The event at the Intercontinental was the same as always. Bright lights. Little bronzed nametags. Red carpets that looked good on video but, in real life, were worn and gum-spotted. None of it mattered. He was on my arm and in the core of my body was a solid weight of shiny silver metal, stretching me for him.

“How’s that thing feel?” Adam asked once we were out of range of the flashing lights.

“Not bad.” I pulled him closer.

He gazed down at me, and what should have been a long, warm look into my soul ending in a kiss was actually short and interrupted by his need to talk to someone across the room.

We’d been married business partners long enough for me to regret the loss of that warm moment at the same time as I understood it. The nametag on the end of my ribbon lanyard said McNeill-Barnes Publishing, and it meant business. I could still play company owner. I could still be a businesswoman. I was always the heiress to an iconic publishing house. Even with a butt plug inserted in my ass.

I had to bite my lips to keep from laughing. We were talking to Giulio Fenestro, who was a shoo-in for a Pulitzer. Not the time to giggle about walking around pretty-as-you-please with a hunk of precious metal in my rectum.

Do. Not. Laugh.

Adam yanked me to the silent auction tables.

“What’s so funny?” he whispered.

“Nothing.” I snapped up a clipboard.

“Am I going to punish you for lies of omission?”

I wrote my name and a number on the sheet. I didn’t even know what I was bidding on.

“Put my address. You’ll be there for the duration.”

“So sure, are you?”

I put down the clipboard. He took me by the chin and looked deeply in my eyes. I tried to hide the pain of the pregnancy test. First, with defiance, then submission as I looked away. I couldn’t bear to look away for long. When our eyes met again, he wasn’t looking at something that pleased him.

“Talk to me.”

“I’m nervous about later, I guess.”

He let my chin go and broke eye contact.

“Well, well,” he said. “Look who’s here.”

I followed his gaze to Stefan, who was talking to Thalia Jonson from Breakneck Books.

“Krovite published his catalogs, right?” I asked. “That must be why he’s here.”

Adam didn’t wait to answer but approached the pair with his usual confidence and grace. He didn’t take my hand or give me his arm. His fingers didn’t brush my neck as they often did when we were at a party together. He just went, and I dragged my butt plug behind.

Five minutes before, I would have had to stifle a laugh, but now I felt small and infantile with the sophisticated humor of a twelve-year-old boy.

I shook Thalia’s hand and did a double-air kiss with Stefan. We talked about the future of plated art books versus art textbooks for a few minutes before Thalia excused herself.

“Just like old times,” Stefan said then turned to me.

“Are you moving to Breakneck?” I asked quietly. “They just bought Havershim’s old plant in Norfolk.”

We engaged in a light, gossipy business discussion about Breakneck’s color plating abilities, during which Adam didn’t touch me or look at me. I could hold the conversation, but the weight of his inattention kept me from breathing right. Kept me from thinking clearly.

“Can you excuse us?” Adam said, offering me his arm.

“Of course.”

He pulled me away from the crowd in the ballroom and up a set of beige marble stairs. My stockings felt saggy and my shoes bit the soft parts of my ankles, but I continued. I needed to focus on pleasing him.

We slipped past a velvet rope, into a narrow hallway lined with paintings of beautiful Victorian women and a deep blue carpet. He wasn’t looking at me. Just walking fast and looking ahead. The avoidance hurt more than my shoes.

“Stop,” I said. “What’s the problem? Wait—” I interrupted myself, looking at the floor and putting my hands up to fend off his voice and his face. I’d melt for either. “You’re going to ask me what I’m talking about, so let’s just skip that part.” I stood straight and took a deep breath, balling my fists and girding myself against his brutal charms. “If I thought you were taking me to fuck me, I’d follow. No problem. But I’m getting the sense there’s no sex at the end of this walk.”

My voice sounded shrill and desperate, and everything about him was simply rock solid and right with the world. Even in his confusion, as all the things he could say flashed across his face, he was perfect and I was a little girl who wanted to rip a piece of metal out of her ass.

“Just say it, Adam. Whatever it is.”

“Your eyes.”

“What about them?”

