Married to my ex

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE TABLE

Chapter Eight:

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The Table

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Peter's office was too warm and too personal for what was about to happen in it, Beatrice thought, watching Charles Hoxwood settle into the leather chair she'd deliberately avoided sitting in herself four days earlier, as though he'd known exactly which seat in the room carried the most quiet authority and claimed it on instinct.

"Shall we start with the practicalities?" Charles said, once the four of them were arranged around Peter's desk — her father behind it, herself and Roman in the two chairs facing it, Charles having pulled a fifth chair to the side, angled so he could watch everyone's faces at once. "I find these things go more smoothly when we're honest about what everyone actually wants from them."

"I'll go first, then." Beatrice kept her voice level, the same voice she used across a negotiating table for clients who had considerably more to lose than she did.

"I want it in writing, drafted by my own solicitor, not yours, not the company's. I want a clean exit clause with no financial penalty to me if either of us decides, at any point, that this isn't working. And I want to be clear, for the record, that I'm not agreeing to feel anything I don't feel. If this happens, it's an arrangement. Not a performance of something real, for anyone's benefit."

Charles's eyebrows lifted slightly, something that might almost have been respect flickering across his face before he smoothed it away. "Admirably direct. I can work with direct." He glanced at Roman. "Anything to add?"

"The exit clause stands," Roman said.

"And I want it noted that neither of us is being pressured into this by the other's family beyond this room. Whatever happens after today, that's between the two of us, not something either of our fathers gets to keep negotiating from the sidelines."

"Duly noted," Charles said, in a tone that made it entirely unclear whether he intended to honour it.

Peter, who had been quiet through most of this, leaned forward with his hands folded on the desk, and when he spoke his voice had none of Charles's brisk efficiency in it. "Beatrice. I want you to know you can still say no to all of this. Whatever Charles and I discussed before you got here, none of it means anything without your agreement, and I'd rather lose the alliance entirely than have you feel you were bartered the way—" He stopped himself, but Beatrice heard the rest of the sentence anyway, sitting unspoken in the room. The way your mother was almost bartered, once, by people who thought they knew better than she did.

"I appreciate that," Beatrice said, and meant it, though it did nothing to loosen the tightness sitting in her chest. She looked at Roman, briefly, and found him already watching her, something unreadable in his expression that she didn't have the capacity to interpret properly with two fathers watching them both like hawks circling the same field. "I'd like a moment, if that's alright. To think, without an audience."

"Of course." Peter stood immediately, gesturing Charles up with him. "We'll step out. Take whatever time you need."

The two men left, Charles pausing at the door just long enough to say, "Elaine can have the draft terms to your solicitor within the hour, whenever you're ready," before he followed Peter out and shut the door with a click that felt, to Beatrice, unreasonably loud.

Silence settled over the office. Roman didn't move to fill it immediately, which she found she was grateful for — some old instinct in her braced automatically for him to say something too smooth, too rehearsed, the way his father did, and when he didn't, she felt something in her shoulders ease very slightly.

"You don't have to do this," he said finally, quietly, none of the boardroom formality left in his voice at all. "Whatever my father's told your father about what this means for the companies — you don't owe either of them your life to fix a problem you didn't create."

"I know that." She turned the pen on Peter's desk slowly between her fingers, the same habit she'd had four days ago in this exact room. "But he's my father, Roman. I've known him for four days and I already understand he'd give up the alliance in a heartbeat if I asked him to — and somehow that's exactly what makes me want to consider it properly instead of just refusing on principle. He spent twenty-three years not knowing I existed. I don't know what I owe him yet. I'm still working that out."

"And what do you want? Not what you owe anyone. What do you actually want."

The question landed harder than she expected, mostly because no one had asked it quite that plainly since this whole strange unravelling began. Beatrice looked at him for a long moment — really looked, past the composed CEO he'd built himself into, and found, underneath it, something closer to the boy from the car park than she'd let herself admit to seeing since Friday.

"I want to stop being something that happens to me," she said finally. "My mother running. You leaving. My father finding me and turning it into a party before I'd even agreed to be found. I've spent five years building a life where I decide things, Roman, not have them decided for me, and if I do this — if — it's because I looked at it properly and chose it. Not because Charles Hoxwood drew up a memo."

Something shifted in Roman's face, some old warmth she hadn't seen since before the car park, since before either of them had learned how expensive that kind of warmth could turn out to be. "Then choose properly," he said. "Take the week. Read every line of that contract twice. Ask me anything you want to ask, and I'll actually answer it this time — no interruptions, no fathers walking in halfway through. I owe you that much, at least. I owe you considerably more than that, if we're honest."

Beatrice studied him, weighing the sentence the way she'd weigh a clause she didn't entirely trust yet, and found, despite every careful instinct built over five years, that some part of her wanted to believe him.

"I'll read the contract," she said. "That's all I'm agreeing to right now. Reading it."

"That's all I'm asking." He stood, straightening his jacket, some of the boardroom composure sliding visibly back into place as he moved towards the door — and then paused, hand on the handle, and looked back at her with an expression that made her chest tighten in a way she hadn't braced for. "For what it's worth — whatever you decide, I hope it's actually yours this time. The choice, I mean. I don't think either of us got that, the last time this family decided something for us."

He left before she could answer, and Beatrice sat alone in her father's warm, book-lined office with an unsigned contract somewhere on its way to her solicitor's inbox and a strange, unfamiliar ache in her chest that had nothing to do with business terms at all , and did not yet know that three floors below, in a private members' club she'd never heard of, a woman she'd never met was already reading the first quiet rumour of an engagement neither Beatrice nor Roman had agreed to yet, and deciding, with considerable satisfaction, exactly how she intended to burn it down.