LOGINI found the lie on a Tuesday. Five thousand dollars. Every month. Going to a woman with my husband's last name. When Flynn came home and saw me sitting on the office floor surrounded by bank statements, he didn't even try to deny it. He just stood there and told me he couldn't explain. Three years of marriage and all I got was “I can't”. So I left. Three months later I met Dominic. Flynn's biggest business rival. Charming, warm, patient in all the ways Flynn never was. He made me laugh for the first time in months. He made me feel like myself again. He felt like the right choice. Except he wasn't. Now I'm pregnant, furious, and standing in the middle of two men who both claim they love me. They're both asking me to trust them. But they both already broke that trust.
View MoreARIA'S POVWe sat across from each other and didn't move, the radiator did what it always did at this hour and neither of us said anything until the sound faded.Then I said: "Tell me the rest."He looked at me."Aria-""The rest, Dominic," I said. "All of it. In order."Something shifted in his face. Not the warmth dropping exactly. More like a man who had been holding something for a long time and understood, looking at me now, that the holding was finished. That I was not going to accept anything less than the full sequence and he could see this and there was nothing left to manage.He told me.He started with Isabella. The three years together, the engagement, the end of it. Her friendship with Sienna, how long it had gone back, the specific depth of a connection I hadn't known existed between the two women who had both been inside my story without my knowledge. When Isabella had told him about Flynn, about Sienna, about what was happening with my marriage, Dominic had understood
ARIA'S POVI cleaned the apartment before he arrived.I noticed myself doing it halfway through wiping down the kitchen counter, the cloth moving in slow careful circles over a surface that was already clean. I stopped, put the cloth down and stood there for a moment.This is not about comfort. This is not something you clean your way through.I left the rest of it, sat on the couch and waited.He arrived at seven exactly, always punctual. I opened the door and saw him with a bottle of wine in his hand. A specific bottle, a Willamette Valley pinot I'd mentioned once in passing three months ago, the kind of offhand mention that people didn't usually remember. He remembered. He always remembered things."I remembered," he said. Warm, easy, the smile that had been one of the first things I noticed about him.I took the bottle.Set it on the counter and didn't open it.He came inside and I heard the small pause behind me, the fraction of a second where he registered the absence of the us
ARIA'S POVJordan arrived with food. A bag from the breakfast spot three blocks over, the kind of place that required a wait on weekday mornings. She'd gotten there early enough to beat the line, which meant she'd been up thinking about this before most people were awake.I knew this signal. Jordan brought food when the conversation was going to require something to do with your hands.I put the kettle on without being asked.We sat at my kitchen table with the food between us and I watched her arrange the things she bought. She wasn't dramatic about it. Jordan was never dramatic. She was methodical, which was sometimes worse."Tell me," I said.She did.She laid it out cleanly and in order. Everything she found. She said it all without the framing of someone trying to convince me of something. Just information, laid on the table in sequence, and then she stopped and let the silence be what it was.The room was very quiet. Then. "You're telling me," I said, "that he knew about Flyn
ARIA'S POVJordan arrived with food. A bag from the breakfast spot three blocks over, the kind of place that required a wait on weekday mornings. She'd gotten there early enough to beat the line, which meant she'd been up thinking about this before most people were awake.I knew this signal. Jordan brought food when the conversation was going to require something to do with your hands.I put the kettle on without being asked.We sat at my kitchen table with the food between us and I watched her arrange the things she bought. She wasn't dramatic about it. Jordan was never dramatic. She was methodical, which was sometimes worse."Tell me," I said.She did.She laid it out cleanly and in order. Everything she found. She said it all without the framing of someone trying to convince me of something. Just information, laid on the table in sequence, and then she stopped and let the silence be what it was.The room was very quiet. Then. "You're telling me," I said, "that he knew about Flyn
FLYNN'S POVThe client dinner ran two hours longer than scheduled because Gerald Mack liked to talk and I'd remembered how to listen.That was the thing about business. It didn't care what your personal life looked like. You showed up, you focused and you made the other person feel like the most im
ARIA'S POVI didn't mean to stay.We'd fallen asleep on his couch somewhere after midnight, the movie long finished, my head finding the space between his shoulder and his chest the way it had without either of us deciding that was where it would go. I woke up at 2 AM to the city quiet outside the
FLYNN'S POVCatherine had fallen asleep on Sienna's shoulder by the time I said it."The divorce finalized this week."Sienna didn't respond right away. She adjusted Catherine slightly, the automatic movement of someone who had learned in two months to do everything with one arm, and looked at the
ARIA'S POVI wore real clothes to sign my divorce papers.Not black or celebratory. Just the blazer and the ankle boots I saved for days that required me to feel like myself. The kind of outfit you put on when you need your outside to hold your inside together.Jordan had offered to come three time
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