Chapter 2

He put the car in the agreement. Then he didn’t leave.

He found the first-aid kit and cleaned the cut on my finger. The antiseptic made me flinch, and he immediately softened.

“Tell me if it hurts.”

I looked down at him and remembered a desert in Utah, seven years ago. My motorcycle had died on a ridge at midnight. Grayson, in a borrowed jacket that didn’t fit him, helped me push it three miles. My palms had blistered on the handlebars. He cleaned them just like this, kissed my fingertips, and said, Sienna, you can always be yourself. No one gets to change you.

The love at the beginning had been real. So had every later demand that I change.

Maisy pushed the door open. “Gray, your front door is a nightmare.”

She didn’t look at the divorce papers. She dropped her helmet on the leather sofa and tracked mud across the wool rug. I said nothing. That rug was the one Grayson had brought back from Europe in our second year. I had stepped on it in canvas shoes, and he had frowned and told the housekeeper to replace the whole thing. The Ashford house isn’t a roadside motel, he’d said. There have to be rules.

Now Maisy left muddy prints on it, and he only sighed. “How many times have I told you not to barge in?”

She made a face at him. Then her eyes landed on my bare ring finger. “So you really agreed to the divorce?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not just pretending to be noble so you can cry to Gray later?”

“Maisy,” Grayson warned.

“Joking.” She stuck out her tongue. He didn’t make her apologize; he just picked up his jacket and draped it over her shoulders.

“Weren’t we going to watch the sunrise? Let’s go.”

At the door, he turned back to me. “Keep the driver after the transfer. You hate driving alone.”

He remembered. He also remembered that my knee ached in the rain. But the jacket on Maisy’s shoulders was the fifth-anniversary gift I had given him. A man could remember your habits and still delete you from his future.

I said okay. When the door closed, I called Margot.

“He signed.”

There was a pause on the line. “Which version?”

“The third. The lake house and the car are in it now.”

Margot laughed softly. “Good. He still feels guilty. The less you ask for, the more he’ll insist on giving you. Sienna, we’ve waited five years. We can wait thirty more days.”

I looked out the window at the taillights disappearing down the drive. “I know.”

Then I cried anyway.

The next morning, Grayson rode Maisy’s VoltRider to the family courthouse. He looked ridiculous on it, a grown man folded onto a scooter, his knees practically at the handlebars. Maisy sat behind him with her arms around his waist, laughing.

I watched from the Aurelian for a long moment before I got out.

Grayson’s smile faded when he saw me. “You’re early.”

“I wanted to beat the traffic.”

Maisy had her phone up, live on Streamly. The camera swung from the scooter to the luxury car to me.

“Look at this, guys,” she said to her audience. “One person gets divorced in a two-million-dollar car. The other rides toward freedom.”

The comments rolled in.

Is that the rich wife?

She dressed like that for a divorce? How is she going to survive without a man?

Maisy wins. He’d rather ride a scooter than go back to that mansion.

Grayson reached over and pushed her phone down. “Don’t film her.”

For a second, I thought he understood that filming me without consent was wrong. Then he turned to me. “Maisy makes a living on Streamly. She didn’t mean anything by it. Don’t hold it against her.”

Maisy peeked around her phone. “Relax, Mrs. Ashford. I used a beauty filter. You can’t even see the wrinkles.”

She was twenty-three. The same age I had been when I met Grayson. Back then, I was outside shooting most of the year. My skin was sunburned, and I had fine lines around my eyes when I laughed. Grayson used to touch my face and say they were wind kisses. After we married, he sent me to aestheticians and dressed me in evening gowns. He didn’t want me showing up at galas with a sunburned face.

Now Maisy had reduced five years of effort to vanity and aging with a single sentence.

I didn’t argue. I followed the clerk inside and signed the paperwork.