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Page Nine

Cassandra’s Pov

I did not carry the folder upstairs right away. I stood on the stairs and listened to the sounds from the dining room, Tiana’s laugh, the scrape of a chair, Angelo saying her name softly. Then I walked back down three steps, picked up the folder with two fingers, and took it to our bedroom as if it might bite me.

I locked the door. In three years of marriage I never locked it once.

The folder held thirty-one pages of heavy cream paper with the Rossi Holdings letterhead at the top. The title on the first page read Transfer of Voting Interest and Appointment of Proxy. I read it twice, slowly, the way my father taught me to read anything with a signature line.

My father, Daniel Moore, built the first Rossi warehouse beside Angelo’s father, and when he died he left me twelve percent of the company. On our wedding night Angelo told me to keep those shares safe, because they were the only part of Rossi Holdings that never lied to him. I thought it was the most romantic thing a man had ever said to me.

According to page three, my twelve percent now belonged to the Halcyon Family Trust. The trustee was named on page four. Tiana Wells.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed my hand over my mouth. The paper shook so hard in my other hand that the words blurred, and I had to set it on my knee and wait until I could read again.

I turned to the last page. The signature line carried my full name in blue ink, Cassandra Moore Rossi, and beneath it a date, the fourteenth of September.

It was almost my handwriting. Whoever copied it made the loop of the R too tight, and I have always left that loop open, because my father did. On the fourteenth of September I stood in the kitchen at seven in the morning, making a birthday cake for Angelo’s mother, and I did not touch a pen all day.

Someone had signed my name, and the date was three weeks old.

A knock hit the door, so hard that I flinched.

“Cass. Open it.”

I put the folder under my pillow, which was a childish thing to do, and then took it out again, because I was done hiding things in my own house. I opened the door.

Angelo stood in the hallway with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and one hand braced on the frame. His gaze moved past me to the cream paper on the bed, and his face closed like a door.

“You went through my things.”

“It has my name on it.”

“It’s a restructuring.” He walked into the room without being invited and picked up the folder as if it belonged to him, which, I suppose, was the point. “The board is panicking about the leak. Tiana drafted this to calm them down. It’s routine.”

“You are giving my father’s shares to her.”

“To a trust.” He said it patiently, the way he explains things to interns. “Tiana manages it. She understands this company better than…”

He stopped.

“Better than who?” I asked.

Angelo looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him decide not to be kind. “Better than someone who spends her days choosing candles.”

It was quiet in the room. Downstairs a glass touched a plate, and Tiana’s voice drifted up, light and unbothered.

“I gave up my studio for this company,” I said. “I turned down the Milan contract. You asked me to.”

“I asked you to make a home. You can still do that.” He tucked the folder under his arm. “You’re taking this far too seriously. You signed it last month. Tiana’s assistant brought it to the study and you signed it.”

“I did not sign this.”

“Don’t start.”

“Angelo, I was making your mother’s cake on the fourteenth. I never saw this document until tonight.”

He frowned, and for one second I thought I saw a c***k in him, a thought he did not like. Then it was gone. “You sign everything I put in front of you, Cass. You always have. That is why this works.”

It took me a moment to understand what he had just said. He was not accusing me of lying. He believed I had signed it, because in his mind I always did. He never once checked.

I should have felt anger, and I did, but underneath it I felt something quieter and much worse. I felt like a pen he kept in his drawer.

“Who is Marcus Hale?” I asked.

Angelo went completely still. He did not blink. “Where did you hear that name?”

“Your phone lit up in the hallway. He wrote that I shouldn’t sign anything tonight.”

“You read my messages.”

“They were on the screen.”

He crossed the room in three steps and stopped close enough that I smelled the snow on his coat and the wine on his breath. His voice came out low and flat, the voice he uses on men he is about to fire. “Listen to me carefully. You will not speak to Marcus Hale, you will not answer if he calls, and you will not open the door if he comes here. He would use you to hurt me, and you wouldn’t even notice it happening.”

“Why would he use me?”

“Because you are the easiest thing I own to take.”

I stared at him. I waited for him to hear what he said, to take it back or at least look sorry, the way he used to when we were new and he stepped on my feelings by accident.

He only checked his watch.

“Tiana is staying in the east guest room tonight,” he said. “There are photographers outside the gate, and I won’t have her go home to that. Be polite at breakfast.”

“It’s our anniversary.”

“I know what day it is.” For the first time his voice cracked, but only with irritation. “Do you think I enjoy being reminded? I have a company to protect, a board to calm, and a friend who is falling apart downstairs. The least you can do is not make one more thing difficult.”

He walked out. The door closed softly behind him, which was somehow worse than a slam.

I heard his footsteps go down the hall, then the east wing door open, then Tiana’s voice rise to meet him in a soft, grateful murmur. I heard him say, “Don’t cry, it’s handled.”

I did not cry. I sat on the bed with my hands in my lap and counted the things I knew. He believed I signed it. He had not read it, or he had not read it carefully. He chose her bracelet, her birthday, her trust, her guest room, and he told me to be polite at breakfast.

My phone buzzed against the bedspread. I almost let it ring, but the number on the screen was one I did not know, and I thought of the way Angelo’s face changed when I said a name.

I picked it up.

Unknown: Check page nine. Do not let Angelo see you read it. I can explain, but not by text.

My thumb hovered over the screen. I did not ask who it was. I already knew.

The folder was lying where Angelo dropped it on the dresser. He walked away without taking it, because in his mind there was nothing in it worth hiding. I crossed the room, opened it, and turned past the signature pages to page nine.

It was not a share transfer. It was a single page in different type, printed on different paper, stapled behind the others so neatly that I never noticed it was there.

The heading read: Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.

The petitioner was Angelo Rossi. The respondent was me. And at the bottom, above the line for the court’s seal, was my husband’s signature in black ink, dated the same day as my forged one.

He signed it three weeks ago, and he sat across from me tonight and let me serve him salmon.