Chapter Seven: Uninvited

The penthouse looked different in daylight.

Jennifer stood in the entryway with a single suitcase at her feet, the same one she'd hastily packed the night before, staring at the floor-to-ceiling windows she'd been pressed against less than forty-eight hours ago. It felt like a different lifetime already, the version of herself who'd walked into a bar looking for oblivion and found this instead.

"Second door on the left," Carter said, not looking up from the tablet in his hand as he crossed the living room. "It's stocked with whatever the housekeeper thought a woman might need. If it's wrong, tell her, not me."

"How thoughtful," Jennifer said dryly, picking up her suitcase.

"I try."

She found the room easily enough, spacious, tastefully neutral, nothing like the stark charcoal walls of the room she'd woken up in that first morning. It didn't feel like his space. It felt, oddly, like a space built specifically to keep her at a careful distance, which she supposed made sense. Whatever this arrangement was, it wasn't that.

She'd barely set her suitcase on the bed when she heard raised voices from somewhere near the entryway.

Jennifer's stomach dropped before she even registered why. She knew that voice. She'd know it anywhere.

Gerald.

She hurried back out, rounding the corner into the living room just in time to see her ex-fiancé standing in the doorway, jaw tight, eyes blazing, while Carter blocked his path with the unhurried calm of a man who'd been expecting exactly this.

"You need an invitation to be in my home," Carter said, voice mild, almost bored. "Strange. I don't recall extending you one."

"Cut the act," Gerald snapped. "I know she's here. Marion let it slip when I called the office looking for her."

Carter's brow lifted, unbothered. "Marion should learn discretion."

"Jennifer." Gerald's gaze found her over Carter's shoulder, and something in his expression cracked, desperate and wounded in a way that might have moved her a week ago. "Please. Just talk to me. Whatever he's told you, whatever deal you think you've made, you don't understand what you're getting into with him."

"I understand perfectly," Jennifer said, crossing her arms, refusing to let herself soften. "He's saving my father's company. Something you never once offered to do, even though you knew exactly how bad things had gotten."

"I didn't know—"

"You knew," she cut in, sharper now. "I told you things were tight. You just never bothered to ask how tight, because it wasn't your problem to fix."

Gerald flinched like she'd struck him. "That's not fair."

"Neither was what you did to me," Jennifer said. "But here we are."

Carter watched the exchange with an expression Jennifer couldn't quite place, something between amusement and something sharper, more territorial, though he said nothing, letting her fight her own battle.

"You're actually going to stand there," Gerald said, voice rising, "and tell me you'd rather live with him? My uncle? The man the entire family had to erase from every photo because of what he did?"

"What he did," Carter repeated, voice going dangerously quiet for the first time. "Careful, Gerald. You don't actually know what happened ten years ago. None of you do."

"I know enough."

"You know what your mother told you." Carter's tone sharpened into something colder, something that made Jennifer's skin prickle. "There's a difference."

Gerald's jaw worked, but he said nothing, some flicker of uncertainty crossing his face before he shoved it down and turned back to Jennifer instead. "This isn't you," he said, softer now, almost pleading. "You're not someone who does things like this. Moving in with a stranger. Playing house with a man twice your age just to prove a point."

"He's not a stranger," Jennifer said. "I know him considerably better than that, actually."

Something flashed hot and furious across Gerald's face at the implication, exactly as she'd intended.

"Careful," Carter murmured, almost too low to hear, though the corner of his mouth had curved in something that looked dangerously close to approval.

"You did this to hurt me," Gerald said, voice cracking. "This whole thing, moving in with him, saving your father's company through him, it's all just some elaborate way to make me suffer."

Jennifer tilted her head, considering him with a coolness that surprised even her. "Is it working?"

Gerald's silence answered clearly enough.

"Then I'd call that a success," she said. "Now if you don't mind, I have a lot of unpacking to do."

Gerald's gaze swung between the two of them, something desperate and calculating moving behind his eyes. "This isn't over," he said finally, backing toward the door. "You'll see what he really is, Jennifer. Everyone does eventually."

"Careful," Carter said again, softer this time, almost gentle in its menace. "That sounds remarkably like a threat, Gerald. And I'd hate for you to say something you can't take back in front of a witness."

Gerald's jaw clenched, but he said nothing further, turning and disappearing through the door, letting it slam shut hard enough to rattle the frame.

Silence settled over the penthouse in his wake.

"Well," Carter said eventually, turning back to Jennifer with an unreadable expression. "That went about as well as I expected."

"You knew he'd come here."

"I suspected." Carter shrugged, unbothered. "Marion's always been fond of gossip. I assumed word would travel quickly."

Jennifer stared at him, something uneasy settling in her chest. "You used me. Just now. To get to him."

"I let you use yourself," Carter corrected, something almost gentle beneath the words. "You didn't need my help sounding like you meant every word."

She didn't have a response for that, mostly because he wasn't wrong. Every syllable she'd thrown at Gerald had come from somewhere true, somewhere she hadn't fully examined until it was already out in the open.

Carter studied her for a long moment, something shifting behind his gaze. "Go finish unpacking," he said finally, voice quieter than before. "We'll discuss the gala details over dinner."

Jennifer turned to go, but paused at the hallway, glancing back at him. "Was any of that true? What you said about ten years ago. About not knowing what really happened?"

Something flickered across Carter's face, brief and guarded, gone before she could name it.

"Ask me again sometime," he said. "

When you're ready to actually hear the answer."