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"You weren't answering."

"Neither were you."

Fair.

I start up the stairs anyway.

She doesn't move.

She just stands there above me, gorgeous and furious and obviously already late, which I don't notice until I get halfway up and see the rest of it. The gold dress hanging on the bedroom door. The makeup laid out on the vanity. The shoes waiting near the landing. She's not settling in for the night.

She's leaving.

And then I remember the invitation.

The showing.

Tonight.

Shit.

"You came here with annulment papers on the night of my opening?" she asks, voice rising now, hurt and fury braided so tightly together I can't pull them apart.

"I didn't bring them out to punish you."

"Really? Because it feels weirdly punitive from where I'm standing."

"Aria—"

"No." She drops the earring onto the hallway table with a clatter. "Actually, no. I am already late. People are already gathering. Gabriel is probably downstairs trying to figure out whether I've had a nervous breakdown or been murdered. And instead of putting on shoes and pretending I'm normal for the next three hours, I'm standing in a villa in Cannes arguing with my husband about annulment papers."

The word hits.

Husband.

Not ex-husband. Not Everett.

My husband.

I don't let myself sit with it.

"Then sign them," I say, because apparently crossing an ocean has done absolutely nothing to improve my instincts.

Her face goes still.

Not calm.

Worse.

The kind of stillness that means I've just stepped directly on the last nerve she had left.

"Are you insane?"

Probably.

"You could have mailed them," she says. "You had a week to call. Nine hours to warn me you were coming. And instead you show up here like some emotionally constipated Bond villain with legal paperwork."

That almost gets me.