Chapter 4: What He Said When the Door Closed
The hotel suite was on the fourteenth floor.
Floor-to-ceiling windows, city lights below, champagne already open on the table.
Someone had scattered rose petals across the bed.
Luca locked the door.
He didn't touch the champagne.
He set his jacket over the back of a chair, loosened his tie, and turned to look at me.
"Take the dress off," he said.
"I'd like a few minutes."
"Jessi."
"I said I'd like a few minutes, Luca."
He crossed the room in four steps.
He didn't grab me.
He stopped close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, and he looked down at me with an expression I had learned to read very carefully over eighteen months.
"You've been strange all night," he said.
"I had cake sl@mmed into my face in front of two hundred people."
"It was a tradition."
"It wasn't a tradition.
You invented it on the spot because you wanted to see what I would do."
His jaw shifted.
"You're starting a fight on our wedding night."
"I'm telling you what happened."
"I know what happened.
I was there." He stepped back.
Picked up the champagne glass.
"You smiled.
You were fine."
"I smiled because you told me to."
He drank.
Set the glass down.
"You've been talking to Phoebe."
"She's my maid of honor."
"She doesn't like me."
"No," I said.
"She doesn't."
He turned.
"I want her out of your life.
Starting tomorrow."
I looked at him.
"She's been filling your head with ideas since before the engagement," he said.
"I've watched it happen.
I've been patient.
But we're married now, and I'm telling you — she goes."
"You're telling me."
"Yes."
"She's been my best friend for eleven years."
"And I'm your husband." He said it the way someone sets a key on a table.
Final.
Done.
"That means something now.
That means I come first.
That means when I tell you something needs to change, it changes."
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
The rose petals shifted under my weight.
"What else needs to change?" I asked.
He looked almost pleased that I had asked.
He sat down across from me in the armchair, elbows on his knees, like we were having a reasonable conversation.
"The company," he said.
"I want to be involved.
Properly involved.
Not a courtesy title — actual operational access.
We're a family now.
What's yours is mine."
"The prenuptial agreement—"
"Is a piece of paper your lawyer wrote to protect you from someone she assumed I was." He leaned forward.
"I'm not that person, Jessi.
But I need you to trust me.
And trust means access."
I kept my voice level.
"I'll talk to my attorney."
"I don't want you talking to your attorney.
I want you talking to me."
"About the company."
"About everything." He stood up.
"That's what marriage is.
You don't have private conversations with lawyers and best friends and whoever else you've been whispering to.
You talk to me."
He walked to the window.
The city spread out below him, all light and distance.
"I know you think I'm being controlling," he said.
"Wendy warned me you'd frame it that way.
She said your type always does."
"My type."
"Women who've been told their whole lives that they don't need anyone." He turned.
"You do need someone, Jessi.
You just haven't let yourself admit it."
I said nothing.
He took that as agreement.
His shoulders dropped slightly.
He came back across the room, sat beside me on the bed, and put his hand over mine.
"We can make this work," he said.
"But you have to stop fighting me."
Under the pearl button at my neckline, the recorder was still running.
I looked at his hand over mine.
"I'm not fighting you," I said quietly.
He squeezed my hand.
"Good."
He had no idea that the word *access* — spoken in his own voice, in the context of the prenuptial agreement, on the night of our wedding — had just handed my attorney exactly what she needed to begin a fraud investigation.
May you like
He thought he had won the first real argument of our marriage.
What he had actually done was confess.
