Carissa poured coffee and held the phone between shoulder and ear. “Good morning to you too.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. She says you cut off her money overnight.”
“Yes.”
Linda exhaled sharply. “Carissa.”
There it was. Her name in that tone. The tone reserved for moments when Carissa had again failed to be infinitely absorbent.
“She says she and Damen are in love.”
Carissa smiled at the kitchen wall. “Did she say that before or after she admitted she’s been sleeping with my husband for seven months?”
Linda fell silent for a fraction too long.
So Nikki had not led with that.
Interesting.
“She said the marriage was already in trouble,” Linda said.
“Then she should have the courage to date after the divorce, not during it.”
“Things are not always that simple.”
“They are exactly that simple.”
Linda shifted tactics. “You know Nikki has always been fragile.”
Carissa closed her eyes.
There are sentences that can age thirty years in a second.
There it was again—the family religion. Nikki the fragile. Nikki the vulnerable. Nikki the one circumstances happened to. And Carissa, by implication, the sturdy one. The one built to carry what weaker people dropped.
“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.”
She didn’t look up. “Have we.”