Married To My Husband’s Rival

Chapter 10: What the Money Was For

WREN POV

The silence went on for four full seconds.

I counted them. Not on purpose, just the way your brain starts marking time when everything else stops.

Seth’s face went through something I could not quite name. Not guilt. Guilt is clean, guilt is simple. This was something older than that. Something that had been sitting in him for a while and was only now finding the surface.

“You found it,” he said.

“June found it. Closing an old account for my father.” I kept my voice flat. “She called me this afternoon.”

He set his own glass down. Slow.

“I was going to tell you tonight,” he said.

“I know. You just said that.”

“Wren.”

“Tell me what it was for.”

He told me everything.

Not the half version, not the careful edited version. All of it. I could tell the difference because the half version has pauses in the wrong places and the full version just sounds like someone getting it over with.

Four years ago my father came to Seth. Gus Calloway, the man I had not spoken to properly in eight years, had been watching Seth build Maren Capital from a distance for a long time. Apparently my father paid attention to people like that. Quiet builders. People doing serious things without making noise about it.

Gus also knew Seth had feelings for me once. Knew I had turned him down. And he knew something else that I did not know at the time. He had run his own checks on Owen Briggs before the wedding and what came back was not clean. Not criminal. Just not clean. The kind of picture that makes a careful man nervous.

So Gus went to Seth with a proposal. The transfer was seed capital for a specific acquisition. One that would eventually give Seth enough leverage over Briggs Group to move on it if it ever became necessary. In exchange Seth would keep an eye on Owen. Watch the situation. Be in a position to act if things went wrong.

“My father paid you to watch my marriage,” I said.

“He paid me to be in a position to protect you if you ever needed it.”

“That’s the same thing.”

Seth did not argue with that.

I was still sitting at the table. My hands were in my lap. I had not moved since he started talking and I did not move now.

“He never told me any of this was happening,” I said. “My own father was running some kind of background operation on my husband and he did not once pick up a phone and call me.”

“He thought you wouldn’t want to hear it.”

“He was probably right.” I laughed once. Short and dry. “That doesn’t make it okay.”

“No,” Seth said. “It doesn’t.”

We were quiet for a moment.

The city was doing its usual thing outside the windows. Busy and bright and completely unbothered by anything happening in this room.

“Did you know?” I asked. “When you found me in that corridor at the gala. Did you already know what Owen was going to do that night?”

“No. I told you the truth about that. I knew something was coming because the financials had been deteriorating. I didn’t know about the gala specifically.”

I nodded slowly.

Then I asked the question I actually needed answered.

“Did you come back to New York for the business,” I said, “or for me?”

Silence.

He did not answer straight away. And that half second before he spoke told me more than the words did.

“Both,” he said. “That’s the most honest answer I can give you. It was both and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

I stood up.

Not dramatically, not in a rush. Just stood up because sitting felt wrong suddenly, like I needed to be upright for what I was thinking about.

I walked to the window.

My father.

Gus Calloway. The man I left at eighteen and barely looked back at. The man I spent years being angry at for reasons I had never explained to anyone out loud. He had watched me from a distance, apparently. Watched me choose Owen against his advice, because he did give me advice once, carefully and gently, and I ignored it because I was twenty-two and in love and absolutely certain I knew better.

And then he had gone and made a deal with the man I rejected to protect me from the marriage I chose.

The irony of it sat so heavy in my chest I almost laughed. Almost.

Eight years of distance and he was still doing things for me. Just doing them in the way Gus did everything, quietly, without asking, without telling me, without giving me any say in it.

Just like Seth.

I stood at that window and thought about that for a long time.

Then I asked the last thing.

I did not plan to. It just came out because it was the only thing left.

“Do you have feelings for me?” I said. “Real ones. Not the deal, not the acquisition, not the version of this we perform for other people. Actual feelings.”

Nothing moved in the room.

Then I heard him get up from the table. Slow steps. He came to stand behind me. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him. Not touching. Just there.

“Yes,” he said.

One word. Just that.

I stared at the city.

A cab somewhere below was honking at something. Two people on the pavement across the street were arguing, or laughing, I could not tell from up here. Everything was just moving the way it always moved.

“I need time to think,” I said.

“I know.”

“About all of it. My father, the transfer, what you just said. I need time.”

“Take it.”

I heard him step back. Then his footsteps across the floor. Then the soft sound of the door.

Then silence.

I stayed at the window for a long time after that. Long enough for my feet to ache from standing. Long enough for the city to shift from that buzzy early-night energy into the quieter version of itself it became after midnight.

There was too much to hold at once.

My father and Seth and four years of a marriage that was being dismantled piece by piece and a woman named Diane who had been pulling strings the whole time and Lacey’s frightened face in a bathroom and Owen’s grief expression at the charity dinner and Seth standing behind me saying yes like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Too much.

I finally moved. Picked up my phone. I just needed to hear my sister’s voice. Something normal and real and uncomplicated.

June picked up on the second ring.

“Hey,” I said. “You okay?”

Silence for a second. Her breathing sounded wrong.

“June?”

“I’m fine,” she said. Then, “Actually I’m not.”

My stomach dropped. “What happened?”

“Someone was in my apartment tonight.” Her voice was very careful. Controlled in the way people get when they are trying not to panic. “I came home and nothing was missing and the door wasn’t broken or anything but someone had been inside.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they left something on my kitchen table.”

“What?”

“A photo.” She stopped. “Wren. It’s a photo of you.”

The cold started at the back of my neck and moved down fast.

“What kind of photo?”

“It’s taken through a window. You’re standing at a window, it looks like tonight, like just a few hours ago, and it’s from outside and whoever took it was high up because the angle is…” She stopped again. “It’s your penthouse window, Wren. Someone was out there tonight watching you and they broke into my apartment to make sure you knew.”

I did not move.

“They know where you are,” June said. “And they want you to know they know.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​