“They’re swollen. Just a little. You probably put ice on them before you came, and now they’re swollen again. You were crying. Don’t deny it. I want to know why, and you haven’t told me. So that means one of three things. Either it’s something you don’t want me to know, it’s someone you don’t want me to kill, or it’s me.”

My eyes swelled up again. My palms became as wet as my mouth. I was going to explode in a cyclone of spit and tears, so I clamped my lips shut.

“And I know it’s me,” he said. “It’s what I said. It’s what I didn’t say. I don’t know which. I can’t get this right. I mean, at the Sheepshead house, when I made love to you, I felt it again. I thought…” He closed his eyes slowly and opened them again, looking more composed. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. It matters.”

“It makes me crazy when you cry.”

“Why?”

“I want to hurt whoever hurt you. Then I realize I might have to hurt myself. And I would. I will. Why were you crying?”

My feet hurt and my shoulders were suddenly stiff. Remembering the bathroom floor, I felt like a brittle statue in a fancy dress. I was made of shell and soft tissue. No lie I told would change that.

“I thought I was pregnant.”

His eyebrows went up, and his face took on an urgency I’d never seen before. Part confusion and part smothered joy. “You—”

“I’m not.”

“Ah.”

“But it made me think. This baby. It doesn’t exist, but it had parents. And I don’t know if his parents have a future, so those babies won’t ever exist. I feel like I killed children.”

“What does that mean?” He brushed a hair from my cheek. The gesture was tender and sweet, somehow protective, existing in a land between Manhattan and Montauk.

“I didn’t want it,” I said fiercely. That was the only way. “I told myself to hope I wasn’t. I know hoping one way or the other didn’t affect the results, but the hope told me something. I don’t want to be pregnant. But when I wasn’t, I was disappointed. And that told me something too.”

“You wanted to be pregnant,” he said. “But not with me.”

“I want children with you, but not in this situation. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

“Maybe you’re doing both.” His fingers caught the ribbon lanyard, stroking to down to the nametag. Diana Steinbeck. Our names were merged on my tag.

“I don’t know how to fix all this.”

“It’s amazing that you left me in the first place without thinking about how terribly inconvenient it would be.”

“I’m impulsive. If it didn’t take three sponsors to get into the Cellar, I’d be—” I cut myself off, but it was too late.

He increased the downward pressure on the lanyard just a little. “Excuse me?”

Fuck it. I had to stand by my actions or dance around them like an adolescent trying to get away with adult behavior. He wasn’t my father.

“I started the process before you redlined it.” I didn’t say how many minutes before, or how easy it would have been to halt. Maybe I was an adolescent. I yanked my lanyard away. I wouldn’t be physically threatened by him.

“Did Charlie write a letter?”

“I asked Stefan and—” Fuck it again. We said no lies of omission. He couldn’t hurt me anymore. “Serena.”

Adam let the tag drop, took me by the hand, and pulled me behind him.

“Adam, wait!”

“Don’t let go.”

He held my hand so tightly I couldn’t have let go if I wanted to, then he slapped open the door to the main hall and cut into the crowd. He didn’t slow down long enough for me to say help to someone I knew or cut a turn on my high heels.

“Adam! The floor is marble!” I barked after I slipped, avoiding a fall but not shame.

He stopped and, with the force of inertia that kept me moving forward, wrapped his arm around my waist. Then he kept crossing the room as if he were saving a life.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“Stefan. That’s what.”

“It’s not his fault.”

“The fuck it’s not.”

I followed more readily in an odd, unbelievable need to protect Stefan. “You introduced us. You made it possible.”

“Exactly,” he said. “I’m the only one who can undo what I did.”

“It won’t go through until after the thirty days.”

“Irrelevant.”

“You’re being unreasonable.”

He couldn’t lodge an objection because Stefan came into view. I didn’t know the man he was talking to. Looked like an old-school publishing guy with a comb-over, a five-thousand-dollar suit, and red tie.

I smiled at him as we approached, and since we were about to bulldoze his conversation, I mouthed the word, “Sorry.”

“Isn’t it funny how I don’t see you for years and now you show up here?” Adam said the second he was in earshot.

