Se connecterHusband? Aiden? Oh no, this joke had gone way too far.
Grace's heart hammered against her ribs. She gathered herself from the shock, blinking hard like that would somehow reset reality. "You're saying this man here is my husband?" Sophia answered with a sweet smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "That's right. He's your husband." She tilted her head, her voice dripping with false concern. "Oh, don't tell me you don't remember your own man?" Grace stared at them. Really stared. Mason and Sophia were standing close together, too close, and Sophia's hand was resting on Mason's arm like she owned him. Like they were the couple here, not Grace and Mason. "Really?" Grace's voice came out flat. Mason shrugged. "Yeah, really. We're just here to visit you. Aiden here is your husband." His tone was casual, like he was discussing the weather. Aiden looked at Mason with pure disgust. His jaw clenched. Then, in one smooth motion, he switched the ring on his right hand to his left, the one that looked like a wedding band. He turned to Grace, picked up her hand with surprising gentleness, and said, "Yeah. That's right. I'm your husband." His touch was warm. Too warm. Grace felt her pulse spike. Sophia continued, her voice sing-song. "Your room is next door, by the way." Grace's mind raced. Can I still tell the truth now? Should I drop this act? What the hell is happening? Mason leaned close to Aiden's ear and whispered something Grace couldn't quite catch, but she saw Aiden's expression darken. Then Sophia tapped Mason on his butt. Casually. Intimately. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Come on, babe. Let's go. We've got games to play." Babe? Grace felt like the floor had dropped out from under her. Her husband just let another woman touch him like that. Right in front of her. And he didn't even flinch. He looked... pleased. Before Grace could process what she'd just witnessed, Aiden snapped her back to reality. "Come on. I'll show you to our room." Then he bent down and scooped her up in his arms like she weighed nothing. Grace gasped, instinctively wrapping her arms around his neck. His chest was solid against her side, his grip strong and steady. He carried her out of the medical room and down a hallway lined with wooden doors. The resort was beautiful, all polished wood and soft lighting, but Grace couldn't focus on any of it. Her mind was spinning too fast. They reached a door marked with a small bronze plaque that read "Pine Suite." Aiden pushed it open with his shoulder and carried her inside. The room was spacious, decorated in warm tones with a massive bed covered in white linens. A fireplace crackled softly in the corner. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the snowy forest outside. Aiden set her down gently on the edge of the bed. Then he straightened up and walked toward the bathroom without a word. Grace just stood there. Frozen. Her thoughts were a tangled mess. Crap. What now? What am I supposed to do? She glanced around the room aimlessly, her hands fidgeting with the hem of her sweater. She heard the sound of running water from the bathroom. Aiden was getting ready to shower. The reality of the situation hit her all at once. She was alone in a room with Aiden. Pretending to be his wife. And she had no idea how far this charade was going to go. Footsteps. She turned. Aiden stood in the doorway of the bathroom, leaning against the frame. He was shirtless now. Just a white towel wrapped low around his waist. His abs were carved like marble, his shoulders broad and powerful. Grace's breath caught in her throat. She'd never really looked at him before. Not like this. All these years, she'd only seen him as the cold, arrogant brother who tried to ruin her wedding. But now... God, he was stunning. He looked at her with an unreadable expression. "You're just going to stand there?" Grace swallowed hard. She didn't know what to say. Aiden walked closer. Each step deliberate. His eyes locked on hers. "Do you wanna take a shower with me?" Grace's mind went blank. What do I do? He's my husband's brother! Why is he doing this? He hates me, doesn't he? Before she could answer, Aiden reached out and turned her to face him. His hands were firm on her shoulders. Grace looked up, and for the first time, she saw past his usual cold demeanor. His eyes weren't hateful. They were intense and almost... vulnerable. Then it happened. The towel loosened. It slipped. And fell to the floor. Grace's eyes went wide. She couldn't help it. She looked. And what she saw made her entire body freeze. He was huge. Impossibly so. Heat flooded her face. Her mind flashed back to the dream. The pool. His hands on her body. The way he'd kissed her. The way he'd touched her. Oh God. She screamed internally. Jesus, this is huge! Aiden's voice cut through her panic. "Hey. Why are you so nervous?" He tilted his head, his lips curving into the faintest smirk. "Nothing you haven't seen before, right?"Lily graduated from law school on a Friday in June.The ceremony was in London. Grace and Aiden flew in for it — they did not discuss whether they would go, they simply went, because Lily graduating from law school was not an event that was attended or not attended depending on scheduling, it was an event that was attended.Their daughter spent the ceremony pulling at the collar of the outfit Grace had dressed her in and looking at the ceiling with the deep philosophical suspicion of a two-year-old confronted with formal proceedings. She fell asleep on Aiden's shoulder during the dean's address, which was the right response.Lily came down from the stage with her degree and found them in the crowd and hugged Grace for a long time."You did it," Grace said."I did it," Lily said. Into her shoulder. The particular voice of someone who had been holding the emotion down through the ceremony and was now releasing it into a safe place.Grace held on.Lily had joined Tessa's Table's legal ad
