“Mom,” Carissa said quietly, “if you use the word fragile to describe the woman who slept with her sister’s husband in a house her sister paid for, this call ends.”
Linda bristled. “You don’t have to be cruel.”
Carissa’s laugh this time was so soft it almost disappeared. “I’m beginning to think everyone in this family mistakes accuracy for cruelty whenever it lands in the wrong place.”
She ended the call before her mother could answer.
That afternoon she met Denise Kessler in her office and signed the first set of papers.
Not because she enjoyed the symbolism. Because paperwork was the one language betrayal could not gaslight.
By the second week of November, the reunion was four days away.
Carissa had not yet told Damen exactly what she planned. She did not owe him spoiler alerts for his own collapse.
But he sensed something.
He moved through the house with the defensive vigilance of a man who knew a door was opening somewhere behind him and didn’t know whether it led to disgrace or exposure or both. He tried tenderness once, awkwardly, in the kitchen.
“I know things got messed up,” he said while she was slicing lemons. “But we’ve had a whole life together, Carissa.”