Married to the wrong billionaire

CHAPTER TEN

AVA

I didn't ask him again about Victoria. I told myself that was strength, choosing not to chase an answer he clearly didn't want to give. Some quieter part of me suspected it was something closer to fear — that pushing might get me an answer I wasn't ready to hear.

Three days later, we were seated at a Van Doren Enterprises dinner for senior leadership, the kind of evening built entirely around long tables and longer speeches, and I found myself placed directly beside Ethan by a seating chart neither of us had arranged.

"This wasn't my doing," he said, low, as we sat.

"I believe you." I did. He looked as unenthused about the arrangement as I felt, which was somehow more reassuring than if he'd looked pleased. If nothing else, I was learning to trust that he didn't bother performing for an audience of one.

The table was long enough that conversation stayed compartmentalized in clusters, which meant Ethan and I existed in a small, private pocket of silence in the middle of it — close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, far enough that neither of us acknowledged it. I was intensely aware of exactly how much space separated his hand from mine on the white tablecloth. Not much. Not nothing.

A board member two seats down launched into a story about a merger from a decade ago that clearly no one at the table had asked to hear. Ethan's attention drifted toward me instead, and I caught him looking — not at my face, but somewhere just above it, at the tightly pinned knot of hair I hadn't thought twice about that morning.

"What," I said, when I noticed.

"Nothing." He looked away, back toward the man still talking, his jaw set in that particular way that told me he was choosing not to explain something rather than genuinely having nothing to say.

I let it go. I'd learned, in the short time I'd known him, that pressing Ethan Van Doren on something he'd decided to keep to himself rarely produced anything but a wall.

"You always wear it like that," he said, a few minutes later, apropos of nothing, like the thought had escaped before he'd fully decided to let it.

"Like what?"

"Up. Pinned."

"It's practical."

"Is it."

"What else would it be?"

He didn't answer that either, and I found myself annoyed at how often our conversations seemed to end exactly at the point where they might have actually told me something true about him.

Dinner continued in its slow, formal rhythm — courses arriving and disappearing, wine poured by staff who moved so quietly I sometimes forgot they were there, conversation orbiting around numbers and strategies I only half followed. I answered when spoken to, smiled when it was expected, and spent most of the evening doing the quiet work of reading the room the way I always did, cataloguing who deferred to whom, who watched Ethan for approval before speaking, who avoided looking at either of us directly.

It was somewhere between the second and third course that it happened.

A server reached across the table at an awkward angle, and I shifted my hand slightly to make room, and in the process my fingers brushed against Ethan's where it rested near his glass. It was nothing — an accident, the kind of contact that happens a hundred times a day between strangers on trains and in crowded elevators, forgotten before it's fully registered. I almost apologized out of pure reflex, the way you do with a stranger on a train, before I remembered that this particular stranger was, on paper at least, my husband.

Except he didn't pull away.

His hand moved, deliberately this time, and settled fully over mine beneath the edge of the tablecloth, where no one at the table could see it happening.

I went very still.

Nobody was watching. There were no cameras here, no reporters angling for a photograph, no board members currently paying either of us any attention at all. Whatever performance we owed the world, we didn't owe it here, in this specific unwatched moment, and yet his hand stayed exactly where it was — warm, solid, undeniably real in a way that had nothing to do with optics.

I could have moved my hand away. I understood, distantly, that I probably should have. Instead I sat there, listening to a story about interest rates I would never remember, acutely aware of nothing except the weight and warmth of his palm against the back of my hand, and I didn't move either.

Neither of us said anything about it. Neither of us looked at each other. We simply sat there, side by side, performing polite interest in a conversation neither of us was following, while beneath the table something entirely unperformed was happening between us for the first time.

It lasted through the rest of the course. Maybe longer. I lost track of time in a way that embarrassed me a little, later, when I tried to reconstruct exactly how long his hand had stayed there before the plates were cleared and he needed both hands again for something as mundane as picking up his water glass.

When he finally moved it away, he didn't look at me. I didn't look at him either. We simply returned, seamlessly, to the version of ourselves the room expected to see — composed, distant, appropriately married.

But something had shifted in the small pocket of silence between us, something neither of us was ready to name, and I spent the rest of the dinner aware of exactly where his hand rested on the table, watching for it, half hoping, half dreading that it might find its way back.

It didn't. Not again that night.

I told myself that was for the best.

I didn't entirely believe that either — not anymore. It was becoming something of a pattern, lately, this quiet gap between what I told myself and what I actually felt, and I was starting to suspect it wasn't going to close on its own.