Chapter Fifteen

Marcus left a little after two, and I remember the click of the door being softer than it should have been, like he was trying not to wake something that was already awake.

He'd draped his jacket over my legs before he went, and I fell back asleep still smelling faintly of hospital soap on the collar.

I woke up alone. Just me, the blanket, his jacket still across my knees, and pale gray light coming through the blinds.

I didn't hear the front door open, I heard the key turn in it, the specific scrape of a lock I hadn't given him permission to still have, and by the time I sat up straight, Nathaniel was already standing in the entryway in yesterday's shirt with his sleeves shoved to the elbow.

"You have a key to this place now?"

"I never gave it up." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the jacket on my legs, at the second dent in the couch cushion, doing math with his eyes.

"Marcus left hours ago," I said. "That's his jacket. He forgot it."

"Convenient."

My stomach dropped, not from guilt, I hadn't done anything to feel guilty about, but from the sheer exhaustion of having to say that sentence out loud at all. "Nathaniel, he left at two in the morning. Ask your own driveway cameras if you don't believe me."

"I didn't need cameras." His hand tightened on the doorframe, knuckles going pale. "I was in my study, I saw his car sitting there for six hours."

That stopped me. "You were watching?"

He didn't answer that, which was its own kind of answer, and for a second the only sound in the room was a lawn mower starting up somewhere out on the property, ordinary and far away, and I focused on that because it was easier than looking at his face.

"I couldn't sleep," he said finally, quieter.

"Neither could I." My hands had curled into the blanket without me noticing, fabric bunched tight in my fists. "You know why? Because your fiancée.....sorry, your sister-in-law.....left a note on my pillow telling me to know my place, and when I brought it to you, you put your hand on her shoulder and told me to calm down."

"That's not what happened."

"That's exactly what happened." My voice cracked and I hated it, hated that it still had the power to do that after everything.

"I stood on that terrace with proof in my hand and I watched you choose her tears over my evidence, and then I came back here and sat in the dark because I didn't want to look at a single thing that reminded me of this house. And Marcus came because he's the only person who's asked me if I'm okay in longer than I can remember."

Nathaniel's jaw worked, muscle jumping under the skin, and he looked away from me toward the window, toward the main house he'd walked out of maybe twenty minutes ago.

"If this is the life you want," he said, and his voice had gone strange, tight, like it cost him something to keep it even, "then let's finish the divorce."

The words hit me somewhere under my ribs, hard enough that I actually pressed my hand there without meaning to.

"Fine," I said.

"You should know what that means." He turned back to face me and something in his expression had gone deliberately blank, like he was reading off a card he'd written for himself in the mirror that morning. "Under the marriage contract, you leave with nothing. No settlement. Nothing from my accounts. You came into this with nothing, Elena."

I felt that word....nothing....land in my chest like something physical, a hand pressed flat against my sternum, pushing.

For a second I couldn't speak.

I sat there on the couch with the blanket still fisted in my hands and I felt two years rise up all at once.....every dinner I'd served in silence, every birthday of his I'd remembered when his own mother forgot, every night I'd lain awake in a bed with a man who slept with his back to me like I was a stranger who'd wandered in.

"Say that again," I whispered.

"Elena...."

"No. I want to hear you say it a second time. Slowly. And mean it."

He didn't, he just stood there, and the silence stretched long enough that I heard my own heartbeat in my ears, fast and hard, and I realized my hands were shaking, actually shaking, not from fear but from something closer to fury, something I hadn't let myself feel all the way through in a long time.

"You think that word scares me?" My voice came out low, rougher than I intended. "I have been surviving on nothing for two years, Nathaniel. Nothing from you. Nothing from my own parents. I learned how to live on nothing before I ever wore your ring, so don't stand in my doorway holding it over my head like a weapon.....it's not a weapon. It's just familiar."

Something flickered across his face.....not guilt exactly, but close to it, close enough that I saw him swallow before he spoke again.

"Draw up the papers," I said, before he could recover whatever he'd been about to reach for. "I'll sign every page. And the next time you want to check on me at two in the morning, try the door instead of the study window."

I stood, walked past him, and opened the front door myself, holding it, waiting.

It took him a long moment to move, when he finally did, he paused right beside me, close enough that I caught the smell of last night's whiskey still on his collar, and for one second....one.... I thought he might say something that wasn't about contracts or appearances or what things looked like from a window.

He didn't.

He walked out across the wet grass, and I shut the door harder than I meant to, my palm flat against the wood, breath coming fast and uneven until his footsteps finally faded toward the main house.

Then I slid down until I was sitting on the floor with my back against the door, knees pulled to my chest, Marcus's jacket still bunched in my lap, and I let myself shake for exactly as long as I needed to.

Not long. Just long enough.