CHAPTER THREE

Camille did not answer. She turned her face into Dominic's shoulder and let out a thin, frightened sob.

"Make her stop, Dom. Please. She's scaring me."

"Enough, Evangeline." Dominic's arm tightened around the trembling woman. "You've signed the papers. There's nothing left here for you. What more do you want?"

Evangeline laughed.

It was a terrible sound — not amusement, but the noise grief makes when it has nowhere left to go — and it stopped as suddenly as it began. In the silence that followed she moved faster than any of them expected.

The slap landed across Camille's cheek with a crack that rang off the high ceilings.

The room erupted in gasps. Camille's hand flew to her face and she stared up at Evangeline, so genuinely shocked that she forgot, for a moment, to keep crying.

"Evangeline!" Dominic was on his feet, towering, his fists clenched white at his sides, fighting visibly to keep himself from doing something he couldn't take back.

She did not give him the chance to find his words. She turned and slapped him too.

The sound of it froze the entire family where they stood. No one — not his mother, not his father, not a single soul in his life — had ever raised a hand to Dominic Voss. And here stood the wife he'd thrown away, her palm print blooming red on his jaw.

"The first one was for Camille," Evangeline said, "for lying about a crime and dressing it up as an injury. If I'd known she was going to frame me for it, I'd have at least had the satisfaction of actually doing it." Her smile was thin and dangerous. "The second one was for you. Not because you chose her. Because you helped her. You looked at the woman who shared your bed for three years and you decided her word was worth less than a performance."

She let her eyes travel over the rest of them, and one by one they looked away.

"I was raised with nothing, and I still came out of it more human than every person in this room. I won't waste another breath of my life on revenge — you aren't worth the years it would take. From this moment, the Voss family and I are strangers. We owe each other nothing. And I'll tell you the same thing I'd tell anyone who'd done to me what you've done." Her voice dropped. "Stay out of my way. Because if our paths ever cross again, I won't be the one on the floor."

She walked to the door. With her hand on the frame she turned back one final time, and the tears were running freely down her face even as her voice stayed level.

"You'll come to regret this, Dominic. I don't know when. But you will. And when that day comes, remember that I stood right here and told you — there is nothing you could ever say that would make me forgive you."

Then she stepped out into the storm and pulled the door shut behind her, leaving the Voss family staring at the space where she'd been.

Rain hammered down the moment she cleared the porch, soaking her to the skin in seconds. She tipped her face up into it and let out a single broken laugh at herself, at the spectacular wreckage of the life she'd tried so hard to build. Then she dug out her phone with numb fingers and called the only person left who would come.

"Julian," she said when he picked up. "Can you get me? I'm — I need to leave. I'll explain when you're here."

Upstairs, Dominic stood at his bedroom window with the lights off.

He had told himself he was going to lie down, that the day had exhausted him, that he simply needed quiet. Instead he found himself at the glass, looking down at the gate, where a small dark figure sat hunched against the rain, waiting.

She didn't run for cover. She didn't even seem to feel it. She just sat there, drenched, until headlights swept up the drive and a white car pulled to the curb. A man jumped out with an umbrella and rushed to her, and Dominic recognized Julian — Evangeline's one true friend, the only person who'd ever treated her like she mattered. He gathered her up, umbrella over her head, and folded her into the passenger seat with a tenderness that made something twist behind Dominic's ribs.

The car pulled away. He watched its taillights shrink and vanish into the wet dark, and felt, absurdly, as though something irreplaceable were being driven out of his life.

He pressed his knuckles to the cold glass. Her last words kept circling back. There is nothing you could ever say. Why should that bother him? He'd wanted her gone. He'd handed her the papers himself.

He turned from the window and the room felt cavernous and empty. He sat heavily on the edge of the bed and, against his will, the memories came.

The first time she'd walked into this house, she'd been all nervous energy and quick smiles, talking too fast, lighting up the dour rooms without meaning to. His grandmother had collapsed on a walk in the park weeks before, and a poor law student had been the one to catch her, to ride with her to the hospital, to sit at her bedside day after day — missing her own bar exam to do it. Cordelia had decided, with the stubbornness of the old and frightened, that this girl and no other would be his wife.

They'd both refused at first. Then Cordelia had used her own failing heart as leverage, and what could either of them say to that? So they had married. And for three years Evangeline had tried, and he had let her try, and he had never once tried back. She wasn't Camille. That was the beginning and end of it, the entire shape of his reasoning.

Except now Camille's tearful face kept blurring against the memory of Evangeline crouched at her wheelchair, begging to be believed. Now there was a slap still stinging on his jaw and a notebook full of untouched money sitting downstairs, every entry dated and accounted for. A gold-digger didn't do that. A gold-digger didn't leave with the same backpack she came with.

"What kind of woman are you?" he murmured to the empty room.

He didn't have an answer. He told himself it didn't matter. What was done was done.

He was still telling himself that when morning came.

Across the city, in a small apartment that smelled of coffee and packing tape, Evangeline knelt over an open suitcase.

"You don't have to do this, you know." Julian leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, worry carved into his face. He'd barely slept. She'd told him everything the night before, and somewhere around the part about the second bank card he'd had to stand up and walk a circle around the room to keep from putting his fist through a wall. "You could stay. You could fight it. I'll find you the meanest lawyer in this city."

"I don't want to fight." She folded a sweater with more care than it needed. "I'm not running to get away from them, Jules. I'm running toward something. A new city. A new name, if I can manage it. A life where 'Voss' means nothing to me." She looked up with a small, tired smile. "Let me have that. Please."

He came and crouched beside her and pulled her into a hug that nearly cracked her ribs. "Then go in style. I'm driving you to the airport myself, and I expect a dramatic goodbye at the gate."

She laughed wetly into his shoulder. Then her stomach lurched without warning, and she pulled back, pressing a hand to her mouth.

"Eva?"

She was already up and moving, stumbling to the bathroom, where she was quietly and thoroughly sick. When she came out a few minutes later she was pale, dabbing at her lips with a tissue.

"Hey." Julian's brow had folded down low. "Are you all right?"