Chapter 7
That night, I couldn't sleep at all.
I sat in the dark, looking at the city lights outside the window, and my mind went back to that rainy night ten years earlier.
The sound of Jonathan closing that door had been absolute.
He told me I couldn't keep up with him.
He said he needed someone who could stand beside him in the spotlight.
Ten years, and the sentence had stayed lodged in me. I thought I had gotten it out, and facing him again brought the whole ache back.
I walked to Nathan's bedroom door.
He was sound asleep, breathing evenly, with a sweet trace of a smile on his face, probably from something good in a dream.
I looked at the face that was so much like Jonathan's and a hundred times warmer.
Slowly, my heart settled down, the panic and fear fading away.
There was nothing left in that man that could frighten me.
I had already survived the worst thing he ever did to me.
Ten years earlier, I was pregnant with him, the whole world had dropped me, and I got through it alone.
I got through the sickness, through the birth, through years of sleepless nights raising a baby by myself.
I went from a woman who couldn't even open a bottle cap to a mom who could carry a sack of rice up five flights of stairs, stay up all night with a feverish kid, and still show up to work the next morning like nothing happened.
I was Emily Carter, and I was Nathan's mother.
Nothing about my life depended on Jonathan anymore.
Running wouldn't solve anything.
Linda had already come to my door, and now work had tied us together again. The harder I ran, the guiltier I would look, and the faster they would start wondering why.
If I couldn't get away from it, I would walk straight into it.
He had said I wasn't worthy of his ambition, that I couldn't stand in the spotlight with him.
Fine. I would stand there and let him look.
I was not the Emily who orbited around him with nothing in her world but groceries and laundry.
I opened my laptop and deleted every escape plan I had written.
In their place I started a new document and titled it Counterattack.
The first move was the meeting the next day.
I was going to show him that I was not only fine without him. I was better.
The soft, obedient woman he remembered, the one who needed him to assign her a value, had not survived the first year on my own.
I went back through the project materials, worked out every angle Jonathan might press on, and built a dozen answers for every question he could throw.
The meeting ran in my head over and over, every word, every shift of tone, even where I would look.
I needed to be calm, professional, and unshakable.
To me he was an ordinary client, a project lead with the name "Jonathan Reed" on the file.
As for being his ex-wife, that could stay buried in the rain ten years ago.
When morning came, I put on a crisp suit and did my makeup carefully.
The woman in the mirror had clear, settled eyes with a cool distance in them.
I smiled at my reflection.
It had been ten years, Jonathan.
This time he would not see a single crack in me.