RUIN ME QUIETLY

Chapter 7

Neither of them mentioned it the next morning.

Wren came downstairs to find Callum already in the kitchen, dressed for a board meeting he technically didn't need to attend the day after his own wedding, drinking coffee like a man determined to pretend the last twelve hours had happened to someone else.

"There's a car coming at nine," he said, not looking up from his phone. "My grandfather wants us at brunch. Proof of concept, I imagine."

"Proof of concept," Wren repeated.

"That the marriage is real enough to matter." He finally looked at her, and whatever had cracked open in the kitchen at two in the morning was sealed shut again, controlled and distant in the daylight. "You don't have to say much. Just don't look like you'd rather be anywhere else."

"I generally would rather be anywhere else."

Something almost like amusement touched his mouth. "Then you're perfect for the role."

She should have found that insulting. She found herself, instead, fighting back something dangerously close to a smile, and hated how easy it was becoming to forget, in small unguarded moments like this one, exactly what he'd cost her family.

Brunch was exactly as unbearable as she'd expected — his grandfather, Warrick Vance, presiding over a table of relatives and board members like a man auditioning applicants for a role Wren had already been cast in, asking her pointed questions about her father's business with a smile that never once reached his eyes.

"Ashford Textiles," he said, swirling wine he hadn't touched. "Terrible business, what happened there. Your father was a good man. Bad negotiator."

"He trusted the wrong people," Wren said evenly. "I'm told that's a common mistake."

Something flickered across Warrick's face — not quite offense, closer to reassessment — and beside her, she felt rather than saw Callum go very still, watching the exchange with an expression she couldn't fully read.

"She's sharper than the last one," Warrick said to Callum, as if Wren weren't sitting directly beside him.

"She's sharper than most people in this room," Callum said, and reached over, without any apparent forethought, to rest his hand briefly over hers on the table. It lasted three seconds. It meant nothing, probably — proof of concept, the performance he'd asked her to give. Her pulse didn't seem to have gotten that memo.

They didn't speak much on the drive home. Wren watched the city slide by the window, turning the morning over in her mind — the ease of his hand on hers, the flash of something protective when his grandfather tried to needle her, the version of Callum that showed up in public versus the one who'd stood in his kitchen at two a.m. looking like something had finally broken loose in his chest.

She was starting, despite every warning she'd given herself, to find him difficult to file away.

"You handled him well," Callum said eventually, eyes on the road. "My grandfather. Most people fold within ten minutes."

"I've had practice not folding."

"I noticed." A pause. "It's one of the more inconvenient things about you."

"Inconvenient how?"

He didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had dropped into something quieter, more careful than she'd heard from him outside of that kitchen. "Inconvenient because I keep expecting to be irritated by you, and I'm not. I find that harder to plan around than almost anything else in my life right now."

She didn't have a clever answer for that. For once, she didn't try to find one.

The house was quiet when they got back — no sign of Seraphine, no lingering tension in the air, just the particular hush of two people alone together for the first time since the wedding without an audience to perform for.

Callum poured two glasses of wine without asking, handed one to her, and for a moment they simply stood in the kitchen where everything had unraveled the night before, neither of them acknowledging it directly.

"About last night," he said finally.

"You don't owe me an explanation."

"I think I do." He turned the glass in his hand, not drinking from it. "Seraphine and I have a history that predates every part of my life you've seen. It's complicated, and it's not finished, whatever I told her last night. I don't want to lie to you about that."

"Then why did you say what you said? That I'm not a stranger anymore."

He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Wren thought he might not answer at all.

"Because it's true," he said finally. "And because it surprised me more than it should have."

The kitchen felt smaller suddenly, the space between them thinner than it had any right to be. Wren set her glass down, aware of her own pulse in a way she hadn't allowed herself to be aware of anything involving Callum Vance since the day she'd walked into his office looking for a folder of evidence.

"This wasn't supposed to be complicated," she said, more to herself than to him.

"No," Callum agreed, stepping closer, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze. "It wasn't."

Neither of them moved away.

"Callum—"

"Tell me to stop," he said, low, his hand coming up to brush a strand of hair back from her face with a gentleness that undid something in her chest she'd been guarding for three years. "If you want me to stop, tell me now."

She didn't tell him to stop.

What happened next, she would think about for a long time afterward — not the details of it, which she kept carefully to herself even in her own memory, but the way it had felt to be chosen, however briefly, by a man who'd spent the entire day proving to a room full of strangers that she mattered, and then proved it again, in private, in a way that had nothing to do with performance at all.

By the time she woke the next morning, sunlight cutting gold across an unfamiliar ceiling, Callum was already gone from the bed beside her — and the space where he should have been felt colder than it had any right to, given everything that had happened in it the night before.

Downstairs, she found a note on the kitchen counter in handwriting she was already starting to recognize.

Called into an emergency meeting. Don't wait up. — C.

It wasn't the note that unsettled her. It was the second thing beside it — a woman's earring, small and unmistakably not hers, sitting on the counter like it had been forgotten in a hurry sometime after Wren had gone to sleep.