ONE YEAR, ONE HUSBAND
Book Seven: The False Divorce
"We're announcing a separation," Ethan said, three days after the airport, standing in his study with a press release already drafted on the screen behind him, and I felt the words land somewhere just beneath my ribs, sharper than I had any right to let them be for a marriage that was, on paper, exactly as temporary as this.
"You want to fake a divorce," I said, "to catch Noah."
"I want to make him believe he's won." Ethan turned the laptop toward me, showing me a timeline his security team had assembled overnight, phone records and shell company filings that traced Noah's fingerprints across the leaked contract, across a series of transfers into an account linked to Victor Carter, across three years of quiet, patient sabotage aimed at both our families at once. "If he thinks the marriage is failing on its own, without his interference being suspected, he'll get careless. People always do, once they think they've already won."
"Explain the mechanics to me," I said, forcing myself to focus on the strategy instead of the sick feeling settling in my stomach. "How does a fake divorce make him careless?"
"Noah's entire play has depended on believing he understands us better than we understand ourselves," Ethan said. "He leaked the contract assuming it would end the marriage on its own, without him lifting another finger. If we announce a separation ourselves, quietly, without scandal, we take away his win. He'll want to know why it isn't hurting us the way he planned. People who want to know why tend to make phone calls they shouldn't, to people they shouldn't call."
"And if I say no?"
"Then we find another way," he said, and something in the plainness of it, the total absence of pressure, made it harder to say no than if he'd pushed. "But I think this is the fastest path to proving what Victor did to your father, Mia. And I think you want that more than you want to protect your pride right now."
He was right, which I resented deeply, and by the end of the week our lawyers had drafted a public statement citing "irreconcilable differences," and I had moved, publicly, into the guest wing, and the tabloids that had spent two weeks calling me a gold-digger pivoted overnight into calling me a tragic, discarded bride, which was, if anything, worse.
✲ ✲ ✲
Playing estranged was, I discovered, exhausting in ways that playing married had never been. We had to be photographed leaving separate cars at the same events, standing with careful, wounded distance between us at a charity dinner neither of us could skip without raising suspicion, and I found myself genuinely, uncomfortably good at looking heartbroken, because I no longer had to reach very far to find the feeling.
"You're overdoing it," Ethan murmured at one such dinner, his voice pitched only for me as we passed each other near the bar, close enough to speak but careful not to touch.
"I'm not overdoing anything."
"You've looked at me exactly like that, with exactly that expression, four times tonight. Any more and Victor will think I've broken your heart on purpose."
"Maybe you have," I said, and watched something flicker across his face before I walked away, because it was easier to say it as part of the performance than to admit how much of it wasn't.
We spent our evenings, behind the mansion's locked doors, hunched over the same laptop, cross-referencing dates and wire transfers, building the case against Victor and Noah in careful, methodical silence punctuated by moments that felt entirely too much like the marriage we were publicly ending. He made me coffee at midnight without being asked, exactly the way I took it, which I hadn't remembered telling him. I found the one financial record that finally connected Victor's signature to a shell company that had, five years ago, quietly bought up a portion of Carter Design's debt at a steep discount before selling it back to the bank at full value, engineering my father's crisis for a profit margin so cold it made me physically ill to look at.
"This is it," I said, staring at the document until the numbers blurred. "This is proof he did this on purpose."
Ethan leaned over my shoulder to look, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him along my back, and for a moment neither of us moved to put the appropriate distance back between us. His hand settled briefly on the back of my chair, not quite touching me, and I found myself acutely aware of exactly how little separated the space where his fingers rested from the space where my shoulder began.
"Your father would be proud of this," he said quietly, still reading over my shoulder. "Not the debt. This. Finding it. Refusing to let it stay buried."
"You didn't know him well enough to say that."
"I knew him for one conversation," Ethan said, "two days before he died, and it was enough to know he'd have recognized his own stubbornness in you immediately."
I turned to look at him, close enough that neither of us pretended, for a moment, that the distance between the marriage we were performing and the one taking shape quietly in this room was the same distance at all.
