Married to my ex

CHAPTER SEVEN : TERMS

Chapter Seven:

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Terms

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Roman found out from Elaine, his father's assistant, which told him everything he needed to know about where he ranked in his own family's decision-making.

"Congratulations," she said, dropping a folder on his desk with the particular brisk neutrality she reserved for news she suspected he wouldn't want. "Winslow's agreed to discuss terms. Your father wants you in the boardroom at four."

"Discuss terms for what?"

Elaine's expression flickered, just slightly, into something almost like pity. "The engagement, Mr. Hoxwood. I assumed you knew."

He didn't say anything for long enough that she excused herself, and Roman sat alone with the folder unopened in front of him, feeling something cold and familiar settle into his chest — the specific, well-worn humiliation of learning his own life had been rearranged in a room he hadn't been invited into. He'd known, in the abstract, that his father intended to pursue this. He hadn't expected it to already be moving fast enough that an assistant knew the details before he did.

He opened the folder anyway, because some part of him needed to see the shape of it in writing before he trusted himself to walk into that boardroom. It was worse than he'd braced for — a full outline already drafted by legal, timelines, a proposed announcement date, language about "strategic consolidation" that made the whole thing read like a merger memo with a wedding attached, because that, Roman understood with a sick clarity, was precisely what it was.

He thought of the low brick wall. He thought of a yellow dress and a girl who'd asked him, four days ago by a window, whether five years had taught him to say a true thing quickly, and found, sitting there with his father's folder open in front of him, that he had exactly one clear thought: she should hear this from me, not from a memo she finds out about the way I just did.

He left the office before four.

Her office was smaller than his, tucked into a boutique advisory firm two floors up from a coffee shop that smelled better than anywhere in Hoxwood Tower, and Beatrice looked up from her desk with an expression that made it immediately clear she already knew why he was there.

"My father called an hour ago," she said, before he could open his mouth. "So I assume you're not here to catch up on old times."

"I wanted you to hear it from me before it became a memo you had no say in." Roman stayed in the doorway, unsure, suddenly, whether he had any right to come further in. "I only found out myself an hour before that. My father didn't think I needed to be consulted either."

Something in her face shifted, very slightly — not warmth, not yet, but a flicker of something that might once have been surprise that he'd bothered. "That's almost considerate of you."

"I'm trying." He came in properly then, closing the door behind him, and sat in the chair across from her desk without being invited to, because he suspected an invitation wasn't coming. "Beatrice, I don't know what you want to do with this. I don't know what I want to do with it either, if I'm honest. But I don't think either of us should let it happen the way the last thing happened — decided somewhere else, by other people, while we stand there afterward pretending we had a choice."

"You didn't stand there pretending anything." Her voice was level, but there was an edge under it now, old and sharp. "You just left."

"I know." He held her gaze, made himself not look away from it the way he had five years ago. "I know, and I'm not going to pretend that's not exactly what I did. But I'm asking you to let this be different. If we're actually going to talk about this — the marriage, the alliance, whatever they're calling it in that memo — I want it to be an actual conversation. Terms we both choose. Not something either of us just gets handed."

Beatrice was quiet for a long moment, turning a pen slowly between her fingers, and Roman watched her doing what he now recognised, even after five years apart, as her particular way of thinking — methodical, careful, weighing something from every angle before she let herself commit to a position out loud.

"If I even consider this," she said finally, "and I want to be clear, I haven't decided anything — it would be on my terms. Not your father's. Not mine dressed up as generosity. Actual terms, in writing, that protect me if this goes badly, and that don't require me to pretend to feel anything I don't feel, for anyone's benefit."

"That's fair."

"And no promises," she added, sharper now, meeting his eyes directly. "I'm not doing this so we can quietly pick up where we left off, Roman, five years later, like nothing happened. Whatever this is, if it happens, it's a business arrangement between two adults who happen to already know exactly how badly this can go. I need you to understand that before either of us goes any further."

"Understood." He said it evenly, though something in his chest had gone tight at the flatness of her voice, at how thoroughly she meant every word of it. He deserved the flatness. He knew that. It didn't make it easier to sit across from it. "For what it's worth — I don't think either of our fathers particularly care whether we feel anything. I think that's rather the point, for them."

"Convenient for them, then." She set the pen down. "That we're apparently so easy to arrange."

Roman looked at her — really looked, past the composure she'd built so carefully over five years, and felt the same old cowardly urge he'd felt outside the school hall rise up in him again, the urge to say something easier instead of the actual truth sitting heavy in his chest since Elaine had dropped that folder on his desk. He made himself, for once, not give in to it.

"Beatrice, before we go any further with any of this — there's something I should have told you five years ago and never did. About why I actually ended things. It wasn't—"

The door opened without a knock, and Charles Hoxwood stepped into the small office as though he owned it, his eyes moving between them with the particular sharpness of a man immediately recalculating whatever conversation he'd just interrupted.

"There you are," Charles said to Roman, ignoring entirely the fact that he'd walked into a room he hadn't been invited to. "Peter's on his way over now, I thought it best we all discuss terms together, properly, before the lawyers get involved and slow everything down.

" His gaze moved to Beatrice, assessing, already recalculating her too.

"Ms. Whitfield. I do hope my son's been behaving himself."

Roman felt the sentence he'd been about to say dissolve somewhere in his throat, unsaid for a second time, and watched Beatrice's expression close back over, smooth and composed and entirely unreadable, the moment his father's voice filled the room.