Married By Mistake

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Gala Guest List

Jax's POV

"You need an actual lawyer," I said. "Not just reading the email over and over hoping it changes."

"I know that."

"Do you know one? Besides whoever Julian's using, obviously."

Elena rubbed both hands over her face, sitting cross-legged on her own couch at nearly one in the morning, the glow of her laptop the only light in the room. "Priya's cousin does contract law. I can call her tomorrow. Tonight I just want to understand what I'm actually looking at."

She'd pulled up the contract itself, the one from the folder, scanned and saved somewhere in her email. I leaned over her shoulder, not because I understood legal language any better than she did, but because it felt wrong to just sit there while she stared at something that clearly scared her.

"Walk me through it," I said. "What does it actually say."

"Exclusivity agreement. My firm handles events exclusively for Croft Properties through the end of the fiscal year. Signed and dated April fourteenth. Witnessed." She scrolled down, and her voice caught slightly. "Witnessed by someone named Warren Cole."

"Who's that?"

"Julian's business partner." She frowned at the screen. "I don't remember Warren being anywhere near me that night. I remember him at the bar for maybe ten minutes the whole gala."

"Could you check? If there's a way to know where you actually were."

She sat up straighter, something sharpening in her face that I recognized, the same look she got the day we filled out paperwork at the courthouse, the spreadsheet look, as I'd started calling it in my head.

"The gala had a photographer. A whole event photography package, because obviously." Her fingers were already moving across the keyboard. "If I can find the timestamped photos, I can cross-reference where I actually was at the time this says I signed something."

It took her twenty minutes of digging through folders, files from her own firm's archive, before she found what she was looking for. A folder of raw event photos, organized by hour.

"Here," she said, angling the screen toward me. "Eight forty PM. That's the exact time listed on the signature page."

The photo showed Elena at eight forty, clear as anything, standing at a completely different end of the ballroom, laughing at something, a champagne glass in her hand, nowhere near Warren Cole or any kind of paperwork.

"That's not you signing a contract," I said quietly.

"No. It's not." She was very still, staring at the photo like it might rearrange itself into a different answer. "I was on the other side of the room. There's no way I signed anything at eight forty."

"So who did?"

Elena didn't answer right away. She scrolled back through the folder instead, searching, methodical, the way I imagined she planned every event she'd ever run, checking every possible angle before settling on a conclusion.

She found it four photos later. Eight forty-two PM, near a side table, half out of frame. Julian, leaning over a document, pen in hand, Warren Cole standing beside him with a look on his face that even in a blurry, half-cropped photo read as uncomfortable.

"That's not proof," I said carefully. "It's not clear what he's signing."

"No. But it's enough to make me ask." Her voice had gone very quiet, very controlled, the specific quiet she gets right before she's about to do something she's scared of. "If he forged my signature, Jax, that's not just a bad relationship. That's fraud. That's something I could actually take to a lawyer with real consequences attached to it."

I watched her sit with that for a moment, the full weight of what she was suggesting settling into the room around us.

"You really think he'd do that," I said. "Forge your name on a legal document."

"A month ago I'd have said no. A month ago I thought I knew exactly who he was." She closed the laptop slowly, like she needed the screen gone before she could finish the thought. "But he set up a joint account without asking me. He handled my mother without asking me. He's spent our entire relationship deciding things on my behalf and calling it love. I don't think forging a signature is actually that far outside what he already believes he's entitled to do."

Something cold moved through my chest, less about the contract and more about the man himself. About what it must have felt like, being with someone who blurred every line between protecting you and controlling you until you couldn't tell the difference anymore.

"What do you want to do," I asked.

Elena looked up at me, and for the first time all night, the fear in her face had shifted into something harder, more resolved.

"I want to find out for certain," she said. "And if I'm right, I want him to know exactly how certain I am before this goes anywhere near a courtroom."