on the window. "You can ask."

"Were you happy? Ever. In this marriage. Was there a point where you were actually happy and I missed it, or was it—" He stopped. Started again. "Was it always like this for you?"

The question landed somewhere soft and unexpected. I hadn't prepared for that one.

I thought about the early days. The wedding, which had been quiet and small because Jamie didn't want a spectacle — or maybe because he didn't want to perform joy he didn't feel, I was never sure which. The first apartment before the penthouse, smaller, less curated. There had been a morning once, maybe six weeks in, where he'd come into the kitchen and I was making eggs and he'd stood behind me and rested his chin on the top of my head without saying anything and I had been so stupidly happy in that moment that I'd burnt the eggs and he'd eaten them anyway without complaining.

That was probably the peak of it.

"There were moments," I said carefully. "Early on. Small ones."

"And then?"

"And then the miscarriage happened and you didn't know how to be there for that and neither of us recovered from it properly and everything just." I pressed my lips together. "Calcified."

He didn't say anything for a while. The car pulled through the gate and up the drive and stopped. The driver got out to open the doors but Jamie held up a hand and the man stayed where he was.

We sat in the parked car in the dark.

"I didn't know what to do," he said finally. "After the miscarriage. I know that's not an excuse. But I genuinely didn't know how to—" His voice was doing something strange, controlled on the surface with something pressurized underneath. "I shut down. I know I did. I didn't know how to hold that kind of grief so I just. Didn't."

"You went back to work three days later," I said. Not accusatory. Just a fact that had lived in my chest for years and finally had somewhere to go.

"I know."

"I was still bleeding, Jamie."

The words sat in the car between us and didn't go anywhere.

"I know," he said again, and this time it came out quieter, stripped of the composure he'd been maintaining all evening. "I know. And I have known that was wrong every day since and I didn't know how to say it so I just kept not saying it."

I turned to look at him then. Properly. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield at the front of the house, both hands in his lap now, and he looked like a man carrying something very heavy in a way that had become so normal to him he'd forgotten it was heavy.

I had spent five years being furious at this man. I had spent five years building a case against him, cataloging every slight and every cold morning and every moment he'd made me feel like furniture. And the case was solid. The case was airtight. Every single item in it was real and valid and deserved.

And still.

"Why didn't you just let me go this morning?" I asked.

He turned his head. 

"Because I don't want a house," he said. "I don't want a PA or a brand asset or an accessory. I know that's what I've been treating you like. I know that. But that's not—" He exhaled through his nose. "That's not what you are to me. In here." He touched his chest once, briefly, like he was embarrassed by the gesture. "In here it has never been that simple and I have done a catastrophic job of making that visible."

I looked at his hand against his chest and I felt something move in me that I immediately tried to hold still.

"This doesn't fix it," I said. For the third time today. Because apparently it needed to be said that many times.

"I'm not trying to fix it tonight."

"Then what are you trying to do?"

He looked at me with those blue eyes that I had been so sex s ex s reading wrong or not at all for years. "I'm trying to give you a reason to still be here tomorrow."

The driver was still standing motionless outside the car, professional and patient, pretending not to exist.

I reached for the door handle.

"I'm still angry," I said.

"I know."

"And I haven't decided anything."

"I know that too."

I opened the door and stepped out into the warm Vegas night. I heard him get out on his side. We walked to the front door in silence, not touching, not performing anything for anyone.

Inside, my suitcase was still in the guest room where I'd left it. Packed. Ready.

I went upstairs without saying goodnight.

He didn't ask me to.

But when I passed the top of the stairs I heard him, quietly, to nobody in particular, say something I almost convinced myself I'd imagined.

"I'm sorry, Alexandria."

First time. Five years. 

I kept walking.

But I didn't sleep for a long time after that.