I stare at the papers in my hand.
Dissolution of Marriage.
The words are so clean. So simple. A legal eraser for a colossal, life-altering fuck-up.
For a split second, a single, hysterical laugh bubbles up in my chest. Of course. Of course Theo Raine has divorce papers on speed dial. The man treats crises like hostile takeovers—preemptive strikes, overwhelming force, and a complete lack of emotional sentimentality.
He's already managing the problem.
He's already erasing me.
The thought should be a relief. It is a relief. A messy, complicated, shame-filled kind of relief.
But it's also… something else.
Something that feels unnervingly like being dismissed.
"You had these ready," I say. It comes out flat. An observation, not an accusation.
He's already moved across the room, pulling on a pair of jeans that look like they cost more than my first car. He doesn't bother with a shirt. Because of course he doesn't.
"I woke up an hour before you did," he says, his back to me. "I assessed the situation and initiated a protocol."
"A protocol," I repeat, numb. "You have a protocol for waking up accidentally married to your former therapist?"
He finally turns, and for the first time, the smirk is gone. His face is all sharp angles and serious intent. He looks like the CEO who can tank a market with a single tweet. Not the patient who used to pick apart my theories on attachment with infuriating accuracy.
"I have a protocol for high-consequence, public-facing emergencies. Yes." He gestures to the papers in my hand. "Step one is containment. Step two is reversal. This is both."
"Right." I nod, my professional brain latching onto the familiar structure of crisis management. "Okay. So we sign these. We file them. We never speak of this again."
"It's not that simple, Elara."
"Why not?"
"Because we don't know what 'this' is." He runs a hand through his already messy hair. "We need a timeline. Data points. We need to know exactly how badly we screwed up before we can unfuck it."
He's right. Goddammit, he's right. My inner clinician cringes at his phrasing but agrees with the logic. We have to understand the pathology before we can prescribe a treatment.
"Okay," I say, placing the divorce papers reverently on the mahogany desk as if they might explode. "Data points. The last thing I remember clearly is the conference dinner. My assistant, Brenda, was with me. I was not drinking."
"I was at a dinner with my board," he says, pulling his phone from his jeans pocket. "An utterly soul-crushing affair at some Michelin-starred shoebox downtown. I had exactly one glass of Macallan 25. Then I left."
"And then?"
He squints, looking at a point over my shoulder. "I remember… wanting to get out of the suit. I went to a bar. One of the casino bars downstairs. The one with the big, stupid crystal dragon."
A flash. The glitter of a thousand suspended crystals. The low thrum of house music.
"I was there," I whisper.
"Yeah." His eyes meet mine. "You were. You were at the bar, arguing with the bartender about the neuro-psychological benefits of top-shelf gin versus well gin."
My face burns. I would never.
Except… I have a vague memory of doing exactly that.
"What happened next?" I press.
"That's the problem," he says, scrolling through his phone. "It gets… patchy. Like a badly edited movie. I remember you laughing. A lot. I remember us talking to some guys from a bachelor party. I remember you convincing them to choreograph a dance to a song by The Killers."
"I did not."
"You did. There's a video of it on Instagram, but we can get to that later." He waves a dismissive hand. "The point is, we need more than just fragments. We need video. Hard evidence."
He taps his phone screen, puts it to his ear.
"Dmitri," he says, without preamble. "I need the security footage from the entire VIP wing of this hotel from last night. All camera angles. From 10 p.m. until now… Yes, all of them… I don't care what you have to do, I want it on my laptop in five minutes."
He hangs up. No goodbye. No thank you. Just the calm, terrifying certainty of a man who has never been told 'no.'
Five minutes later, a chime sounds on his laptop.
He gestures for me to come over.
Every instinct in my body screams at me to stay away. To not get closer. But the need for information, for control, is stronger. I walk over, perching on the edge of the chair next to his, a chaste foot of distance between us. My skin prickles with awareness. I can feel the heat radiating off him.
He clicks 'play.'
The screen fills with the silent, grayscale footage of the hotel hallway. Time stamp in the corner. 11:47 p.m.
The elevator doors slide open.
Two figures stumble out.
Us.
