CHAPTER THIRTEEN — The Man in the Lobby

He came for me himself, three days later, and didn't bother hiding it.

I was leaving the dental office after my final shift — I'd kept the job out of habit more than need, unwilling yet to let go of a life I'd built with my own two hands — when I saw him leaning against a black car parked illegally at the curb, watching the door like he'd been waiting exactly as long as it took.

"Don't scream," Vaughn said, before I could decide whether to. "I only want to talk. If I wanted to hurt you, Ivy, I've had a decade of opportunities."

"That's supposed to reassure me?"

"It's supposed to be honest." He pushed off the car, hands visible, deliberately unthreatening even as every instinct in me screamed to get back inside the building. "You found the file. I know, because Griffith's firm brought in a forensic auditor this morning, and I still have a friend or two left inside." A humourless smile. "I'll save you the trouble of asking. Yes. All of it is true. I chose your father's shop specifically. I watched your family for over a year before I made my first move."

"Why?" The word came out smaller than I wanted it to. "What did we ever do to you?"

"Nothing," Vaughn said, and something almost like sincerity moved across his face, which somehow made it worse. "You were never the target. You were the tool. I needed someone close to Damien with every reason to accept an offer no woman with real options would take — desperate enough, and good enough, that he'd actually fall for her instead of just using her as planned. I needed the marriage to become real. A real marriage is so much harder to walk away from when it collapses." His eyes went cold, all the charm gone now. "And it is going to collapse, Ivy. I've made sure of that."

Ice moved down my spine. "What did you do?"

"Nothing yet." He checked his watch, unhurried, terrifyingly calm. "But I have information that would end my cousin's career even without the company — a decision he made eight years ago, buried carefully, that I've spent considerable resources uncovering. Something about the collapse of Halden Manufacturing, and the three hundred jobs that went with it, and exactly how much Damien knew before he let it happen to protect his own numbers that quarter." His smile came back, thin and cruel. "He's not the man you think you married, Ivy. You're going to have a choice to make very soon about whether you still want him once you know the truth."

He got into the car before I could respond, and rolled the window down just enough to add one more thing.

"Ask him about Halden," he said. "Ask him before I have to make him answer for it in public."

The car pulled into traffic, and I stood on the sidewalk with my pulse roaring in my ears, dialling Damien with fingers that didn't feel like mine.

He answered on the first ring. "Ivy? What's wrong?"

"Who is Halden Manufacturing," I said, "and why does your cousin think it's going to end everything we've built?"

The silence on the other end lasted a fraction too long to be nothing.

"Where are you," Damien said finally, his voice gone very careful, very controlled — the exact tone I now understood meant he was hiding something enormous behind it. "I'm sending a car. We need to talk about this in person."

"Damien." My voice cracked on his name. "Just tell me. Is it true?"

The pause before he answered told me everything his words hadn't yet.

"It's complicated," he said quietly. "And yes. Some of it is true. I need you to let me explain the whole of it before you decide what that means."

I closed my eyes on a sidewalk in the city that had somehow become my whole life in the span of two months, and felt the ground I'd finally believed was solid begin, quietly, to shift beneath me again.

"Send the car," I said. "But Damien — you'd better tell me everything. All of it. I am done being the last person in this marriage to find out the truth."