Chapter 3 - The Woman Across the Table
Landon rose so abruptly that his chair scraped the stone. Two diners glanced over. I stopped several feet from the table, with Brit and Keeley beside me. “Sit down,” I said quietly. “Nobody needs a performance.” His mouth opened, then closed. Sloane was staring at him now. She still held the envelope. The roses stood between them like evidence neither person could move. I noticed one loose petal on the white tablecloth. Its edges were perfectly unbroken.
“Harper, this is complicated.” He reached toward my arm. I stepped back. “Then use clear words.” He glanced at my friends, irritated by their presence. “We should speak privately.” “We have spoken privately for months,” I answered. “You used that privacy to tell me I was imagining things.” His expression changed. I knew that look: the warning that I was about to embarrass him by refusing to become the reasonable wife he could send home.
Sloane placed the card beside her plate. “You told me she signed in August.” “Sloane.” “You said you were waiting to tell your mother.” I looked at her hand. No ring. No visible triumph either. Just a woman beginning to understand that the story she occupied had missing pages. “We are married,” I said. “We live together. He kissed me goodbye yesterday and told me he was going to a conference.” Landon muttered that we were separated emotionally.
Brit made a small sound of disbelief. I held up my hand, mostly to steady myself. “What is Bellwether House?” Landon looked toward the restaurant doors. “An opportunity.” “For whom?” Sloane answered before he could. “A retreat property. Workshops downstairs, guest rooms upstairs. He said the funding was approved.” My stomach tightened. I had described something similar to Landon over dinner years earlier, right down to a courtyard where beginners could paint beneath strings of lights.
“Whose funding?” I asked. Sloane swallowed. “He said his family investment account.” “My mother died,” I told her. “That is where the money came from.” Landon leaned forward. “Nothing has been finalized. You're turning preliminary discussions into something ugly.” I looked at him until he stopped speaking. “You were going to use my mother's money to buy my dream for someone else.” He lowered his voice. “It could have benefited everybody if you had listened.”
That sentence hurt more than any confession. Even now, he imagined a version of events in which the real problem was my failure to cooperate. Sloane pushed her chair back. “You showed me a letter.” Landon snapped her name, and she flinched. “What letter?” I asked. She reached into her bag for her phone. Her thumb hesitated over the screen. “A statement saying you approved the investment. With your signature.” The terrace seemed suddenly much colder.
“I signed nothing.” I said it to her, then to him. Landon began explaining that a draft was not a legal document, that people misunderstood business all the time, that I had encouraged him to explore options. But Sloane had found the photograph. She turned her phone toward me. There was my name beneath a paragraph I had never read. The signature looked familiar because it resembled mine. Above it was a date when I had been visiting my aunt.
May you like
A breeze lifted the corner of the tablecloth. Somewhere behind us, someone laughed at another table, and I felt the strange insult of the world continuing normally. I wanted Landon to say something that would make him recognizable again. Instead, he kept watching my phone, measuring the danger in what I had learned. Sloane lowered her eyes. For the first time that evening, I saw how lonely the table was, even with two people sitting at it. There was nothing there worth winning.
I photographed her screen with her permission. “Send me the original email if you choose,” I said. “You don't owe me a conversation tonight.” My voice almost broke on that last word. I owed her no comfort either, but I would not compete for a liar. Landon moved between us. Brit stepped beside me. “We're leaving.” As we turned, he whispered, “You'll regret making this public.” I looked back once. “You made it real. I only stopped pretending it wasn't.”
