CHAPTER SIX TITLE: THE CALL AT DAWN

The light switch clicking off should have told me everything. It should have been enough to make me turn around, walk back to my room, and let the rest of the night die where it belonged.

Instead, my hand finally found the door.

I pushed it open slowly, my breath caught somewhere between my chest and my throat, bracing myself for whatever I might see.

But the room was empty.

The bed was untouched, the covers still perfectly made. A single lamp glowed faintly in the corner, the only light left on. There was no Lucas. No Sophia. Just an open window, curtains drifting lazily in the night breeze, and the faint sound of voices drifting up from somewhere below.

The balcony.

I crossed the room quietly, my bare feet silent against the cold marble floor, and stepped toward the window. Down in the garden, half-hidden beneath the old oak tree Lucas' grandmother had planted decades ago, I could see them. Sophia stood close to him, her hand resting lightly against his chest, her face tilted up toward his like she was waiting for something.

Lucas wasn't pulling away.

He wasn't pulling her closer either but he wasn't stepping back, and right now, that felt like the same thing.

"Do you remember this spot?" Sophia's voice floated up faintly on the wind, soft and wistful. "You used to say this was the only place in this whole house where you could actually breathe."

"Sophia"

"I'm not asking for anything, Lucas." She looked down, and even from this distance, I could see the practiced tremble in her shoulders. "I just needed a few minutes. Away from everyone watching us. Away from all of it."

I gripped the edge of the curtain so hard my knuckles turned white.

Away from everyone watching us. As if I were some kind of intrusion into a love story that had already been written long before I existed. As if this house, this marriage, this entire life I had spent three years building brick by brick was nothing but a set they were both waiting to walk off of.

I should have said something. I should have opened that window wider and asked exactly what kind of wiring problem brought them both out to a garden at one in the morning.

But I didn't.

I stepped back from the window instead, my chest tight, my eyes burning with tears I refused to let fall. Not for her. Not for him. Not tonight.

I walked back through Sophia's empty room, closed the door quietly behind me, and returned to my own, to the bed I had shared with a husband who was currently standing under a tree with another woman, telling her she was the only place he could breathe.

I didn't cry. I had promised myself I was done crying over Lucas Ashford.

Instead, I sat at the edge of the bed and stared at the locked drawer across the room. My countdown notebook was in there, waiting. One hundred and seventy-nine days left now. I almost laughed at the timing.

Sleep never came. I lay awake until the first gray light of dawn crept through the curtains, listening for the sound of the bedroom door, for Lucas' footsteps returning. They never did. Sometime near five in the morning, I finally gave up waiting and got out of bed.

The house was silent at that hour, the kind of silence that belonged only to the earliest part of morning before the staff arrived and the family woke. I made my way downstairs, telling myself I needed coffee, needed something to do with my hands that wasn't waiting.

But somehow my feet carried me instead toward Lucas' private office.

I don't know why I went there. Maybe some part of me wanted proof of something I already knew but hadn't let myself admit. Maybe I just wanted to feel close to whatever version of him existed before Sophia came back and rearranged everything I thought I understood about my marriage.

The door was unlocked. Lucas rarely locked it he trusted the house, trusted his family, trusted that no one would dare go through his things. I hesitated in the doorway for a long moment, my hand resting against the frame.

This is wrong, I told myself. Turn around.

I didn't listen.

The office smelled like him cedar and expensive cologne, the same scent that used to comfort me in the early days of our marriage, back when I still believed comfort was something he was capable of giving me. Moonlight spilled through the tall windows, catching on the edges of his desk, his bookshelves, the framed photos of the company's skyline projects.

I wasn't looking for anything specific. I told myself that, even as my fingers trailed along the edge of his desk, even as I opened the top drawer out of nothing but restless curiosity.

Pens. Business cards. A spare set of keys.

Nothing.

I almost closed it and walked away. I almost let this be the end of it one more sleepless night, one more thing I chose not to see.

But then my eyes caught the corner of something tucked beneath a stack of files in the bottom drawer. A worn leather notebook, its cover soft and cracked with age, nothing like the sleek modern planners Lucas usually kept.

My hands were shaking slightly as I lifted it out.

The moment I opened it, I understood why he kept it hidden.

The first page held a sketch a house, hand-drawn in careful, deliberate lines. A wraparound porch. Large windows facing what looked like a garden. Underneath, in handwriting I recognized instantly as Lucas', were the words: Our home. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere just for us.

I turned the page, my heart pounding harder with every line.

Names. Children's names, written and crossed out and rewritten, like he'd spent hours deciding. Sophia written beside each one, small hearts drawn in the margins the way teenagers doodled in the backs of their notebooks.

Honeymoon plans. A list of cities Paris, Santorini, Kyoto with notes beside each one about the best time of year to visit, the best hotels, things she would love.

Page after page of a future Lucas had built in his mind long before I ever became Mrs. Ashford. A future with a house I would never live in, with children whose names had already been chosen by two people who weren't me, with a honeymoon to cities I'd never been invited to dream about.

Not one page mentioned me. Not one line, not one crossed-out name, not one small careless heart.

Three years of marriage, and I had never existed anywhere in the private corners of my own husband's mind.

I don't know how long I sat there on the floor of his office, that notebook open in my lap, before I heard footsteps in the hallway outside.

Fast ones. Familiar ones.

I barely had time to shove the notebook back into the drawer and push it shut before the office door swung open and Lucas stepped inside, his shirt still half unbuttoned from the night before, his hair disheveled, his expression unreadable in the low light.

He froze the moment he saw me sitting there.

"Emma." His voice was careful, too careful. "What are you doing in here?"

"Couldn't sleep," I said, forcing my voice steady even though my hands were still trembling in my lap. "I came down for coffee. I must have wandered in without thinking."

It wasn't even a good lie, and from the way his eyes flicked briefly toward the bottom drawer just for a fraction of a second, just long enough for me to notice I knew he didn't believe me either.

"You've been gone all night," I said instead, before he could ask anything further. "The wiring problem take that long to fix?"

Something shifted behind his eyes. Guilt, maybe. Or something closer to panic.

"Emma, it's not what you think."

"Then what is it?" I stood slowly, my legs unsteady beneath me, my eyes never leaving his face. "Because from where I was standing, it looked like you two were having a very quiet, very private conversation under a tree at one in the morning."

His jaw tightened. "You were watching us?"

"I went looking for my husband," I said. "I didn't expect to find him standing somewhere he clearly didn't want to be found."

For a long moment, neither of us said anything. The silence between us stretched thin and sharp, the kind that felt like it could shatter with one wrong word.

Then Lucas' phone, still in his pocket, began to buzz.

He hesitated, glancing down at it, and something in his expression changed the instant he read the screen the same look he'd had the night before when he thought Sophia was in danger.

"It's Victor," he said quietly, already turning toward the door. "He needs me at the office. Now."

"At six in the morning?"

"Emma, I have to go."

And just like that, he was gone again, leaving me standing alone in his office with a stolen glimpse of a future that never included me and a growing certainty that whatever Victor wanted a

t six in the morning had nothing to do with business at all.