ONE YEAR, ONE HUSBAND
Book Four: Dinner Declares War
I told myself I was looking for a book. I was not looking for a book.
I had gone downstairs at eleven at night for a glass of water, and I heard Ethan's voice coming from the small sitting room off the kitchen, low and unusually careful, the voice he used when he was choosing every word before he let it out.
"You can't keep doing this, Liv."
Olivia's laugh drifted after it, soft and knowing. "Doing what, exactly? Reminding you of something real, in a house full of something that isn't?"
"That isn't fair."
"Isn't it?" A pause, the click of a glass set down on wood. "You used to tell me everything, Ethan. Now I have to hear from the papers that you kissed your wife at the Whitmore Gala like you meant it."
"I don't owe you an accounting of my marriage."
"No," Olivia said, quieter now, and something in her tone made the back of my neck go cold. "But you owe me the truth about why you actually needed one so fast. We both know it wasn't only the board vote."
I did not hear his answer, because at that exact moment I stepped backward directly into a side table and sent a porcelain bowl of decorative lemons crashing to the floor, and by the time I'd finished apologizing to absolutely no one and fled up the stairs, my heart was doing something violent and humiliated in my chest, and I had already decided, with the particular clarity of the deeply irrational, that whatever I had just overheard meant exactly what I feared it meant.
They were finding their way back to each other. Quietly. In sitting rooms. While I redecorated my entire understanding of my own marriage around a kiss that apparently hadn't meant what I'd let myself believe it meant.
✲ ✲ ✲
I am not, generally speaking, a woman who plots revenge. I would like that on the record. But by the following afternoon, nursing a wound I had no right to be nursing over a marriage that was, by every legal definition, fake, I had convinced myself that the only reasonable, mature, dignified response was to invite Jonah Reyes, a friend from my design program with excellent bone structure and an easy laugh, to that evening's dinner with Ethan's business partners.
"You want me to what?" Jonah asked, when I called him.
"Just be charming. And laugh at everything I say like it's the funniest thing you've ever heard."
"Mia, are you trying to make your husband jealous?"
"I'm trying to have a normal dinner with a normal friend," I said, with the total conviction of a woman who was absolutely trying to make her husband jealous.
It worked, in the sense that Ethan noticed immediately, and did not work, in every sense that mattered. He greeted Jonah at the door with a handshake that lasted exactly one second too long, the kind of grip that communicates something entirely different from the polite words accompanying it, and seated him, with what I could only assume was deliberate cruelty, directly across from two of the most intimidating investors on Ethan's guest list.
He was perfectly, unbearably polite to Jonah all through the appetizer, asking pointed questions about his career with the surgical precision of a man building a case. "Furniture design," he said, turning the phrase over like he was examining it for flaws. "And how exactly did you and Mia meet?"
"School," Jonah said, glancing at me with the particular alarm of a man who has just realized he has wandered into someone else's argument without a map. "We dated. Very briefly. Years ago."
"Fascinating," Ethan said, in a tone that suggested he found it anything but, and refilled the investor beside him's wine with the same unhurried precision he'd used to build three separate corporate acquisitions I'd read about in the financial press.
By the time the entrée arrived, I realized with rising panic that I had badly misjudged what jealous Ethan actually looked like. It did not look like sulking. It looked like a man quietly and efficiently taking someone apart at the table using nothing but excellent manners, complimenting Jonah's tie while asking whether his firm had ever handled a client who defaulted, mentioning offhand that Carter Design's new investor relationship required, above all else, discretion.
"Jonah tells me you two dated, briefly, in school," Ethan said to me, refilling my wine with a hand that was entirely too steady.
"Very briefly," I said. "Ages ago."
"How lovely that you've stayed close," he said, in a tone that suggested he found absolutely nothing lovely about it, and excused himself from the table two minutes later, catching my eye on the way past with a look that was less an invitation than a summons.
I found him in the small study down the hall, arms crossed, his jaw set in a way I was learning to associate with him being far angrier than he intended anyone to know.
"What exactly are we doing tonight, Mia?"
"Having dinner. With a friend."
"You brought an ex-boyfriend to a business dinner to sit across from investors evaluating whether our marriage is stable enough to justify a merger," he said. "So I'll ask again. What are we doing?"
"Maybe I wanted to see what it looked like," I said, before I could stop myself, "when you actually cared."
Something shifted in his face, quick and unguarded before the wall came back down. "You think I don't care?"
"I heard you last night," I said, and watched him go very still. "With Olivia. In the sitting room."
"That was business."
"It didn't sound like business."
