Married to my ex

CHAPTER TWO: THE INCONVENIENCE

Chapter Two:

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The Inconveniences.

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Three weeks earlier, Roman Hoxwood learned that the fastest way to empty a boardroom was to walk in holding his phone like it had personally wronged him.

He hadn't meant to look composed and failed at it — but by the time the lift doors opened onto the executive floor, whatever careful blankness he usually wore had slipped, because his father's assistant took one look at him and found somewhere else to be.

"Everyone out," Roman said, and the four department heads left without a single question, which told him more about how he must have looked than any mirror would.

Alone, he set his phone face-down on the table. The message had come from a name he didn't recognise, with a video attached, and a single line: thought you should see this before everyone else does.

He'd watched it anyway — Cindy, in a private members' club he'd paid the membership for, laughing at something a man who wasn't Roman had said, leaning into him with the ease of someone very comfortable being touched by him — until it ended and he had to remember how to breathe normally before the doors opened.

He wasn't sure, even now, whether what he felt was grief, or relief wearing grief's coat. He and Cindy had been engaged four months, "together" in the managed way his family understood the word for most of the five years since his graduation — an arrangement stitched together so early by both their fathers that Roman had genuinely mistaken the stitching for a foundation. Cindy hadn't fallen in love with Roman Hoxwood. She'd fallen in with the idea of him, and any man wearing the same title would apparently have done.

He filed away the fact that he didn't feel sharper than this, and went to find his father.

"You've seen it, then," Charles said, without looking up from the document he was signing, which meant someone had already told him. Someone always already told him.

"I'm ending it," Roman said, before his father could get ahead of him. "Today."

"Obviously." Charles capped his pen with a small, precise click. "The question is how we manage the fallout, not whether you're ending it." He was already reaching for his phone. "I'll have Elaine draft a statement. 'Growing in different directions.' You won't need to comment beyond that."

"That's it? She was engaged to me and sleeping with someone else, and your first thought is the press statement?"

Charles looked at him properly, and for a moment Roman hoped something like concern might surface. It didn't.

"A four-month engagement to a Timmerson girl was never the point, Roman. The point was the alliance. That's what's inconvenienced — not your heart — so don't waste my time pretending otherwise."

The worst part was that his father wasn't entirely wrong. What Roman felt, standing there, was recognition: this is the shape my life has taken. Alliances that end in press statements. He thought, unbidden, of a different graduation day five years ago — a girl in a pale yellow dress, waiting for him, before he'd walked up and, on his father's instruction, ended the only thing that had never once felt like strategy.

He didn't let himself think about Beatrice properly. He just noted the thought's presence, the way you'd note weather through a window, and put it away.

"Fine," he said. "Handle the statement. I'll handle telling her."

"You won't need to. I imagine she already knows." Charles was right. By evening, three gossip columns had the story, framed exactly as dignified as promised, and Cindy hadn't called — only, according to one headline, been photographed leaving the country "to clear her head." Roman drove home, poured a whisky he didn't finish, and told himself the hollow feeling in his chest was relief.

He almost believed it for a full week.

"Sit," Charles said again, and this time there was energy in his voice — the briskness he reserved for profitable news. "I want to talk to you about Winslow."

"Peter Winslow." Roman knew the name — a competitor who'd sat just below Hoxwood Enterprises for as long as he could remember, seeming quietly determined to close that gap. "What about him?"

"He's found his daughter. Illegitimate, kept hidden by the mother, now deceased. He's spent a fortune tracking her down, and he's throwing her a welcome dinner Friday. Half the City's invited."

"And this concerns us because—"

"Because a man who's just found an heir is a man thinking hard about legacy. About who that heir marries, eventually, and what it might do for the name he's spent thirty years building." Charles set down his pen. "And you, as of last week, are conveniently — and very publicly — unattached."

Something in Roman's chest went very still. "You cannot be serious."

"I'm entirely serious. Winslow's company would close the gap on us within eighteen months if he ever wanted to be aggressive, and he's never had a reason to consolidate. A daughter gives him one." Charles's eyes held his son's steadily. "I've already accepted the invitation. Both of us. Friday."

"Father—"

"You're going, Roman. You're going to be charming, and available, and exactly as unattached as the papers say you are. Whatever this girl turns out to be like, I'd suggest you find a way to be interested."

Roman opened his mouth to argue, every instinct already bracing against the shape of where this was going — the horrible, familiar shape of his father deciding his life for him a second time — and found he had no idea what was about to walk through that door on Friday, or how completely it was about to undo every careful, hollow thing he'd built since the last time Charles Hoxwood had told him exactly who to marry.