Ethan's POV
The mug hits the floor before I've decided to drop it, and the coffee goes wide across the kitchen tile in a dark spreading shape, and I stand there staring at the television screen and do not move. My fingers are still curved in the shape of a handle that isn't there anymore. I don't look down. I don't look at the mess.
Isabella is on every channel.
Not the Isabella from yesterday's news — not the jealous ex, not the abandoned fiancée, not the woman described as walking out in a rage while a dying woman got her happy ending. This Isabella is in emerald silk with her hair done and a smile on her face that I've never seen before, and she's standing next to Alexander Whitmore at a podium in front of hundreds of reporters and she's saying, I discovered I was already engaged to someone far better. Funny how that works.
The reporters laugh. She tilts her head just slightly when they do, easy and unbothered, the way a person moves when they know exactly where they are.
"Turn it off." Vanessa's voice behind me, sharp and high. "Ethan. Turn it off right now."
I can't turn it off. I can't look away. I watch Isabella gesture toward Alexander as she speaks — a small, open-palmed movement, like an offering, like she is presenting something she's proud of — and something about the fluency of it stops me cold. She looks — she looks like someone I don't recognize, and I spent six years with this woman, I know every expression she has, and this one is new. This one has no apology in it anywhere.
Something shatters. I spin to find Vanessa has thrown a vase — one of the wedding gift vases, still wrapped in cellophane — at the wall beside the television, and she's standing in the middle of the living room with her hands in fists at her sides, the tendons in her forearms drawn tight, and her face a color I've never seen on it.
"She doesn't get to do this," Vanessa says. Her voice is very quiet now, which is worse than when it was loud. "She doesn't get to just — walk out and land on her feet and make it look like she won. She doesn't get to win."
"Vanessa." I take a step toward her, hands out, palms up, the universal shape of please, stop, come back to me. "You need to calm down. The doctors said stress…"
"Don't." She points at me, one sharp finger leveled at the center of my chest like she's locating something. "Don't tell me about the doctors. And don't stand there looking at the screen like that. Like you miss her."
I don't answer. I lower my hands slowly. Maybe that's its own answer.
She makes a sound I've never heard from her — not grief, not anger, but something underneath both of those — and disappears down the hallway, and a door slams hard enough to shake the framed photos on the wall. I look at the photographs — mine and Isabella's, from three years ago, Isabella laughing at something off-camera with her whole face, still hanging there because nobody remembered to take them down — and I look at the television screen, where a reporter is saying Alexander Whitmore confirming the wedding will take place this weekend…
This weekend.
My phone has been ringing for the last ten minutes. I look at the screen. Richard Sinclair, four missed calls. I set the phone face-down on the counter and leave it there and stand in the kitchen looking at the coffee spreading slowly between the tile grout lines, already going cold.
~At Sinclair Manor ~
Victoria finds Richard in his office with the curtains drawn and every television dark, which tells her everything she needs to know about how the afternoon has gone. He is seated behind his desk with both hands flat on the surface in front of him, not doing anything with them, not holding anything. A man measuring how much weight a desk can bear.
"The lawyers confirmed it," she says from the doorway, because there is no gentle approach to this and she has never believed in softening things that need to be faced. "The contract is ironclad. Forty percent of Sinclair Industries transfers to the Whitmore Group if we contest it. Every firm we've called is saying the same thing."
Richard doesn't move. Not his hands, not his shoulders.
"Richard."
"I know." His voice comes out flat and strange, like something that used to have more weight to it. "I signed it before she was born. James Whitmore and I shook hands over it — literally, in this office, we stood right here and shook hands like men who thought that meant something permanent. I thought—" He stops. He presses one hand briefly over his mouth and then lowers it. "I thought it would never matter. I thought she'd marry Alexander quietly, that it would all work out without needing the lawyers. And then she met Ethan and I thought there was still time to…"
"You forgot," Victoria says. "You simply forgot it existed."
"I thought I had more time."
"We don't have any time." She crosses to his desk and puts her hands flat on it and waits, very still, until he looks at her. It takes a moment. "Is there anything — anything at all — that gives us grounds to challenge it?"
The silence that follows is the silence of a man who has run the calculation already and come up empty. She watches him do it again anyway, watches his eyes move slightly, the small unconscious arithmetic of someone checking their work and getting the same wrong answer.
"No," he says.
Victoria straightens. Something cold and deliberate settles over her face, the expression she gets when she has decided to solve a problem by whatever means are available. "Then we don't challenge the contract," she says. "We challenge the man."
She picks up her phone and walks out of the office, already dialing, already elsewhere.
"I don't care what it costs," she says into the phone as the door falls shut behind her. "Find dirt on Alexander Whitmore. Find something to break that contract. Isabella is not getting away with this."
In the hallway outside his father's office, Matthew Sinclair stands with his back against the wall, one hand around a glass of water he no longer wants, and listens to his mother's voice fade down the corridor. He is very still in the particular way of someone who has been still long enough to become part of the architecture.
He's been home from London for three days, called back for the wedding, and he has spent those three days watching his family behave in ways he doesn't have adequate words for. He watched his father strip Isabella's accounts. He watched Vanessa perform in the wheelchair. He watched his mother orchestrate it all from the center, moving people and leverage and money around a board only she could fully see.
And now he's listening to her plan the next move, and something in him — something that has been quietly deciding for three days — finishes deciding. He feels it the way you feel a door close: not loud, but definite.
He pulls out his phone. In his father's old files, the ones Richard never thought to password-protect because Richard has always trusted his son absolutely, Matthew found something six months ago that he has been holding like a live wire, unsure what to do with it. Turning it over. Waiting to understand what kind of person he was going to be.
He knows now.
He opens a new email, types an address from memory, and in the subject line he writes: She deserves to know the truth.
The recipient is Isabella Sinclair.
He hits send before he can change his mind, pockets his phone, and walks to the front door of Sinclair Manor with his shoulders level and his jaw set and doesn't look back.