"Mia." He stepped closer, close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him even through the careful distance he was still trying to maintain. "Whatever you heard, it wasn't what you think."
"Then tell me what it was."
He didn't answer. His hand came up, not quite touching my jaw, hovering there the way a man hovers at the edge of a decision he hasn't fully made, and for one unbearable second I thought he might actually kiss me, no cameras, no reporters, no reason at all except the two of us standing too close together in a room with the door half open.
"Ethan." Victor's voice cut through the room like a blade, and we sprang apart so fast I nearly knocked over a lamp. My uncle stood in the doorway, immaculate in a charcoal suit, his expression carrying the particular delight of a man who has just walked in on something useful. "I do hope I'm not interrupting."
"You are," Ethan said flatly.
"I only came to pay my respects to the newlyweds." Victor's eyes moved over the two of us, over the space we'd only just put between our bodies, and something calculating flickered behind his smile. "Though I confess, Ethan, I didn't expect to find you quite so invested in Charles Carter's daughter. Given the history."
"What history?" I asked, before I could stop myself.
Victor's smile widened, unhurried, savoring it. "You didn't tell her?" he asked Ethan, and when Ethan said nothing at all, his jaw locked tight enough to crack, Victor turned back to me with the satisfied air of a man delivering exactly the blow he'd come to deliver. "Your husband met your father, Mia. Two days before he died. I wonder what they discussed."
✲ ✲ ✲
I did not sleep that night, again, which was becoming something of a pattern I resented more each time it happened.
Instead, somewhere around midnight, restless and unwilling to lie in the dark turning Victor's words over and over, I wandered down to the den, where I found Ethan sprawled on the couch in sweatpants and a T-shirt, looking, for the first time since I'd met him, like an actual person rather than a headline, the television flickering with some documentary about deep sea creatures that he was clearly not watching.
"Can't sleep either," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Victor has a gift for ruining evenings."
"Victor has a gift for making everything look worse than it is." He shifted over, an inch of space on the couch that I told myself I was not reading too much into, and after a moment, I sat down anyway.
We fought over the remote for exactly four minutes, a genuinely ridiculous argument about whether we were watching the octopus documentary or the true crime series I'd been quietly obsessed with for weeks, conducted almost entirely through wordless shoves for possession of a small black rectangle, until he finally wrestled it out of my hand by lifting it directly over his head where my five-foot-five reach stood no chance whatsoever.
"That's cheating," I said, half laughing despite myself.
"That's called having arms," he said, and for one unguarded moment, sitting close enough that our knees were touching, bathed in the blue light of a television neither of us was watching, we looked like exactly what the contract said we should pretend to be, and neither of us moved to correct it.
"Ethan," I said finally, quiet enough that it barely disturbed the room. "What did Victor mean? About you and my father."
His jaw tightened, and for a moment I thought he would deflect again, retreat behind the wall he kept so carefully maintained. Instead, he set the remote down, and looked at me with something that looked almost like exhaustion.
"I did meet him," he said. "Two days before he passed. I'll tell you everything, Mia. I will. Just not tonight."
"Why not tonight?"
"Because tonight," he said, his voice rough, "I would like one evening where you look at me like you did five minutes ago, before you have every reason not to."
I should have pushed. I should have demanded the truth right there on that couch, and some part of me knew, even as I let the moment slide past unchallenged, that I was making a mistake I would regret.
But I looked at him, at the tired, unguarded honesty in his face, and for one more night, I let myself have it.
We sat like that for a long time, the deep sea documentary murmuring on in the background, neither of us reaching for the remote again, and somewhere around one in the morning I fell asleep against the arm of the couch, only half aware of him easing a throw blanket over my shoulders before he switched off the television and, as far as I could tell the next morning from the second indentation in the cushion beside me, stayed there in the dark a while longer than he needed to.
I woke to sunlight and an empty den, and found him in the kitchen already dressed for the day, two cups of coffee on the counter as though he'd known exactly when I would appear.
"You didn't wake me," I said.
"You looked like you needed the sleep more than the lecture I was planning to give you about inviting exes to investor dinners."
"That's very mature of you."
"I contain multitudes," he said, and there it was again, that small, rare flash of dry humor that undid me a little more each time I saw it, before his expression sobered. "I meant what I said. I'll tell you about your father. Soon. Not because Victor forced my hand, but because you deserve to hear it from me."
"Soon," I repeated, testing the word for how much patience I actually had left, and found, unhelpfully, that where Ethan Blake was concerned, I seemed to have more of it than I'd ever had for anyone else in my life.