Isabella's POV
Alexander Whitmore's version of shopping is having Saks Fifth Avenue close their entire store for two hours. Just for me.
I stand in the entrance and look at the empty floors — the hushed racks, the lighting that feels somehow warmer without crowds in it, the personal shoppers standing at precise intervals like they've been placed — and I have the specific, vertiginous feeling of a person who has had nothing for three days standing in the middle of everything.
"Too much?" Alexander asks from beside me, with the tone of someone who already knows the answer and is asking anyway.
"It's an entire department store."
"You need a wardrobe."
"I need three outfits and a blazer. This is… " I gesture at all of it — "this is absurd."
"You're about to become the most photographed woman in the country for the next six months." He says it without drama, just placing the fact. "Everything you wear will be analyzed. Chosen poorly, it becomes a story. Chosen well, it becomes armor." He glances at me. "Would you prefer a story or armor?"
I look at the racks and say nothing, which he correctly interprets as armor, and we go in.
* * *
The personal shopper — her name is Dana, and she moves through clothing the way surgeons move through instruments, with economy and absolute confidence — brings me things in waves. Structured blazers. Silk blouses in colors I'd never have reached for, emerald and deep rust and a blue so dark it's nearly black. Dresses that are built rather than draped. Everything with a line that means something.
Alexander sits in a chair near the fitting room entrance with his phone in one hand, and he looks up for every outfit. He doesn't perform the watching — doesn't lean forward or make a production of his attention — he just looks, briefly and completely, and then he either nods or he shakes his head once, and Dana takes her cue without asking why.
After the sixth outfit I say, without turning away from the mirror, "You're not actually my husband yet."
"No," he agrees.
"So the approving and dismissing…"
"It's just an opinion," he says. "Which you're entirely free to ignore." A pause. "You haven't ignored any of them."
I look at my reflection instead of answering, because he's right and we both know it, and I haven't quite figured out what that means yet.
"You hide behind modest clothes," he says, his voice even and unhurried. "The things you'd have chosen yourself are the things you immediately rejected. The ones that made you look past the mirror." He sets his phone down. "Stop hiding. You're stunning. Start dressing like a woman who knows it."
The personal shopper finds something incredibly interesting to do on the other side of the room.
I look in the mirror for a long time. At the woman in the deep-rust blazer who looks like she's going somewhere important and knows it. At the dark circles I couldn't quite cover. At the hands that haven't fully stopped shaking since yesterday morning.
"Give me a minute," I say, and I go into the fitting room and close the door.
* * *
The crying surprises me. I'd thought I was past it — or past the sudden kind, the kind that arrives without warning — but I'm sitting on the fitting room bench surrounded by ten thousand dollars' worth of clothing and I'm crying into my hands with the specific, ugly desperation of someone who has finally run out of things to hold themselves together with.
Three days ago I had a future. A plan. Six years of work and a wedding and a place in the world that felt solid even if it had never quite felt like mine.
Now I have thirty bags of clothes paid for by a stranger and a contract that trades one kind of belonging for another, and somewhere out there Ethan is watching the news and my father is on the phone with his lawyers and the whole machinery of my family's damage is grinding away, and I am sitting in a Saks Fifth Avenue fitting room crying because I don't know what I deserve anymore.
A knock at the door. One knock, then silence.
"I'm fine," I say.
"I know you're not," Alexander says from the other side. "And that's all right. I just want to make sure you haven't actually collapsed."
I make a sound that is trying to be a laugh and mostly fails.
A pause. Then: "May I come in?"
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and look at my reflection in the fitting room mirror — blotchy, undone, the very picture of a woman failing to hold it together — and then I open the door.
He takes me in without flinching. The red eyes, the mascara, the blazer that costs more than my old monthly rent worn by a person currently falling apart in a changing room. He doesn't say anything soothing. He doesn't tell me it's going to be fine.
"I don't deserve any of this," I say, because apparently I am going to say the thing out loud. "The clothes, the car, the contract. I didn't earn it. I'm not — I'm not what you think I am. I'm someone who gave everything to the wrong person for six years and has nothing to show for it. That's all I am right now."
Alexander looks at me for a moment. Then he says, very simply: "You deserve everything. And you're going to take it all."
Not because it's comforting. Because he means it.
I breathe in. Then out.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay," he says, and steps back, and gives me the space to pull myself together, and doesn't watch me do it.
* * *
Sophie arrives at hour two, summoned by Alexander's assistant with a precision I'm beginning to accept as his baseline, and she does what Sophie has always done — she looks at everything laid out and immediately identifies the twelve things that are powerful versus the eighteen that are just pretty, and we cut the order down to the ones that mean something.
"This one," she says, holding up a black dress so simple it almost disappears. "And this." A charcoal blazer with a waist that means business. "And definitely this." The emerald again, a second piece in the same color, which she holds up beside my face with the satisfied expression of a woman who has just proven a theory.
"The emerald is his choice," I say.
"The emerald is right," Sophie says. "Those are two different arguments."
I look at Alexander across the floor. He's in conversation with Dana, nodding at something, and he glances up and finds my eye with the directness he has, the kind that doesn't look away when you catch it.
Sophie makes a small sound beside me. "He looks at you like you are a solved problem he's glad he worked out."
"That's not romantic."
"No," she agrees. "It's better than romantic. It's certain."
I don't have an answer for that, so I take the charcoal blazer from her hands and go to add it to the pile.
* * *
Thirty bags. I count them as they're loaded into the Rolls Royce because I cannot help it, because every single one of them is proof of something I haven't finished processing yet — that my life changed direction so completely in seventy-two hours that I'm standing on a pavement outside Saks Fifth Avenue with thirty bags of clothes and a ring on my finger and a stranger's hand at the small of my back, and somehow this is better than where I was.
"Bella."
The voice hits me in the chest before my brain identifies it. I turn.
Ethan is on the pavement six feet away, and he looks nothing like the man I spent six years with. His hair isn't right. His shirt is untucked. And when he gets close enough I smell it — something sharp and sour that answers the question of where he's been since the press conference.
Security moves immediately, two of them stepping forward, and Alexander raises one hand and they stop.
"Let him speak," Alexander says, his voice easy, his face absolutely neutral. "This should be entertaining."
Ethan doesn't look at Alexander. His eyes are on me, red-rimmed and desperate, and he takes another step forward and says, "Please. Please just talk to me. This is insane. You don't even know him."
I look at Ethan. This man I rearranged myself for. This man I made smaller so he could be bigger. This man who stood in a bridal suite on our wedding morning and told me this is just a temporary arrangement like I was a seat that needed to be kept warm.
"You're right," I say. "I don't know him." I hold Ethan's gaze and make sure he hears the next part. "But I knew you. And you threw me away."
Ethan's face does something complicated and desperate and too late.
I take Alexander's offered hand and get in the car.
The door closes. Through the tinted window I can see Ethan still standing there, and then his voice comes through, muffled and raw: "Bella. PLEASE."
The car moves. Alexander's hand covers mine on the seat between us, warm and steady, and he doesn't say anything for a moment.
Then: "Well done."
I stare at the back of the headrest in front of me. My hands are shaking again — I can feel it, that deep tremor that hasn't fully left me since the morning I walked out of a chapel in forty thousand dollars of dress and had nothing — and I pressed them flat against my knees and breathed.
"I know," I say.