After My Husband Humiliated Me, I Bankrupted Him

Miley started showing up on Thursdays. Then Mondays too. Then whenever she felt like it.

She'd let herself into the penthouse with a key I didn't know she had, carrying swatches for the gala, or a bottle of wine "for Grant," or a small wrapped box that she'd leave on the console table where I couldn't miss it. The cards were always visible. Always signed with that same looping M.

"Oh, Adalyn." She said my name like she was trying it out for the first time, every time. "I love that you just... wear the same three dresses. It's very brave. Very low-maintenance."

"Thank you," I said.

She tilted her head, studying me the way you'd study a stray cat that had wandered somewhere it didn't belong. "Have you found a little hobby? To keep yourself busy? I worry about you, rattling around this big apartment all day."

"I keep myself busy." I didn't give her more than that. I never did. Nothing to grab onto, nothing to repeat later at dinner with a raised eyebrow.

She smiled like she'd won something anyway, and went to find Grant.

I let her have it. I had a folder in a drawer in Brooklyn with my name on a patent that was worth more than everything in this penthouse combined, and she was worried about my dress. I almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

—

The gala was at a Fifth Avenue mansion turned museum, all marble and hushed lighting, a string quartet playing somewhere I couldn't see. I drifted toward the auction preview because it was the only corner of the room that didn't make my skin itch, glass cases of estate jewelry and old silver, and then I saw it — an 18th-century repeater, gold case, engine-turned dial, sitting under glass like it was embarrassed to be there among the diamonds.

"Breguet-style escapement," a voice said beside me, low, accented, delighted. "Though I suspect it's a very good English imitation. Look at the pillar plate."

I looked up. Silver hair, sharp blue eyes, a bow tie that had gone slightly crooked from what I guessed was hours of enthusiastic gesturing. I knew the face before I knew the name — I'd seen it in restoration journals, at the back of a textbook I'd worn thin in my twenties.

"You're Viktor Hoffmann."

"I am." He looked pleased, not surprised, like he expected to be recognized by exactly the right people and no one else. "And you know what a pillar plate is, which means you are the only interesting person at this party."

We stood there for twenty minutes. Maybe longer. I told him about the beat error, about a repeater train I'd once rebuilt tooth by tooth because the original jeweler had used a nonstandard pitch. His eyebrows kept climbing higher. At one point he actually grabbed my wrist — not unkindly, just urgently — to make a point about escapement geometry, and I laughed, really laughed, for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit.

"Where did you train?" he asked.

"Mostly myself. Some study under one of your former apprentices."

His eyes lit up like I'd handed him a gift. "Then we must talk properly. Not here. Somewhere with better light and worse champagne."

That's when I felt the grip on my elbow.

Grant's fingers pressed in hard enough to bruise, and when I turned, his face had that particular smoothness he wore over anger — jaw tight, eyes flat.

"Viktor." He said the name like it tasted bad. "I see you've met my wife."

"A remarkable conversation," Viktor said, warmly, not yet understanding what he'd walked into.

Grant's smile didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "My wife has a habit of throwing herself at interesting men for attention." He said it lightly, like a joke among friends, loud enough for the two couples nearby to hear. "You'll have to forgive her. She doesn't get out much."

The quartet kept playing. Someone near the bar laughed at something unrelated. The world just went on, the way it always does when you're the one bleeding and no one else can see it.

Viktor went very still. I watched something recalculate behind his eyes — not embarrassment, something closer to disgust, aimed entirely at Grant.

I looked down at Grant's hand on my elbow like it belonged to a stranger. Then, slowly, with two fingers, I lifted it off my arm and set it back at his side. I didn't yank it away. I didn't need to. There's a way to remove someone's hand that says more than shouting ever could.

"If you'll excuse me," I said, to Viktor, not to Grant. "It was a genuine pleasure."

"The pleasure was mine, Mrs. Payne." His voice had gone quiet, careful, the way you speak to someone you've just realized has been underestimated by everyone in the room. "I hope we speak again."

I walked away without looking back at Grant. My elbow throbbed where his fingers had been, a small, stupid, real pain, and underneath it something colder and steadier was settling into place, the same stillness I'd felt at the dinner table under Eleanor's toast.

I thought about the folder in Brooklyn. I thought about Reign's voice saying *airtight.*

Let him have his party favors. Let him have his painting and his Miley and his laughing table.

I was almost done waiting.