My husband asked me to let my sister be his “wife” for one night. He said it like he was asking me to pass the salt.

A sharp, full-throated sound that bounced off the foyer walls and would absolutely carry through the transom and into the street where Jackson’s headlights had just swept across the front windows.

Damen let go instantly.

Carissa smoothed the sleeve of her dress, looked him directly in the eye, and said quietly, “Interesting. So you do know how fast to release a woman when you think someone might hear.”

Then she opened the door and walked outside.

Jackson took one look at her face and one look at Damen in the hallway behind her and asked, “Everything okay?”

Carissa smiled without humor. “It will be.”

Dinner itself was almost shockingly normal.

That was what made it dangerous.

Jackson asked about her cases and actually listened to the answers instead of waiting for a place to redirect the conversation back to himself. He remembered she took her bourbon neat and that she hated being asked if she was “one of those women who likes whiskey to seem cool.” He did not flatter her intelligence like it was a surprising quirk. He assumed it as fact and built conversation from there.

At one point, halfway through the main course, Carissa laughed so suddenly and genuinely she startled herself.

Jackson saw it happen and smiled. “There you are.”

It was such a small sentence. It landed with unreasonable force.

When he dropped her off, he walked her to the door and kissed her cheek—not possessively, not performatively, just enough to be warm.

Damen was visible through the front window, standing in the dark living room with his arms crossed.

Carissa went to bed that night understanding two things she had not allowed herself to understand before.

First: her marriage had not merely become unhappy. It had become contemptuous.

Second: she had forgotten what it felt like to sit across from a man and not feel managed.

The dinners continued.

Once a week at first, then twice.

Sometimes they were actually dinners. Sometimes coffee. Sometimes a late walk along the lake after work with both of them in coats against the wind, talking about nothing dramatic—books, parents, the absurdity of school fundraisers, the way Chicago made every season feel like a test of character. Jackson never pushed for confession. He asked, and when she answered, he made space around the answer instead of crowding it.

At home, Damen came apart in predictable stages.

First he mocked it.