chapter 5
1113 Words
Confessions on Christmas Eve
The message sat in Emma's phone like a splinter.
She had not responded to it. She had not shown it to Alex. She had photographed it, stared at it
across three separate evenings, and constructed eleven different theories about who sent it and
what it meant, and then quietly, deliberately, she had done nothing.
Because doing nothing felt safer than pulling the thread.
December arrived the way it always did in the city suddenly and completely, as though someone
had flipped a switch overnight. Christmas lights appeared in shop windows. The office lobby
grew a tree that someone on the events team decorated with silver baubles and tiny white
lights. The air outside turned sharp and clean and honest, the kind of cold that made everything
feel more immediate than it was.
Emma told herself the hollow feeling in her chest was the season. People got nostalgic in
December. It was chemical. It was completely unrelated to the fact that every time Alex set a
coffee on her desk in the morning, she had to remind herself of the ground rules she'd written on
paper in September like a sensible person.
This is a performance. We are colleagues. We are adults.
She was reconsidering all three.
Cassandra made her move on a Tuesday.
Emma heard it first from Dana, who had heard it from someone in PR, who had heard it from
two separate people at a fundraising dinner the previous weekend. The details varied slightly in
each retelling but the shape of them remained consistent that Emma Sinclair's sudden
engagement to Alexander Carter was a calculated move, an ambitious woman leveraging
proximity to power, that the relationship was manufactured and everyone in the right circles
already knew it.
She's always been more interested in his position than her own work.
Emma sat with it. Let it move through her the way cold water moved through a closed fist
impossible to hold, impossible to ignore.
Then she went back to her desk and finished the campaign brief she'd been working on,
because she was not going to let Cassandra Reynolds interrupt her deadline.
But the message from the unknown number throbbed at the back of her mind.
Ask Carter why he chose you.
Ethan found her at the coffee station on Wednesday morning.
She'd known this was coming. She'd felt it in the way he'd been orbiting present at the edges of
meetings, appearing in corridors at convenient moments, performing the role of the reasonable,
concerned ex with the dedication of a man who'd rehearsed it.
Em. He leaned against the counter. Can we talk?
I have eight minutes before a call.
This won't take long. He glanced over his shoulder, a gesture so practiced it almost looked
natural. I'm worried about you.
Emma poured her coffee. That's kind.
I'm serious. His voice dropped. The green eyes went earnest in the way she used to find
disarming. Carter isn't what he presents himself as. There are things about him, business
things, decisions he's made that don't add up.
Ethan
He chose you specifically, he said. Out of everyone in that building. Don't you find that
convenient?
The unknown message. Six words.
Emma's hand stilled on her coffee cup.
I think, she said carefully, that you should go back to Cassandra.
Something flashed in his eyes, not hurt. Frustration. The specific frustration of a man whose
script wasn't landing.
She put you up to this, Emma said. Quietly. Certainly. Whatever you're doing right now.
He opened his mouth.
Don't, she said. Please don't.
She picked up her coffee and walked away, and she did not look back, and her hands were
completely steady, and she was enormously proud of that for approximately forty seconds.
Then she turned the corner, stopped in the empty corridor, pressed her back against the wall,
and pulled out her phone.
She typed one message to Alex.
We need to talk tonight.
He came to her apartment.
She hadn't expected that had assumed they'd meet in some neutral, professional location that
reinforced the appropriate distance between them. But he arrived at seven with his jacket over
his arm and snow on his shoulders from the ten steps between his car and her building
entrance, and when she opened the door he looked at her face and said, What happened,
without making it a question.
She showed him the message.
He read it once. His jaw tightened.
Sit down, she said. Please.
He sat. She stayed standing because she needed the advantage of movement, something to do
with her hands, somewhere to direct the energy of everything she'd been carrying since
Tuesday.
Did you choose me? she asked. Specifically. Before the ring, before the corridor did you know
what you were doing?
Silence.
Alex.
Yes, he said.
The word landed like a stone into still water.
Emma stared at him. Explain that.
He looked at his hands briefly. Then up at her, with the expression he'd worn on the gallery edge
the look of a man stepping onto uncertain ground and choosing to step anyway.
I knew about Ethan before you did, he said quietly. Not the details. But enough. Someone on
the team had raised concerns and I was already watching the situation. A pause. When you
came around that corridor, I understood immediately what had happened. And when you put
that ring on my hand something moved across his face I made a decision.
To protect me, Emma said. Flat. Testing it.
Yes.
That's not Alex, that's not. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. You should have told me.
I know.
From the beginning, you should have
I know, Emma.
The way he said her name stopped her.
She looked at him. He was watching her with an openness she had never seen in two years, not
in boardrooms, not in the Maldives, not in the gallery. Something stripped back and undefended
and completely, dangerously honest.
I stopped pretending somewhere over the Indian Ocean, he said quietly. I just didn't think you had.
The room went very still.
Emma's heart knocked hard against her ribs once, twice, a third time that felt like a question
she hadn't decided to ask yet.
Alex
Her door buzzer sounded.
She crossed to the intercom. Yes?
Static. Then Dana's voice, wrong in pitch, tight in a way that made Emma's stomach drop.
Emma. Don't panic. There are photographers outside like a lot of them. Someone just released
a story. A breath. They're saying the engagement is fake. They have a source. And Emma
A pause that lasted entirely too long.
The source is someone inside your apartment building.
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