Chapter 2: The Prenup

Aria's POV.

My hand still stung from the slap. 

Jason touched his cheek as if he were examining a minor inconvenience rather than the first time his wife had ever struck him.

"Are we done with the theatrics?" he asked.

I stared at him, this stranger wearing my husband's face. "How did you know?"

"Know what?"

"That I was thinking about leaving. That I consulted a lawyer."

He walked to his desk, pulled out a leather folder, and opened it with the same detachment he used to review quarterly reports. 

"I have access to your phone records, Aria. Your credit card and bank statements." He glanced up. "I'm your husband. Do you think I wouldn't notice?"

The casual invasion should have shocked me. Instead, I felt numb. Of course, he had been monitoring me. I wasn't a wife, I was a business asset requiring oversight.

"That's illegal," I said weakly.

"You signed the papers when we married. Joint accounts and shared access. All perfectly legal." 

He pulled a thick document from the folder and slid it across the polished mahogany. "This is your prenup. Perhaps you should have read it more carefully."

I recognized my own signature at the bottom, young and looping and so goddamn naive. 

I had signed it in his lawyer's office three days before our wedding, too in love to care about protecting myself, too trusting to imagine I would ever need to.

"Page seventeen," Jason said. "Section four, subsection B."

I flipped through the pages with shaking hands. The legal language swam before my eyes until I found it: 

“In the event of divorce before the completion of three (3) years of marriage, the party initiating dissolution shall forfeit all claims to marital assets, alimony, and shared property.”

Three years. We had been married for two years and four months.

"Eight months," I whispered.

"Eight months," Jason confirmed. "You can survive eight months, Aria. You've survived two years of this."

The way he said it, like our marriage was something to endure rather than celebrate made my throat tighten. 

"You've been counting down too."

"Of course I have." He closed the folder. "Do you think I wanted this any more than you did?"

The question hit like a physical blow. 

"Then why? Why did you marry me at all?"

Jason was silent for a long moment, looking at me with those gray eyes that had once made my heart race. Now they just made me feel cold.

"My family needed me to move on," he said finally. "After Isabelle died, my father gave me an ultimatum. Settle down, produce an heir, and prove I could run the company without becoming a liability. Or he would give everything to Kyle."

"Kyle?"

"My brother." Jason's jaw tightened. "You haven't met him. He's been overseas for years."

I had been married to this man for two years and didn't even know he had a brother. The realization settled over me like a heavy blanket.

"So you married me to keep your inheritance," I said flatly.

"I married you because you were appropriate." He paused. "You had no expectations. You weren't someone who would demand I love you."

The words should have hurt more than they did. Maybe I was too numb. Maybe some part of me had always known.

"I was wrong about that," Jason continued. "You did have expectations, you wanted more than I could give."

"I wanted a husband who remembered our anniversary," I said, my voice shaking. "I wanted someone who looked at me the way you looked at Violet Brown tonight. I wanted to matter."

"You matter." But his tone suggested otherwise. "You're my wife."

"What does that mean to you, Jason? Really?"

He considered the question with the same seriousness he brought to board meetings. 

"It means we have an arrangement. You have my name, my money, my protection. You live in a penthouse most people only dream about."

"Except love. Except basic human decency. Except a husband who doesn't disappear for hours with his dead girlfriend's sister."

Jason's face finally changed, a flash of something that might have been guilt. "Violet needed someone to talk to. Today was hard for her. It would have been Isabelle's thirtieth birthday."

Of course it was. I had suffered through our anniversary dinner alone while Jason worked late, but he remembered his dead ex-girlfriend's birthday.

"Are you sleeping with her?" The question surprised us both.

"No." Jason's answer was immediate. "I've never been unfaithful to you, Aria. I may be a terrible husband, but I'm not a cheater."

I wanted to believe him. God, I wanted to believe him. But I had wanted to believe a lot of things about Jason Hartley that had turned out to be lies.

"The prenup has a morality clause," I said, remembering the lawyer's words. "If either of us commits adultery, he forfeit everything."

Jason's eyes narrowed. "You read that far."

"I had time. While you were working late. While you were in Singapore. While you were everywhere except here with me."

"Are you planning to have an affair, Aria? Is that your strategy? Force me to divorce you by making yourself intolerable?"

The suggestion made me laugh, bitter and broken. "No, Jason. I was wondering if you already had. If maybe all those business trips and late nights were covering for something more."

"They weren't." He closed the distance between us, and I fought the urge to step back. "I told you, I don't cheat. I have many faults, but infidelity isn't one of them."

"Just emotional unavailability. Just marrying someone you knew you could never love. Just spending two years making me feel invisible."

"I never promised to love you."

"You said vows in front of three hundred people that promised exactly that."

Jason's jaw tightened. "Those were words, Aria. Just words."

I felt something inside me crack.. not break, not yet, but fracture in a way that would never fully heal. "I want separate bedrooms."

If he was surprised, he didn't show it. 

"Fine."

"That's it? Just fine?"

"We haven't shared a bed in months anyway." He turned back to his desk, dismissing me. "Take whichever guest room you prefer."

I stood there for another moment, waiting for him to say something else. To fight for me, to ask me to stay, to show any emotion beyond this terrible indifference.

He didn't.

I walked to our bedroom, his bedroom now, and started gathering my things. 

I took my clothes from the closet, toiletries from the bathroom, and the few personal items that had survived two years of slowly erasing myself to fit into his life.

It took three trips down the hall to the guest room. Each time I passed Jason's study, I could see him through the open door, working on his laptop like nothing had happened. Like his wife moving out of their bedroom was just another item checked off his to-do list.

On my final trip, as I carried an armful of books and the jewelry box he had given me for our anniversary; “for your efforts” then something fell from between the pages. An envelope, cream-colored and expensive, with my name written in unfamiliar handwriting.

I picked it up with my free hand and went to the guest room, closing the door behind me. I set down my belongings on the bed and opened the envelope with shaking fingers.

Inside were photographs. Jason and Violet in the garden tonight, standing close. Another of them at a restaurant, intimate and dimly lit. A third of Jason entering a hotel, Violet behind him. The timestamps showed six months of meetings.

There was a note, typed and anonymous: “You deserve to know the truth. Your husband has been seeing Violet Brown for six months. The Singapore trips? He's with her. —A Friend”

At the bottom was a phone number.

I stared at the photos, my mind racing. Jason had looked me in the eye twenty minutes ago and sworn he had never been unfaithful. Either he was lying, or someone was setting him up.

Either way, I finally had what I needed.

Proof.