He has his arm around my shoulder, and I'm leaning into him, my head tilted back in a silent laugh. Video-Elara looks… happy. Carefree. A complete and total stranger.
He fumbles with the key card to our suite. Drops it. I bend down to get it at the same time he does, and we bump heads. And then we're both laughing. An intimate, shared moment of ridiculousness.
He finally gets the door open and ushers me inside. Before the door closes, he leans down and kisses me.
It's not a sloppy, drunken kiss.
It's slow. Intentional. My video-self rises on her toes, her hands tangling in his hair, pulling him closer. It's a kiss that speaks of familiarity. Of chemistry.
Of something real.
I feel my stomach plummet.
"Turn it off," I say, my voice tight.
He ignores me, clicking to another file. The casino bar. There we are, sitting close, heads bent together. He says something. I throw my head back and laugh. The same open-mouthed, uninhibited laugh from the hallway.
Another file. A wedding chapel. A cheap, god-awful, pastel-pink nightmare of a place.
There's the Elvis impersonator.
And there we are, standing in front of him, holding hands. Theo says something, and I can see my video-self nodding, my eyes shining. I look radiant. I look like a woman in love.
I look like someone I have never been.
Theo clicks the laptop shut. The sudden silence is deafening.
"So," he says, his voice carefully neutral. "That happened."
I can't speak. I just shake my head, staring at the blank screen. That wasn't me. It couldn't have been. I don't get that happy. I don't let go that much. I don't fall in love with my patients in Vegas wedding chapels.
"I don't understand," I finally manage to say. "I don't remember being that… intoxicated."
It's true. The memories I have are fuzzy, but the feeling I remember wasn't one of sloppy, out-of-control drunkenness. It was a feeling of… euphoria. A strange, floaty, unburdened lightness.
"Neither do I," Theo says, and his voice is different now. The CEO is gone. The patient is gone. This is someone else. Someone serious. Concerned. "I've been drunk before. I've been black-out drunk before. This wasn't it."
My head snaps up. I look at him. Really look at him. The confidence is still there, but it's underpinned by a flicker of something else. Confusion. Uncertainty.
"The hangover," I say, the pieces starting to click together in my clinical brain. "The severity of the amnesia is disproportionate to the subjective feeling of intoxication we recall. The headache… it feels chemical. Not alcoholic."
"And the memory gaps," he adds, catching on immediately. "They're not fuzzy. They're surgical. Like entire chunks of the tape were just… erased."
We stare at each other.
The air in the room shifts.
This is no longer about a mistake we made.
This isn't about us anymore.
The horrifying, unifying thought dawns on us at the exact same moment.
We weren't just drunk.
Something is not right.
We were drugged.
Someone did this to us. Orchestrated it. The wedding, the public spectacle… it was a setup.
The silence that follows is heavier than anything that's come before it. It's a silence filled with the shadow of a new, unknown enemy. For the first time since I woke up, Theo and I are on the same side. Two unwilling allies against a threat we can't even name yet.
And in that moment of fragile, terrifying alliance… his phone rings.
The sound is obscene in the quiet room. A sharp, custom ringtone that sounds like a collapsing building.
He pulls it out of his pocket, his eyes narrowed at the screen. I see his expression shift. The strategic calm evaporates, replaced by a flash of pure, undiluted shock.
"What the hell," he mutters.
He swipes to answer, his thumb hovering for a second before pressing down.
"Yeah?"
A pause. I watch his jaw tighten.
"Who is this?"
Another pause, longer this time. His knuckles are white where he's gripping the phone.
"That's not possible. How did you get this number?"
He listens, his face a mask of stone. But I can see a muscle twitching in his cheek. He's losing control, and it's terrifying to watch.
He hangs up without another word, tossing the phone onto the bed as if it's on fire.
He looks at me, and his eyes are bleak. All the power, all the confidence, all the infuriating calm has been stripped away. All that's left is the raw, stark reality of our new situation.
"What is it?" I ask, my voice barely a whisper. "Who was that?"
He takes a slow breath, the air rattling in his chest.
"That," he says, his voice dangerously low, "was a reporter. From the L.A. Chronicle."
He lets the silence stretch, lets the full weight of his next words land on me like an anvil.
"He wanted an exclusive comment on my surprise wedding."