And there it was—that familiar, polished dismissal he used whenever he needed to shrink a disaster down to a scheduling inconvenience. Carissa had spent ten years watching him do it to overdue bills, bounced ideas, failed jobs, forgotten birthdays, bruised feelings, and now apparently to the fact that he had built a parallel version of his life in which she had been edited out and replaced by the prettier woman in her own family.
“Why can’t I go?” she asked, though she already knew.
Damen made a face, the one he made when she forced him to say ugly things aloud. “Because if I show up with you, then I have to explain why I’m not married to Nikki.”
Carissa let the silence stretch.
He kept going, because men like Damen often mistook silence for opportunity.
“These people remember her. They remember she was hot. They remember me with a beautiful girl on my arm. If I show up with…” He stopped.
“With what?” Carissa asked.
He looked straight at her.
“With someone else, it turns into a whole thing.”
Someone else.
Not my wife.
Not Carissa.
Not the woman paying the mortgage.
Not the woman whose last three bonuses had kept their lives from collapsing under the weight of his unfinished plans.
Someone else.
Carissa had spent years in boardrooms where men used euphemism like a weapon. She knew how language hid contempt. But nothing in those rooms had ever hit as cleanly as the sentence she was now hearing from the man she had married.
“So your solution,” she said, and she was almost proud of how level her voice still sounded, “is for my sister to impersonate me for a night because your ego can’t survive the truth.”
Damen leaned back in his chair. “That’s dramatic.”
“No,” Carissa said. “Dramatic would be me throwing this bowl at your head.”
He gave her a humorless little smile, as though her anger were a child trying on adult clothes. “It’s one night, Carissa. One event. These people don’t matter. I’ll do whatever you want after. Nice dinner. Weekend trip. You’re acting like this means something it doesn’t.”