Chapter Eleven

Saffron's POV

I saw her before she saw me.

The ballroom of the Aurelian was a blaze of gold and glass. Nyx hung on my arm in a red dress that kept the cameras turned our way, laughing at something I had not heard, her stomach carefully angled for the photographers. Every few minutes someone stopped to congratulate us. A baby. An heir. A miracle. I nodded and smiled and shook hands with people whose names I forgot as soon as they said them.

Then the crowd by the far windows parted, and there she was.

For a moment I thought I was imagining it. Isolde, in a deep green dress, her hair down over one shoulder, a leather folder tucked under her arm. She was laughing. Not the polite, cautious smile she used to wear around my family. A real laugh, her head tilted back, her whole face lit up from the inside.

And beside her, with one hand at the small of her back, stood Dacre Knight.

I had known him for ten years, by name and by reputation. Cold as a closed vault, my mother always said. Dangerous in a quiet way. He had once turned down a merger offer from my father with a single email, four words long. I had never seen him touch a person in public.

His hand did not leave her back. He leaned in to hear her better, and I watched the line of his shoulders, and I knew what I was looking at. I had spent five years standing at exactly that angle toward her and never let anyone see.

"Saffron," Nyx said. "Who are you staring at?"

"No one."

"You're hurting my arm."

I loosened my grip. I did not look away.

It was jealousy. I knew it the way you recognize your own handwriting on an envelope. It rose slowly, thick and hot, and it did not have a place to go. She had every right to stand beside whoever she wanted. I had signed her out of my life with a pen I had handed her myself.

She had put on weight. Not much, just a softening in the face, a gentleness around the eyes. She looked well. She looked, God help me, happy.

"Excuse me," I said to Nyx.

"Where are you going?"

"I need air."

I did not need air. I crossed the room, slipping through knots of people, keeping her in sight. I saw her turn to say something to Dacre. I saw her sway. I saw him catch her in one smooth motion, before her knees even gave, and lift her into his arms, and carry her out through a door at the side of the room.

My feet were moving before I decided to follow.

The corridor behind the ballroom was long and dim and quiet. At the end, a door stood half closed with light spilling from the gap. I heard voices. I stopped a few steps away and told myself to turn around.

"...not alone anymore, Isolde." Dacre's voice, low and steady. "I mean that."

I could not hear her answer. I took another step.

"I don't know how to accept that."

"Then we will learn it slowly."

Silence. The soft sound of someone crying. And I stood in a hallway in a tuxedo that cost more than most people's cars, my hands useless at my sides, and thought, she cried like that in our kitchen, three nights before the end. I had stood in the doorway and walked away.

I pushed the door open.

"Isolde?"

She was sitting on a sofa, a white handkerchief in her hand, her face wet and flushed. Her eyes found mine, and the color drained out of them. Dacre turned slowly. He was the only person I have ever met who could look calm and murderous at the same time.

"Saffron," she said. It was not a question.

"Are you all right?"

"She is fine," Dacre said.

"I wasn't speaking to you."

"I am aware." He stepped between us. He was an inch taller than I was, and he stood perfectly still. "Mrs. Laurent fainted. A physician has seen her. She needs quiet."

"Mrs. Laurent?" I almost laughed. "Her name is Cole."

"Not anymore."

"Saffron." Isolde's voice, soft and steady. "Please leave."

I looked at her. At the pale cheeks, the damp lashes, the hand she had moved flat against the front of her green dress. It happened so fast I almost missed it, the old reflex, the same motion I had watched in the hallway of our house. Her palm pressed to her stomach, as if she were holding something in place.

I had seen that motion before. Once, in the doorway of my own home, with a pen in my hand.

"Are you sick?" I said.

"I'm tired."

"You fainted."

"It's the heat."

"It's the middle of November."

"Mr. Cole." Dacre's voice dropped. "Leave. Now. Or I will have you removed in front of your wife's cameras, and I promise you the photograph will be much less flattering than the one she is posing for in the ballroom."

I stood very still. I could hear my own pulse. Behind him, Isolde looked at the floor.

"Take care of yourself," I said, to her.

Neither of them answered.

I went back down the corridor, past the crowd, past Nyx, who called my name three times, and I did not stop until I reached the terrace. Cold air hit my face. I stood at the stone railing with both hands gripping the edge and the whole city glittering below me.

Her hand. The weight she had put on. The way Dacre had carried her. The dizziness, the pallor, the dry cracker I had once seen her slip into her coat pocket, years ago, in the first weeks of the one pregnancy scare that had turned out to be nothing.

Good news, for once.

I took out my phone. My hand wasn't steady. I scrolled to a number I had never called, a private investigator whose card my lawyer had given me two years ago for a different, smaller, ugly purpose.

It rang twice.

"Cole," I said. "I need everything you can find on Isolde Laurent. Medical records. Doctors. Every appointment since the day of the divorce."

"That's a lot of ground, sir."

"Start with the hospitals." My voice sounded strange to my own ears. "And do it fast."

I hung up. The wind pulled at my coat. Behind me, through the glass doors, music swelled, a waltz, bright and false. I looked down at my own hands on the railing and I whispered the words aloud, once, to the night.

"No. It can't be.”