Chapter 3

I generally minded my own business. As long as Ethan's women stayed out of my face, I could pretend they didn't exist.

Mia Parker was the exception.

She was young, pretty, and well educated. Wasting years on him for a two-hundred-thousand-dollar goodbye? She could do better.

I found her email address and anonymously sent her the truth about Ethan Cole. His company. His money. His wife.

I wrote the message three times. The first version sounded jealous, which was inaccurate and therefore offensive. The second sounded like a corporate disclosure notice. The third was plain: the man she knew under a trimmed-down version of his life owned half the skyline, wore poverty like a costume, and came home to a wife when the performance ended.

My finger hovered over Send.

If I had wanted revenge, I could have copied Ethan. I didn't. If I had wanted gratitude, I would have signed my name. I wanted Mia to have the one thing no one had given the poor young man in my own past: the truth before years turned into a bill no amount of money could pay.

That was the noble version. The less noble version was that I wanted to see what Ethan's grand romance looked like after somebody switched on the lights.

I sent it.

I expected tears, a fight, perhaps a breakup.

I didn't expect her to try to kill herself.

At the hospital, I stood outside the ICU and looked through the glass at her pale face. My knees weakened. I felt sick.

I'd been here before, years earlier.

I'd sat on one of those hard, cold chairs all night, barely moving, waiting for morning.

Ethan threw a printout of my email in my face.

The pages struck my shoulder and slid across the hospital floor. One stopped beside a nurse's shoe. She stepped around it without looking at either of us. Hospitals make private disasters look embarrassingly ordinary.

Ethan had been pacing for an hour. His shirt was wrinkled, and there was dried soup on one cuff from the apartment life he found so authentic. I had never seen him wear panic so badly.

"Look what you've done. You wanted her gone. Did you have to be this cruel?"

For once, I didn't bow my head and apologize.

I threw the pages back at him.

"I was trying to protect her. She's been with you for three months, and finding out did this to her. What if it had been three years? Did you ever think about what it would do to her to discover that her boyfriend wasn't just pretending to be poor, but married to somebody else?"

His assistant had told me Mia truly wanted to marry him. She'd used money her parents had saved for her to buy a little house on the outskirts of the city. Their future home.

She supposedly didn't care that he had nothing. Didn't care that he seemed happy to drift through life without ambition. She was prepared to build a future for them both.

Listening to the assistant, I'd found it hard to stay in the present.

Someone had once offered to take care of me like that. He'd had so little idea what he was promising.

I looked at Ethan.

"Could you really do that to her? Keep her as your mistress?"

"My mistress?"

He gave a short laugh and turned toward me.

"What makes you so sure I wouldn't divorce you?"

I stared at him.

The corridor seemed to narrow around us. Until then, divorce had been a weapon we kept mounted over the fireplace, polished and visible, neither of us foolish enough to fire it. I had assumed his women were punishment, entertainment, or both. I had not considered that one of them might become a competing bidder.

"You'd leave the company in my hands?" I asked.

His jaw tightened. That was not the response he'd wanted. He had offered me heartbreak, and I had asked about governance.

"You always do that," he said. "Turn everything into money."

"Money is the part people can't deny saying later."

His eyes flicked toward the ICU door. "Maybe that's why she is different."

There it was: the comparison he'd been waiting to make. I felt the insult land, then watched myself calculate around it. Habit is a sturdy little animal.