Dear Ex-Husband, Watch Me Love Again

Chapter 15

They had been in the car for ten minutes and neither of them had said a word or looked in eachother’s direction.

Lucas kept his eyes on the road while Katherine watched the city from her window. The silence between them wasn’t comfortable but it was bearable…for Katherine at least.

It was the kind of silence that comes after something had been said and couldn’t be taken back.

When they were only eight minutes away from the building, her phone buzzed. She looked down at the screen and felt her mood brighten instantly.

Z: [Remember what I taught you. The first day determines how the rest of your time there will be so, smash it. Don’t let them intimidate you. You already belong there. Best of luck.]

She read it once and then read it again, and despite everything, she felt herself smile.

She typed back a response quickly.

[Thank you, Tutor! Appreciate it.]

Then, she set the phone down on her knee.

"Who's that?"

Her mood soured instantly. She looked up to see that Lucas was watching the road but his jaw had that familiar tightness to it again.

"A friend," she replied.

"Must be a good friend." His voice came out casual but it wasn't. "Making a married woman smile at her phone like that while her husband is sitting right beside her."

Katherine exhaled slowly through her nose. She picked up her phone and slipped it into her bag.

"Lucas," she said quietly, "you are talking like you believe I don't have a life outside of you."

He laughed, and it wasn't a kind sound. "Do you?"

She looked at him.

"Think about it," he said, eyes still on the road. "Who were you texting just now? Because as far as I know, you don't really have friends anymore. You cut most of them off yourself."

He wasn't wrong.

She had done exactly that. One by one, over the first two years of their marriage, she had let those friendships go cold.

Ava had been the first, calling her every other week with concerns about Lucas that Katherine had dismissed as jealousy. Then Payton, who had sat across from her at lunch one afternoon and said very carefully that something felt off about the way Lucas spoke about her in rooms she wasn’t in.

Then the others, each of them raising the same quiet alarm in different ways, and Katherine shutting each door firmly behind her because she had been so certain, so completely certain, that they were wrong.

She had told them to stay out of her marriage.

She had chosen Lucas over every single one of them without blinking.

And now she was sitting in a car beside him knowing everything they had tried to tell her was true, had probably always been true, and she had spent years defending a man who didn't deserve a single word she had said on his behalf.

She looked out the window and said nothing for a moment.

"You're wrong," she said finally.

"Am I?"

"Yes." She kept her eyes on the passing street. "You're wrong."

She didn't explain further and he didn't push it, but she was already thinking about her friends. About whether they still had the same number. About what she would even say after all this time and all the things she had said on her way out.

She would figure that out later. One thing at a time.

The Whitmore Group building came into view as Lucas turned onto the main street, and Katherine sat up slightly. It was a tall, clean building that had always managed to look both modern and permanent at the same time, the kind of building that announced itself without trying. She had grown up going to that building on weekends when her father brought her along. She knew the lobby, the elevators, the smell of the air conditioning on the upper floors.

She hadn't been inside in years.

Lucas slowed the car and then pulled to a stop at the entrance. He turned off the engine and leaned back in his seat with a sigh that sounded like it had been sitting in his chest since yesterday.

"I'm tired of this," he said suddenly.

She looked at him, brows raised as she wondered what he meant.

"The fighting. The distance. All of it." He rubbed the side of his face. "I just want us to go back to how we were. Before the cruise, before all of this. Can we just do that?"

Katherine looked at him for a moment. At the familiar lines of his face, the ones she had spent two years thinking she knew completely.

"I'm not fighting with you, Lucas," she said. "I'm just trying to do something for myself for once. That's all this is."

He shook his head. "Someone has gotten into your head. I don't know who or what they said but the Katherine I know, the woman I fell in love with, she would never go against me like this."

Katherine opened her mouth to respond and then stopped.

She turned and looked out through the windscreen instead.

"The directors are outside," she said instead.

Lucas frowned and followed her gaze. Lined up just beyond the glass entrance of the building was a small group of people in formal clothes, waiting. One of them was already looking toward the car.

"They came out to receive me," she said simply. She picked up her bag from the floor and settled it on her lap. Then she turned to look at Lucas with an expression that was completely pleasant.

"Be a good husband and help me with my door."

Lucas stared at her, a mixture of irritation and disbelief plastered across his face.

Then he looked back at the directors standing outside waiting for his wife.

He got out of the car, came around to her side, and opened the door without a word.

Katherine stepped out, smoothed her jacket once, lifted her chin, and turned toward the building where the directors were already beginning to smile in welcome.

She didn't look back at Lucas.

“Welcome to Whitmore Group, Mrs Carter.” One of the executives greeted and Katherine shook her head lightly.

“Please, while I’m here, call me Katherine. I prefer that to Mrs Carter.”