My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret

Roman woke up to the smell of burned coffee.He lay still for a moment, eyes on the ceiling. Isabella was moving around downstairs. Cabinets opening. Closing. Opening again.He checked his phone. 6:51 AM. He got up.She was standing at the kitchen counter in his dress shirt, hair loose, frowning at the cabinet above the coffee machine. It was the wrong cabinet. Glasses lived there."Where do you keep the coffee?" she asked.Roman walked to the counter and stood next to her. He looked at the cabinet she had open, then the one beside it, then the one across. He realized, standing there in his own kitchen, that he did not actually know.For three years, the coffee had simply been there when he came downstairs. Already made. Already the right temperature. He had picked it up and walked away without once thinking about where it came from or who had figured it out."Try the one by the window," he said. He was guessing.Isabella tried two more cabinets before she found it. A shelf near the r

Sera slept nine hours straight and woke up to the smell of bacon.Not the kind that came from a hotel kitchen or a caterer running late. Real breakfast, made by someone who knew she was home. She lay still for a moment, listening. Footsteps in the hallway, unhurried. Rosa's voice somewhere below giving quiet instructions. A door closing. The ordinary, living sounds of a house that expected her.She had forgotten what that felt like.She showered, dressed, and came downstairs to find the dining table already set. Fresh flowers in the center. The good china, not the everyday set. Orange juice in the glass pitcher her grandmother had brought from Lisbon forty years ago. Nobody had told Rosa to do any of it. She had just done it because Sera was home, and this was what home looked like."Ms. Sera." Rosa looked up from the sideboard, and her whole face shifted into the kind of smile that didn't need to announce itself. "You're back.""I'm back," Sera said.Rosa squeezed her hand once, warm

The seven o'clock meeting ran long.It always did. Roman knew this and had stopped fighting it two years ago. He showed up at six forty-five with coffee and no breakfast, same as every Thursday, and sat at the head of the conference table until the room finally cleared at nine fifteen.He went straight into a follow-up with Hartwell. Then a legal call. Then a stack of documents that had been waiting since Tuesday. Priya left a coffee on the corner of his desk sometime around ten. He drank half of it cold without noticing.At eleven-oh-four, the pressure arrived behind his left eye.It always started there. Not sharp. Just a steady push, like a thumb pressing from the inside, specific enough that he knew exactly what was building. He had thirty minutes, maybe forty, before it went from manageable to the kind of pain that made screen light feel like something physical hitting his face.He opened his desk drawer.The sticky note sat in the top left corner where he had pressed it back dow

Roman had eaten at Varro's a dozen times.It was the kind of place that stayed full without advertising itself, dark wood paneling, tables set far enough apart that conversations stayed private. His lunch was with a property developer named Gideon Marsh, a joint venture discussion Roman had not yet decided whether to pursue. Routine. He had done fifty meetings like it.He saw her four steps inside the door.Corner table, slightly removed from the main floor. Four people. Dante on her left, arms loose, posture relaxed in the specific way of someone who was never actually relaxed. A silver-haired man across from her, the kind of face that said lawyer or senior counsel, the kind of expensive suit that said he had been wearing expensive suits for thirty years. A younger man beside him, leaning forward, talking with his hands.And Sera at the center of it, laughing.Not the careful version. Not the contained, appropriate laugh she kept for rooms full of people she did not fully trust. This

The auction had been Sera's idea, which meant it ran exactly the way she wanted.She had chaired the organizing committee for six weeks, quietly, through emails and one in-person meeting where she sat at the far end of the table and let the committee director think he was running things until the last twenty minutes. Then she restructured the entire budget in four decisions and smiled when he said it was a good idea.The Harwick ballroom held three hundred guests. Eighteen auction lots. A dinner program she had timed to the minute, because programs that ran over made people restless and restless people bid less.She had been here for two hours before the room filled.She moved through it the way she moved through any room she had prepared for, which was without effort, because the effort had already happened. She knew which donors needed to feel personally seen before they would open their checkbooks. She knew which table had the difficult personality and who at that table handled him