✲ ✲ ✲
Olivia found her opening exactly when I expected her to, at a gallery opening we could not avoid without drawing suspicion, cornering me near the coat check with the particular brightness of a woman who has been waiting for this moment.
"I have to say," she said, "I didn't expect you to actually go through with it. Trapping him with the marriage was one thing. But letting the whole city think you broke his heart, when everyone knows you're the one who married him for the company? That takes a special kind of nerve, Mia."
"I didn't ask for your opinion, Olivia."
"No, but you should hear it anyway." Her smile sharpened. "You seduced a man who was never available to you in the first place, out of pure spite, because you couldn't stand that he almost married someone else first. Everyone at this party already knows it. I made sure of that, this morning, over coffee with three separate reporters."
Something cold and furious rose in me, and for one unguarded second I very nearly abandoned the entire performance, right there by the coat check, in favor of telling Olivia Blake exactly what I thought of her methods. I did not get the chance.
"That's an interesting story," Ethan said, appearing behind Olivia with a stillness that made her spin around, "considering I proposed the marriage, Liv. Not her. I approached Mia's office, with a contract, because I needed a wife before a board vote. If you're telling reporters otherwise, you're lying to them, and I'd hate for that to come back on you."
Olivia's composure cracked, just slightly, at the edges. "Ethan—"
"We're done here," he said, not unkindly, but with a finality that left no room for further negotiation, and steered me away with a hand at my back that lingered a fraction longer than the performance strictly required.
"Thank you," I said quietly, once we were out of earshot.
"I didn't do it for you," he said, though the look on his face suggested otherwise. "I did it because she was lying, and I don't like liars. That's all."
"Of course," I said, hiding a smile I didn't fully understand. "That's exactly all it was."
✲ ✲ ✲
The public divorce scene, when it finally came, was staged for a single photographer Ethan's team had quietly arranged to "catch" us at, a final, definitive image to convince Noah the marriage was truly over. We stood on the mansion's front steps, the photographer positioned across the street with a long lens, and Ethan pulled me into an embrace that was meant, according to the script, to look like a last, grieving goodbye.
He did not let go when the photographer got the shot.
"Ethan," I said quietly, against his shoulder. "That's enough. He has it."
"I know," he said, his voice rough, his arms not loosening at all. "Give me another minute."
"Ethan."
"One more minute, Mia," he said, and I felt something in his voice crack open, some seam he'd kept carefully sealed since the airport, since the blackout, since the very first night I'd set his shirt on fire in his own kitchen, and I stopped counting the minutes after that, standing on the front steps of a house that was supposed to feel like the end of something, held by a man who did not, for a long time, let go.
✲ ✲ ✲
That night, unable to sleep, I went back to the financial records Grace had helped me organize into a private folder no one else had access to, cross-checking the shell company's paperwork one final time before we handed everything to Ethan's investigator in the morning.
It was there, buried in a scanned bank memo dated five years earlier, that I found the detail that changed everything I thought I understood about my father's final years.
The memo wasn't only about the debt. It referenced a private meeting between Victor Carter and the bank's loan officer, two full months before my father ever signed the original agreement, discussing terms for a loan my father had not yet requested, structured specifically to fail under conditions only someone with inside knowledge of Carter Design's cash flow could have engineered in advance.
My father hadn't taken on reckless debt out of desperation, the way I had believed for five long years, blaming a grief I never fully understood.
He had been set up, deliberately, by his own brother, months before he ever walked into that bank believing he had a choice.
But Victor had never worked in finance. He had never once, in twenty years, set foot in Carter Design's accounting office, and the cash flow projections referenced in that memo were precise down to the dollar, the kind of precision that required someone inside the numbers, not simply someone with a motive.
Beneath Victor's signature on the memo, in smaller print I'd nearly missed, was a second name I recognized instantly, because I had seen it, only weeks earlier, on a very different document entirely.
The consulting firm that had supplied those projections to Victor was owned, quietly and through two shell layers, by Noah Blake.