My Husband Left Me in the Fire, So I Took His Fortune

It started with diamonds.

Two years ago, the Ashford jewelry gala at the Plaza. Alex had his hand on the small of my back, and I was still the only woman he looked at.

Then Isabella Ashford walked down the staircase.

Champagne silk. Bare shoulders. Light poured over her like it had been waiting all night for her. She looked like a white camellia grown in a glass house, something no one had ever been allowed to touch.

Every man in the ballroom turned.

So did Alex.

"Who is that?" I asked.

He didn't answer right away. His fingers slid off my back.

"Isabella Ashford," he said. "Gerald's daughter. She just came back from London."

"You know her?"

"I know of her."

His voice was normal. But his eyes darkened, inch by inch, like a room when someone turns the lights down slowly. I'd watched that face for eleven years. I knew every look it had.

I'd just never seen that one pointed at someone else.

"Alex."

"Hm?"

"Nothing."

I already knew. He liked her.

---

After that, it happened in small pieces.

Isabella coughed at a charity lunch, and Alex left the table. He came back twenty minutes later with a pharmacy bag.

"You went yourself?" I asked. "You have three assistants."

"They'd buy the wrong thing."

Paparazzi trapped her outside a SoHo boutique. Alex was there before her own security.

Then a text came at two in the morning. I watched him read it in the blue glow of his phone, in our bed.

"Who is it?"

"Bella can't sleep." He was already pulling on a sweater.

"You have the Kessler merger at eight."

"I'll handle it."

"Alex. It's two a.m."

"She's alone, Violet."

The door shut. I lay there and listened to the elevator go down.

And the strangest part was that he never told her. Not once. Not one word.

"Why don't you just say it?" I asked him one night. "You obviously want her."

He set down his whiskey very carefully. "She's engaged to Jason Rhodes."

"So?"

"So I won't put her in that position." He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. "She doesn't deserve to be gossiped about."

He wouldn't let her suffer one ounce of embarrassment.

But he'd let me suffer all of it.

---

"Alex, let me leave."

I said it in his study, standing in front of his desk with my coat already on.

He didn't look up from his laptop. "Leave where?"

"You. This house. I don't want to be next to you anymore."

He laughed. One quiet breath through his nose.

"If you leave me," he said, "where would you even go?"

"Anywhere."

Now he looked up.

He came around the desk slowly and took my wrist. Not hard. He didn't have to grip hard. His thumb settled right over my pulse, like he was checking that it still belonged to him.

The corner of his mouth curved. The smile was so cold it hurt.

"Violet. You stay with me. That's the only place you go."

---

So I fought him instead.

I fought him over dinner. Over a missed birthday. Over a bracelet that showed up on Isabella's wrist in a magazine photo, the same one he'd once said was "too flashy" for me.

"You bought her that."

"It was a thank-you for her father's introduction."

"Do you hear yourself?"

"Lower your voice."

"Why? Afraid someone will tell *Bella*?"

His glass hit the counter. "Don't say her name like that."

"Like what? Like she's the reason you come home at four in the morning smelling like her perfume?"

"Violet."

"Say it, Alex! Just say you want her!"

He crossed the kitchen in two strides and caught my chin between his fingers. He tipped my face up toward the light.

His eyes ran over me, slow and flat.

"Look at yourself," he said. "Look at what you've turned into. You're ugly like this."

I waited for the anger to come.

It didn't.

Something inside me simply clicked off, like a lamp. No crash. No scream. Just quiet.

"Okay," I said.

He frowned. "Okay?"

"Okay."

He let go of my chin. I walked out of the kitchen, and I didn't slam a single door.

That night I packed two suitcases and carried them across the estate to the little guest cottage by the east gardens. By morning I'd told the staff the same thing, one by one.

"If Mr. Reyes comes, I'm not seeing him."

The housekeeper twisted her apron. "Miss Monroe, he'll be angry."

"Then let him be angry somewhere else."

---

Some nights in that cottage, the memories came in without knocking.

Alex at twenty, in a hospital bed after a car tried to run him off the Long Island Expressway. Me at his side, crying so hard I hiccupped.

He'd lifted one weak hand and pinched my cheek.

"Hey. Quit crying. You always call me trouble, right?"

"You *are* trouble."

"And trouble lives forever." He grinned with cracked lips. "You're stuck with me, Vi."

Or the Thanksgiving parade when I was sixteen. The crowd surged near Herald Square. Someone shoved. A scaffold of giant paper turkeys tipped toward us, and Alex wrapped his whole body around mine like a shell.

I heard the metal hit his back.

He spent three days flat in bed. I sat beside him every hour of them, sniffling into his blanket.

When he finally opened his eyes, the first thing he said was, "It's fine, Vi. Doesn't hurt."

The sweeter those memories got, the more they burned going down.

---

Last spring, Alex got hurt again.

Some street thugs cornered Isabella outside a club in the Meatpacking District. Alex pulled one of them off her, and another one put a knife in his back.

I heard the cars come up the drive at midnight. I stood at the cottage window and watched him climb out of the back seat. His face was gray. His shirt was stuck to him in dark patches. Two of his men held his arms.

He glanced toward the east gardens once.

I didn't move from the window. I didn't open the door.

He'd saved me once. I'd saved him once. We were even.

In my arms, Cinnamon twitched her nose and burrowed into my sweater. She was the brown rabbit he'd given me three Christmases ago, the twin of the white one he'd kept for himself.

Snowball.

The housekeeper told me last week. Snowball died in a hutch in the main house, water bowl dry, because nobody remembered he was there. Alex had been at Isabella's for five days straight.

I stroked Cinnamon's ears and whispered into her fur.

"Do you miss him? Your brother?"

She didn't answer. Of course she didn't.

A man like that, I thought, doesn't even deserve a rabbit.

Across the lawn, the lights in the main house went on room by room. Then the door to the main house opened, and a figure stepped out onto the porch, holding his side.

He was looking straight at my window.

And he started walking.