Chapter 2 - The Document Between Them
I stared at the photograph until the letters of my own name blurred. The document was angled away from the camera, so I could not read the smaller print, but the heading was visible.
GRANT FAMILY HOLDINGS — SPOUSAL CONSENT.
I had never signed anything with that title.
Sophia sent another message.
I thought you knew. Apparently you don’t.
My first instinct was to call Alexander, but I stopped myself. That was the old Erin—the woman who asked him to explain things and then allowed him to explain them until she doubted what she had seen with her own eyes. Instead, I enlarged the photograph and saved three copies.
“What time do you close?” I asked the saleswoman.
“For you tonight? Whenever you’re finished.”
“I’m finished.”
By 12:20 a.m., I was in the back of a car headed home with the red coat wrapped around me and thirty-seven receipts inside my new handbag. Alexander’s card sat in a side pocket. I had no intention of using it again.
The house was dark when I arrived, except for the dining room candles I had forgotten to extinguish. One had burned itself into a pool of wax. The dinner remained untouched. I looked at the silver anniversary box beside Alexander’s wineglass and almost left it there. Instead, I opened it, removed the restored cuff link, and placed it in my pocket.
That gift belonged to the woman I had been that afternoon.
She no longer existed.
I went upstairs and opened the safe in my dressing room. My passport, birth certificate, grandmother’s jewelry, and several personal documents were inside. I took all of them. Then I opened the cabinet where Alexander kept household records.
Nothing titled “Spousal Consent.”
At 1:08, headlights swept across the bedroom wall.
Alexander came home.
I heard the front door slam.
“Erin?”
I remained in the dressing room.
He appeared seconds later, still wearing the suit he had chosen for Sophia. “Thirty-seven transactions?”
“You counted.”
“My security team counted.”
“Your security team monitors what your wife buys?”
“When my wife spends almost two hundred thousand dollars in three hours, yes.”
“Two hundred and fourteen thousand.”
His eyes narrowed. “That makes it better?”
“No. Accurate.”
For the first time, he seemed uncertain how to speak to me.
“Where’s the card?”
I removed it and held it out.
He stared at my hand rather than taking it.
“You bought luggage.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You know what luggage is used for.”
“Stop playing games.”
I almost smiled. “That’s interesting coming from you.”
His expression hardened. “Is this about Sophia?”
“No.”
“That’s obviously a lie.”
“This is about me.”
He actually looked confused.
I walked past him into the bedroom and pulled one of my old suitcases from the closet. Bellamy & Rowe would deliver the new luggage tomorrow, but I was not waiting.
Alexander followed. “You’re leaving because I had dinner with an old friend?”
I folded a sweater.
“Erin.”
Another sweater.
He caught the suitcase lid before I could open it fully. “Talk to me.”
I looked at his hand.
“Move it.”
Something in my voice made him obey.
I packed in silence.
Finally he said, “Sophia’s fiancé died eight months ago.”
That stopped me.
I turned.
“What?”
“She came back because she’s struggling. She called me. I didn’t think she should be alone.”
For half a second, sympathy complicated my anger. Then I remembered the photograph.
“And therefore your wife should be alone on her anniversary?”
His jaw tightened.
“You could have invited her here,” I continued. “You could have told me. You could have had lunch with her. You could have remembered that I exist.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was the document?”
He froze.
There it was.
Not confusion.
Recognition.
“What document?”
“The one sitting between you and Sophia at dinner.”
His silence answered first.
Then he said, “How did you see that?”
I laughed once. “That’s your question?”
“Did Sophia send you a picture?”
“What is Spousal Consent?”
His face changed.
It was slight, but after two years of studying Alexander Grant, I knew every version of his silence.
This one meant danger.
“Business paperwork.”
“With my name?”
“Yes.”
“That I’ve never seen?”
He rubbed his jaw. “Erin, this is not the time.”
“Then when?”
“I said not tonight.”
I stared at him.
He heard himself too.
The same phrase.
The same expectation.
Wait until Alexander decided my life was convenient enough to discuss.
I zipped the suitcase.
“I’m staying at Paige’s.”
His expression sharpened. “You’re not leaving this house at one in the morning.”
“Watch me.”
“Erin.”
I picked up my coat.
Then his gaze fell to my hand.
The sapphire ring.
“What is that?”
“A ring.”
“I can see that.”
“Then why ask?”
His face hardened. “Take it off.”
That was when I understood something I should have understood years earlier.
Alexander did not care that I had spent his money.
He cared that I had chosen something without him.
“No.”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“No?”
“No.”
I walked downstairs.
He followed me into the foyer. “If you leave tonight, don’t turn this into some dramatic separation tomorrow.”
I stopped with my hand on the door.
“We’re already separated, Alexander.”
“We sleep in the same bed.”
“That isn’t what marriage means.”
He stared at me.
I opened the door.
Behind me, his voice dropped.
“Erin, if you walk out, there are consequences you don’t understand.”
I slowly turned around.
“What consequences?”
He said nothing.
And suddenly the photograph on Sophia’s phone mattered even more.
I stepped back inside, but not because I intended to stay.
“Say that again.”
Alexander looked away.
“What consequences?”
“Forget it.”
“No. You’ve spent two years telling me I misunderstand things. Explain this one.”
He walked toward his study.
I followed.
He opened a cabinet, poured whiskey, and drank half the glass.
“Grant Family Holdings is restructuring.”
“And?”
“My grandfather’s trust contains a marital clause.”
My heartbeat changed.
“What marital clause?”
He looked at me then.
For the first time that night, Alexander looked afraid.
“If our marriage ends before our third anniversary,” he said, “I lose controlling voting rights in Grant Meridian.”
I stared at him.
Our third anniversary was one year away.
“So that’s why you married me?”
“No.”
“Is that why you stayed married to me?”
“No.”
But he answered too quickly.
I stepped backward.
Alexander reached for me. “Erin—”
“Don’t.”
His hand stopped.
I suddenly understood the vacations he had postponed, the arguments he refused to finish, the way his mother kept encouraging us to “give marriage time.”
They did not need forever.
They needed three years.
I had been living inside a countdown nobody bothered to tell me existed.
Then Alexander said the sentence that broke whatever remained.
“If you file for divorce now, you could destroy everything my family built.”
I looked at him.
Not us.
His family.
His company.
His inheritance.
Everything except me.
I opened the front door again.
“This afternoon, I would have done almost anything to save our marriage.”
“Erin.”
May you like
I stepped into the cold.
“You should have come home six hours earlier.”
