Married to my ex

CHAPTER TEN: ON THE RECORD

Chapter Ten: On the Record

Beatrice read the contract four times before she let herself sign it.

She read it first the way a lawyer would — methodical, unhurried, flagging every clause that felt like a trap dressed up as courtesy — and then a second time the way a daughter would, hearing her father's careful hand in the protections built into every paragraph, the exit clause with no penalty attached, the property rights that stayed entirely hers regardless of what happened between her and Roman personally. By the third read, she was almost convinced it was fair. By the fourth, sitting alone in her flat at eleven at night with a glass of wine she hadn't touched, she admitted to herself what she'd been circling for a week: the contract wasn't really the thing she'd been deciding on at all.

She called her aunt before she signed anything.

"I don't know if I'm doing this because it's right," Beatrice said, "or because some part of me still wants to know what happens if I let him back into a room."

Her aunt was quiet for a long moment. "Your mother ran from a version of this exact choice," she said finally. "I watched what it cost her, love — not the running itself, but the not knowing, for the rest of her life, what would have happened if she'd stayed and fought for it instead. I'm not telling you to marry him. I'm telling you — don't let fear of repeating her story be the only reason you say no to something you might actually want."

"And if I say yes for the wrong reasons? If I convince myself it's about the companies, or about Peter, when really it's just—" Beatrice stopped, unable to finish the sentence even to her aunt, even alone in her own kitchen at eleven at night.

"Then you'll find out soon enough which reason was the real one," her aunt said gently. "You always do, love. You're too honest with yourself not to, eventually — even when you'd rather not be."

Beatrice sat with that for a long time after she hung up, turning the pen over the way she'd started doing without noticing, weighing every version of herself that might sign this contract for every possible reason, and signed it anyway just after midnight, feeling less like she'd made a decision and more like she'd finally stopped avoiding one.

The announcement, three weeks later, was exactly as performative as she'd braced herself for and somehow still worse.

Charles had insisted on a proper event — a reception at Hoxwood Tower's top floor, the entire glass wall lit gold against the evening skyline, two hundred guests who mattered to one company or the other, photographers stationed with the practised efficiency of people paid handsomely to capture exactly the right angle of exactly the right smile. Beatrice stood beside Roman in a dress Charles's stylist had selected without asking her opinion, her hand resting where it was supposed to rest, and performed warmth for a room full of strangers with the same discipline she'd once used to explain loan covenants to men who weren't really listening.

"You're doing well," Roman murmured, close enough that only she could hear it, as another round of photographs finished. "For someone who told me a month ago she wasn't agreeing to perform anything."

"I'm not performing for you," she said, matching his low tone, a small private honesty neither father could hear. "I'm performing for the two hundred people watching. There's a difference."

Something that might have been a real smile flickered at the corner of his mouth, gone before either father could catch it, and for one unguarded second Beatrice felt something loosen in her chest that had nothing to do with the contract at all.

The moment didn't last. It never seemed to, lately.

She noticed the shift in the room before she understood its cause — a ripple of attention moving through the crowd near the lifts, heads turning, conversation dipping into the particular hushed excitement reserved for exactly the kind of scene nobody wanted to miss. Beatrice followed the room's gaze and felt Roman go very still beside her.

Cindy Timmerson stood at the edge of the party in a dress considerably more dramatic than the occasion strictly called for, uninvited and entirely unbothered by that fact, scanning the crowd with the composed, searching look of a woman who had spent considerable time deciding exactly how to make an entrance.

"She wasn't on the list," Charles said under his breath, appearing at Roman's other side with the particular tightness he wore whenever something threatened to escape his control. "Roman—"

"I know." Roman's jaw had set into something hard. "I'll handle it."

"You'll do no such thing publicly," Charles said, low and urgent. "Not here, not with every camera in the room pointed at this floor. Let security—"

"Let me," Beatrice said quietly, surprising herself as much as either of them.

Roman looked at her, something sharp and uncertain crossing his face. "You don't have to—"

"I know I don't." She met his eyes, steadier than she felt. "But if she's here to make a scene about the two of us, I'd rather be part of deciding how that scene goes than stand here being talked about in the third person while it happens around me."

She didn't wait for permission. She crossed the room with the same composed, unhurried grace she'd used to walk into Peter's welcome dinner a month ago, aware of every eye following her, aware that whatever happened in the next sixty seconds would likely end up in three separate gossip columns by morning, and stopped a careful, deliberate distance from Cindy — close enough to speak quietly, far enough that the room couldn't hear either of them.

"You must be Cindy," she said, before Cindy could get a single word out first. "I've heard a great deal about you. I don't believe we were properly introduced."

Something flickered across Cindy's face — surprise, quickly smoothed over, at being addressed first, at not being allowed the opening line she'd clearly arrived with. "Beatrice. What a lovely party. I do hope I'm not intruding."

"You weren't invited," Beatrice said, still perfectly pleasant, still perfectly quiet, "which usually means the answer is yes, though I'm sure that's not news to you." She let a small, deliberate pause sit between them, watching Cindy's composure work slightly harder than it had a moment ago to hold its shape. "I understand you and Roman have history. I'm not remotely interested in relitigating it here, in front of two hundred people neither of us actually wants involved. But I'd like it noted, for whatever it's worth to you, that showing up uninvited to a room like this tells me considerably more about your position than anything you could have said to me directly."

Cindy's smile didn't slip, quite, but something behind it went colder, sharper, recalculating in real time. "How very composed of you," she said softly. "I imagine that takes practice, being handed everything so quickly. I do hope you're prepared for how fast it can all be taken away again, once people start looking closely at how convenient the timing of all this really was."

"I'm sure I'll manage," Beatrice said evenly, holding her ground, holding her smile, refusing to let a single flicker of the sudden unease tightening in her chest show on her face. "Enjoy the rest of your evening, Cindy. I hear the door's just behind you."

She turned and walked back towards Roman without waiting to see whether Cindy left, her pulse loud in her own ears, and only once she'd rejoined him — his hand finding the small of her back, warm and steadying in a way that startled her with how much she needed it in that exact moment — did she let herself wonder, with a small cold flicker of unease, exactly what Cindy had meant by how convenient the timing of all this really was.