Aiden came home from the university at twelve-thirty.Their daughter heard him before Grace did. She was in the kitchen playing with the stacking cups that she treated primarily as something to knock over, and she stopped knocking them over and looked at the door with the particular focused alertness she reserved for the sound of him arriving.Then he was in the doorway and she was across the kitchen floor in the direct, determined way she had recently developed for covering distance, and he picked her up and she grabbed his collar with both hands and looked at his face critically, as she always did when he had been away for a few hours, verifying that all the expected features were still in their correct positions.Apparently satisfied, she pointed at the fallen cups."I see," Aiden said seriously. "Were you winning?"She pointed again, more emphatically."Right," he said. "Obviously."Grace watched them from the other side of the kitchen.She had taken the notebook from the storage
Mason was denied parole for the third time on a Wednesday.Rachel sent Grace a one-line message: Denied. Third application. No further right of appeal for twenty-four months.Grace read it at the kitchen table in the Prague apartment — they had been in Prague for a week, the longer visits that had become their pattern since the hub opened, one week in three. She set the phone down and picked up her coffee and looked out the window at the square below where the market ran on weekday mornings.She thought about the first parole denial. She had felt something then — not relief exactly, something adjacent to it. The second denial had produced less. The third produced a clean, neutral awareness of a fact. He would not be released. The system that had been built to hold him was holding him. She did not need to feel anything particular about it.The psychiatric evaluation that had accompanied the denial was a matter of public record. She had read it.Adapted to institutional life.That was t
Five years.That was the number Emma put in front of her at the annual review meeting, the one they held every January in the Tessa's Table London office — the original office, the one above Tessa Designs, which had expanded twice since it opened and was now staffed by eleven people who each understood their specific piece of the work.Three thousand women. Twelve countries. Forty-seven active partnerships with legal networks, survivor organisations, law enforcement liaisons, and advocacy bodies across four continents.Grace read the number and set the paper down and said: "What do we need to do better?"Emma had a list. She always had a list.They worked through it.The UN invitation had come the previous autumn.Not the tribunal — she had addressed that years ago. The General Assembly. The full chamber. The invitation came through diplomatic channels in the specific formal language of a body that moved carefully because everything it did had to hold in multiple jurisdictions simulta
The garden belonged to a house on the edge of the city that Emma had found and booked three months ago, before Grace had fully decided on the details, which was Emma knowing her well enough to act on the knowledge.It was the right kind of garden. Not a formal one — not the kind of garden designed to be looked at from a distance. The kind that had been loved into its shape, that had corners and levels and a particular quality of enclosure that made it feel, despite being outside, like a room.Twenty-three people.Grace had made the list herself, once, and had looked at it and had not added to it and had not removed from it. It was the right number. The people who had been in the rooms. The people whose presence across the past two years had meant something real. Not all of them had stayed throughout — some had come and gone and come back — but they had all, in their way, been part of it.Emma. Rachel. Lily. Floyd. Jennifer. Priya and Isabel, who had flown in and whom Grace had embrace
She sat in the studio for a while after the call ended.The pencil was on the desk. The commission was finished. The studio held its particular night quiet around her, the city outside reduced to its minimal sounds — the occasional car, a door somewhere in the building below, the hum of the city's infrastructure that was always there and usually not heard.She looked at the phone.Mason in the medical wing. Stable. Alive.She turned the information over the way she turned everything now — not to arrive at a conclusion she had already chosen, just to see what it actually was. She had practised this across the months of the investigation and the trial, the discipline of looking at a thing directly rather than at the story she expected the thing to confirm.What she found, looking directly at it, was not what she might have expected to find.There was no satisfaction. She examined carefully for satisfaction and it was not there. She had imagined, at various points across the eighteen mon







