My billionaire ex-husband wants me back

Six years ago today, Damian promised to love me for the rest of his life. This morning, he left before I woke up, and I told myself that meant nothing.

His side of the bed was cold, the kind that means someone has been gone for hours. No note. No kiss on my forehead, the one he used to leave even when he had early meetings, back when he couldn’t stand the idea of me waking up alone.

Two years into our marriage, a Tuesday night, he’d come home early and found me making a mess of his mother’s shrimp recipe. He didn’t say anything. He just came up behind me, stole a shrimp straight off the pan with his fingers, and when I swatted at him he grabbed my waist and spun me around the kitchen like we were somewhere fancier than our own house, humming something off key against my ear until I was laughing too hard to be annoyed anymore.

I held onto that memory like a hand I was afraid to let go of.

Work has been insane, he’d said last week, three times, distracted, his phone lighting up his face at dinner while I talked about nothing important just to fill the quiet between us. I believed him because I wanted to. Marriage meant giving each other grace, and grace meant not counting the times.

I was in the kitchen by four thirty, waving off the chef, because this had to be mine, made by my own hands. Garlic butter shrimp, his mother’s recipe, the one thing he’d once told me tasted like the only good memory of his childhood. I packed it into his favorite container and wrote a card in my best handwriting.

Happy Anniversary, Damian. Six years and I’d choose you again.

I meant it. I needed to mean it.

The drive to Kingston Group took twenty minutes, and I spent all of them rehearsing something light to say, something that might make him laugh the way he used to before the company swallowed that part of him. My hands were sweating on the wheel.

Priya wouldn’t meet my eyes when I stepped off the elevator.

“Mrs. Kingston, maybe call first, he’s kind of…”

“It’s fine.” I was already smiling, already picturing his face. “I want to surprise him.”

I almost knocked. Then I stopped, knocking felt like asking permission to see my own husband.

I opened the door instead.

I heard him before I saw either of them, and something in my chest loosened. I’d missed that laugh. Underneath it came a woman’s, light and easy. Someone from the board, I told myself.

Celeste was the first thing I saw, her back to me, dark hair swept off one shoulder. Damian stood close behind her, closer than a conversation needed. He was helping her with something. His hands were at the back of her neck.

Then the light caught it. A teardrop diamond on a white gold chain.

I stopped breathing before I understood why.

I knew that necklace. I’d found the receipt three weeks ago, folded into his coat pocket while I was doing laundry, and I’d cried, actually cried, pressing it to my chest because my husband had remembered the one I’d pointed at in a magazine six months earlier and never mentioned again.

I had never once imagined this.

He finished the clasp. His fingers didn’t fumble once.

Only then did he look up and find me standing in the doorway.

“You’re early,” he said.

He checked his watch. A small motion, like I’d interrupted something and he was deciding how much time this would cost him.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. My ears had started ringing, a thin high sound that made the room feel like it was happening somewhere far away from me.

Celeste turned. She didn’t flinch, didn’t reach up to cover herself or the necklace, just smiled at me the way you’d smile at someone you passed in a hallway.

“Mrs. Kingston,” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

She wasn’t afraid of me.

My legs carried me across the room on their own, and I set the container on his desk because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands, and they were shaking so badly the lid rattled against the metal.

I turned to leave, and that was when the smell reached me. Sweet, floral, familiar in a way that made my chest ache before my mind caught up to why.

Celeste was wearing it.

The perfume he’d given me on our third anniversary, the one he used to press his face into my neck for and say smelled like the happiest day of his life.

I gave him one more second. I stood there and gave him the chance to take it back, even a lie I could have pretended to believe until I got to the car.

He saw exactly where I was looking.

“It smells better on her,” he said.

For a moment I didn’t feel anything at all. Then it hit, low in my chest, hard enough that I had to lock my knees to stay standing.

My throat closed around whatever I meant to say. Nothing came out. I walked past Priya’s pitying eyes and didn’t breathe right until the elevator doors shut and I was alone with my own reflection in the steel. She looked pale, arms wrapped around herself. I didn’t recognize her for a second. Then I did.

My phone buzzed before I reached the car. There would be an explanation by tonight. Six years didn’t end over a necklace. I opened it smiling, already expecting an apology, and hated how natural it felt.

Cancel dinner tonight. Something important came up.

No second message came. I set my phone on the passenger seat beside the anniversary card I’d written that morning. The ink had smudged where my fingers were still shaking.

Happy Anniversary, Damian.

Six years and I’d choose you again.