Chapter Nine: What He Already Knows

Elena's 

Damian stepped out of the car himself.

I hadn't expected that. I'd braced for Whitmore, for some anonymous man in a suit asking careful questions on someone else's behalf. Instead I got my ex-husband, tailored and composed, closing the car door behind him with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never once doubted he had the right to be exactly where he was standing.

"Elena." He said my name like a question he already knew the answer to. "I heard you were in my building."

Marcus stepped half a pace closer to me, and I felt the shift in him, the lawyer's instinct to interpose himself between a client and a threat.

"It's still technically my building too, isn't it," I said, keeping my voice level. "For another few weeks, at least, according to your own legal team."

Something flickered across Damian's face, not quite a smile. "Fair enough. Though I have to say, I'm curious what brought you here so soon after the divorce announcement. Most people in your position would want distance. You seem to be moving closer."

"I came to collect some things from your office. Grant can confirm it."

"I'm sure he can," Damian said, and the way he said it told me he already suspected the confirmation would be manufactured, a courtesy extended rather than a fact reported. "Grant's very good at confirming whatever needs confirming, when it's asked of him nicely enough."

Marcus's jaw tightened beside me. "Is there a reason you're standing in a parking lot instead of asking your assistant to have her belongings sent over, Damian? That seems like the more efficient use of everyone's time."

Damian's eyes moved to Marcus, assessing, dismissive in that particular way he'd always reserved for people he considered beneath his direct attention. "Marcus. Still playing bodyguard, I see."

"Still watching out for my sister. Same as always."

"Admirable." Damian's attention slid back to me, and something in his expression shifted, sharpened, the casual pretense falling away all at once. "I'll get to the point, Elena, since we're all apparently too important for small talk. You've been unusually calm since the announcement. I noticed it that night, and I've been unable to stop noticing it since. Calm doesn't concern me by itself. What concerns me is when I can't identify where it's coming from."

"Maybe I'm simply relieved," I said. "You did end a marriage I'd been unhappy in for longer than either of us wants to admit."

"Maybe." He studied me for a moment, and I made myself hold perfectly still under it, the same stillness I'd practiced in that ballroom two nights ago. "Or maybe you've found something else to occupy your attention. Something that makes the divorce feel almost incidental."

My pulse spiked, but I kept my face exactly where I wanted it.

"What are you actually asking me, Damian?"

He smiled then, thin and without warmth, and reached into his jacket pocket for his phone, scrolling briefly before turning the screen slightly toward me, not quite showing it, just enough to let me understand he had something there worth showing.

"St. Agatha's Hospice," he said. "Every Thursday, for years. Long before the divorce. Long before, from what I can tell, you had any obvious reason to be spending that much time somewhere like that."

The ground felt like it tilted slightly beneath me.

"I volunteer there," I said, and was proud, distantly, of how steady the words came out. "I have for years. It's not a secret, Damian. You came with me twice yourself, early in the marriage. You sat with a patient there for an hour and charmed her thoroughly, if I recall."

"I remember." Something almost wistful crossed his face for half a second before it hardened again. "I also remember you never once mentioned continuing those visits after things between us started to change. You kept that part of your life very quiet, Elena, for someone with nothing to hide."

"It wasn't hidden. It simply wasn't something you asked about." I let a sharper edge into my voice now, something closer to the anger I'd been suppressing since the ballroom. "You stopped asking me about most things, Damian, somewhere around year two. I didn't realize volunteering at a hospice needed a press release to remain legitimate."

Marcus's hand found my arm, a small, steadying pressure, a silent reminder not to give him more than I needed to.

Damian's eyes narrowed slightly, some careful recalibration happening behind them. "There's a patient there. Elderly woman. Long-term resident, terminal, from what my information tells me. You've visited her more frequently in the last month than in the entire year before it. That's not the pattern of routine volunteering, Elena. That's the pattern of someone who's found something worth staying close to."

"She's dying, Damian." My voice cracked slightly, and I let it, because the grief underneath it was entirely real even if the reason I was showing it wasn't the one he assumed. "She's been my friend for five years. I'm sorry if the idea of someone visiting a dying friend more often as she gets closer to the end doesn't fit neatly into whatever theory you're building, but that's simply what happens when someone you love is running out of time."

For a moment, something in his face genuinely wavered, some old, buried instinct toward decency flickering behind the calculation.

"I'm sorry," he said, and it almost sounded real. "Genuinely. I don't wish that on you, whatever else is true between us."

"Then stop having me followed."

The softness vanished as quickly as it had appeared. "I can't do that, Elena. Not until I understand what it is I'm actually looking at. You have to understand my position. I ended things publicly, cleanly, on my terms, and now you're circling the edges of my company and my life with a calm I've never once seen from you before, and a private investigator I hired specifically to find nothing has instead found a pattern I don't yet understand. I don't like patterns I don't understand. Surely you remember that much about me, at least."

"I remember everything about you," I said quietly. "That's rather the problem, isn't it."

Something passed between us then, brief and unguarded, five years of a shared life compressed into a single look neither of us seemed willing to name out loud.

Marcus broke it first. "We're leaving now, Damian. Unless you have an actual legal reason to detain her, in which case I'd be delighted to hear it in front of a judge instead of a parking lot."

Damian's gaze held mine a moment longer before he finally stepped back, gesturing toward the car with a small, mocking flourish. "Go, then. But Elena." He waited until I'd half-turned away before he said it, low enough that only the two of us could hear. "Whatever this is. Whatever you're building so carefully and so calmly. I will find out what it is. I always do."

"I know," I said, and meant it as both a warning and a confession, and didn't look back to see how he took it.

We were three blocks away before Marcus finally spoke, his hands tight on the wheel, his voice low with something between fury and fear.

"He knows about the hospice, Elena. That's not nothing. That's a thread, and if he pulls it hard enough..."

"He won't find Agnes's confession sitting in a filing cabinet, Marcus. He'll find an old woman I love, dying, and a lot of Thursdays. That's all he has right now."

"For now," Marcus said. "But he just told you himself. He always finds out. And Elena, I don't think that was a threat. I think that was a promise."