Downstairs, applause rose again, polished and distant, like rain against glass. I reached for the jacket draped over a chair and slid it on despite the ache beneath my ribs. Ethan noticed the flinch.
His voice lowered. “Ava, you are not walking back to him alone.”
The words should have felt dramatic, but Ethan spoke them like a decision made after careful arithmetic. I almost laughed, because careful decisions had never saved me from Andrew Vaughn.
Andrew survived by being reasonable in public, generous under chandeliers, humble before cameras. He remembered nurses’ birthdays, donated to pediatric wards, and held frightened parents’ hands with a tenderness that made newspapers adore him.
Behind closed doors, he counted my smiles, corrected my opinions, and called fear devotion. I had learned to predict storms from the angle of his jaw. Tonight, I had missed one sign, and body carried the mistake.
