The Billionaire's Regret: She was his wife. Now she's his competition

The Hartwell ballroom held three hundred people, and Avah Morne knew exactly which forty of them mattered. She knew it the way she knew most things about a room like this — not because anyone had told her, but because she'd spent three years learning it from the inside. Back then she'd stood at the edges as somebody's wife, holding a glass she didn't drink from, watching who leaned toward whom and who laughed half a second too late. She'd filed all of it away and used none of it. Decoration didn't need to be clever. It only had to stand still and photograph well. She wasn't decorating tonight. Tonight she was at Morne Studio. The card in her clutch said so. And the dress she'd chosen was a deep, unrepentant blue — a color she'd never have worn in the old life, when her wardrobe had been a quiet negotiation between elegant and invisible. Invisible had been the point. A wife who stood out was a wife who needed managing. She didn't have a husband to manage her anymore. She'd been divorced for eighteen months, and the strangest part of it, the part she still hadn't told anyone, was how much lighter a person could become once they stopped carrying someone else's idea of them. "You're doing the scan," Clove murmured beside her, lifting two glasses of something pale off a passing tray and handing one over. "I can see you doing it. You've gone all tactical." "I'm enjoying the party." "You're cataloging the party." Clove sipped. "There's a difference, and you've never once enjoyed one of these in your life." That wasn't true, but Avah let it stand, because arguing would mean explaining the specific pleasure of walking into a room that had once swallowed her whole and feeling, now, like she could pick it up and turn it over in her hands. There wasn't a clean way to say that out loud without sounding like she had something to prove. She did have something to prove. She just preferred to prove it quietly. "Three confirmed," she said instead, low, the way they always tallied. "The Aldridge renovation was signed this morning. The clinic in the Meadows. And the restaurant group wants all four locations, not two." "All four." Clove's eyebrows went up over the rim of her glass. "When did that happen?" "Tuesday. They saw the mockups for the first two and decided they didn't want anyone else touching the others." "That's a good problem." "It's the best kind of problem." Avah's eyes moved across the room again, not tactical now, she told herself, just aware. "And there's a fourth I'm working on. Don't look. Eleven o'clock, near the windows, woman in grey, talking to the man with the terrible tie." Clove, who had the discipline of a cat watching a bird, did not look. "Who is she?" "Talia Brandt. She owns the two boutique hotels on the river, and she's about to own a third. She hasn't chosen a designer. She's met four of them and hated all four, which she will tell you within ninety seconds of meeting her, because she likes you to know she has standards." "Sounds insufferable." "She's wonderful. We just haven't met yet." Avah set her glass down on a side table, untouched, an old habit she'd never managed to break. "Give me ten minutes." It took her seven. She didn't approach Talia Brandt directly — that was amateur, and the woman would have smelled it coming. Instead, she let herself drift into the orbit of the conversation Talia was already trapped in, the one with the terrible tie, and she waited for the natural opening that always came at events like this, the moment when a bored person registers a more interesting person nearby and quietly begins angling toward escape. When it came, Avah simply turned, made unhurried eye contact, and said, "I'm sorry to interrupt — I've been admiring the renovation on the Quay House from the outside for a year and I have no idea who did the stonework. Please tell me you know." Talia Brandt looked at her for a moment with the flat, assessing expression of a woman who'd been approached at parties her entire life and had developed a sense for which approaches were transactions. Then something in her face shifted, because Avah's question wasn't a transaction. It was true. She did love the Quay House stonework. "It was a husband-and-wife team out of the old quarter," Talia said, turning fully now, the terrible tie forgotten. "Impossible to book. I tried for my second hotel and they laughed at me." "They laughed at me too," Avah said, and watched the woman's mouth tilt, the first crack of an actual smile, and knew she had her. Not tonight. Tonight was only the beginning of having her. But it would happen now. She could feel the shape of it settling into place. They talked for fifteen minutes. By the end of it Talia Brandt had Avah's card in her hand and a meeting in her calendar and the specific, slightly suspicious warmth of someone who had not expected to enjoy herself and had anyway. Avah excused herself before the warmth could cool. You always left while they still wanted more. That was the one thing the old life had taught her that she didn't resent — how to read the temperature of a room, how to leave a person wanting the next conversation. She'd learned it standing beside a man who had never once wanted the next conversation with her. She was thinking about that, half-smiling at the irony of it, when she saw him. Calder Ives was across the ballroom, near the far doors, in the dark suit he always wore, the one that made every other man in the room look like he was trying. He wasn't trying. That was the whole thing about him — he'd never had to try, not at any of it, and somewhere in their three years she had mistaken that ease for depth and built a marriage on the difference. He was talking to two men she half-recognised. He had a glass in his hand he wasn't drinking from. Her chest did something. She noted it the way she'd note a draft in a room she was designing — a small structural fact, nothing personal, something to account for. She did not let it move her feet. She had every right to walk straight past him. They were divorced, not at war. A nod would do. Civilized people nodded. She could cross the room on the direct path, give him the cool, brief acknowledgment of two professionals who happened to share a city, and be at the coat check in ninety seconds. She took the long way around. She told herself it was practical. The direct path went through a cluster of people from a firm she didn't want to talk to. The long way was simply more efficient, given who was standing where. There were perfectly good reasons, and she lined them up in her mind one after another, neat as place settings, and she did not examine the fact that she'd needed to line them up at all. Clove found her at the coat check, holding both their wraps. "Productive night," Clove said, handing Avah hers. "Very." "Brandt's going to sign." "Brandt's going to sign." Clove watched her settle the wrap over her shoulders. She didn't say anything about the long way around. She'd seen it — Avah knew she'd seen it, because Clove saw everything, it was half of why the studio worked — but she let it lie there between them, unmentioned, which was somehow worse than if she'd said something. In the car, the city sliding past in long ribbons of light, Avah looked down and discovered that her hands weren't quite steady. She flexed them once, slowly, and made them be still. It's the adrenaline, she thought. Four clients in one night. That was all. That was a perfectly good reason, and she added it to the others. "He's announcing something next week, apparently," Clove said, watching the window. "Ives. Some flagship thing. Eli at the firm says it's the biggest project anyone's done in this city in a decade." She said it lightly, the way you mention weather. "Whoever lands the interiors on that is set for years." Avah looked out at the lights. "Mm," she said. She did not say that she already knew. That she'd seen his face on the cover of a magazine three days ago and put it down before she finished the headline. That something in her had gone very still at the word flagship, and had not entirely settled since. She kept her hands in her lap, and she kept them still, and she watched the city go by, and she told herself, all the way home, that she felt nothing at all. She was lying. She just didn't know it yet.