“Nice to see you too,” Stefan said. “Adam Steinbeck, this is—” he indicated the man with the comb-over but didn’t have a chance to make the introduction.

My husband was made of fuel and fire. “And the Greens too. Everywhere she is, you show up.”

Comb-over excused himself. Not that anyone noticed.

“It’s nice to see her.” He directed his words to me. “Do you want to see me?”

Adam didn’t let me answer. “No, she doesn’t.”

“I think he’s kind of interesting,” I said.

Adam leveled a finger at Stefan. “Rescind your sponsorship.”

“Is that what this is about?” Stefan faced me. “Are you all right?” He seemed genuinely concerned. He deserved an answer, but Adam didn’t give me a second.

“She’s fine.”

“That’s enough!” I said, pushing Adam’s arm off me.

“She’s mine, you understand? I’ll decide if she’s in or out.” Adam growled it as if it were deadly true, but we’d just had a conversation about how I wasn’t his. About how he could never love me and be happy at the same time.

“I am not.” I was flat serious. Not yelling, almost too quiet for Adam to hear through the rage in his ears.

“I’m watching you,” Adam continued. “And I’m watching her. So—”

“I’m not yours.”

“—if I ever see you near her again—”

“I’m not yours.” I raised my voice just a little.

“—I’m going to make it my business to —”

“I’m not yours!”

The ballroom gallery fell silent. The string quartet hit a speed bump and played again. Interrupted conversations continued. The world spun on its axis for everyone else, while I stayed suspended in time. Gravity stopped, and I floated in the space between us, where the tension between his shock and his rage vibrated.

“I’m not yours,” I said. “We talked about this.”

“For two days, you are.”

I shook my head slowly. I couldn’t utter the words releasing him from his last half week with me, but it was done. Something inside me had snapped under the weight of his words, the pregnancy test, and the burden of keeping love alive for the both of us. The charade was ending.

I held out my hand. “I need me coat check ticket, please.”

He gave it to me. “I’ll get you home.”

I snapped the ticket away and pushed through the crowd. He would follow. I knew him at least that well. If I turned around, I’d encourage him. I just wanted my coat and a cab—alone. Then I wanted to go to my father’s place and cry for a few hours. Maybe I’d cry hard enough to excavate my grief. I wouldn’t tell Dad why I was crying. I wouldn’t tell him how I knew we were finished. I wouldn’t talk about the submission or my own needs. I’d only tell him how bad I felt for fucking this up.

“Diana.” Adam sidled up to me when I handed the girl my ticket. “Let me take you home.”

“No. Just no.”

“Why not?”

My coat came. I pulled it over the counter. “Because I’m sad. And I feel hopeless. And trapped.”

“By me?”

“You want me to answer that?”

He guided me away from the coat check window. His jacket still smelled like Montauk snow and his body smelled like fennel as it pressed against me.

“Don’t answer,” he said. “Just listen. We have a few days. Only a few more before things get even more complicated. Will we be together? Apart? Some middle thing? Something so painful we can’t even imagine it? These few days we have, they’re precious. It’s all unknowns after that. So let’s just lock ourselves away. You and me. We trust each other. We’ll close the door on love and celebrate trust.”

Running my fingers along his lapel, I avoided meeting his eyes. He pressed his lips to my cheek, then my neck.

“I want to tie you down one more time.”

“What’s the point?” I was arguing about nothing. I was going with him. I just wanted him to work a little harder.

“The way you try so hard to stay quiet when I hurt you. That moment of hesitation before you get on your knees.” I felt the line of his erection against my thigh. “I want it as long as I can get it. I can keep you on the edge for fifteen minutes. I want to see if you can stay quiet before I let you scream.” His lips traced a line across my forehead.

“I hate you.”

“But you trust me.”

I pushed him away, looking into his eyes. “I do. And if you break that trust, it’s broken forever.”

“I won’t.”

I walked past him, pushing my arms into the coat sleeves, tying my scarf, my heels clopping and echoing in the cavern of stone. A doorman opened the brass doors, and I went out into the cold.