Waverly's POV
"My money is mine again," I tell Sloan over the phone, and the sentence tastes like the first real breath I've taken in two weeks.
Nadia called at nine this morning — Gary's legal team caved under pressure and unfroze my personal accounts.
Not the business accounts; those are still locked behind Gary's passwords and his army of overpriced attorneys. But my savings, my credit cards, the money that predates the marriage and belongs to me the way my name does… mine again.
I can buy my own groceries.
I can pay for my own Uber.
I can stop measuring every purchase against the borrowed feeling of living in someone else's house.
Sloan's response is immediate and decisive. "I'll be there in an hour. Don't touch anything in the kitchen!"
She arrives in fifty-nine minutes carrying a bottle of rosé she knows I can't drink and two liters of sparkling water she knows I can, with a canvas bag slung over her shoulder and the particular energy she deploys whenever she's decided the situation requires her full personality.
Sloan Atkinson walks into a room and rearranges it by making everyone in it feel like they've been upgraded.
She's tall, effortlessly put-together in a way that looks accidental, and she talks like some people breathe: constantly, fluently, without any apparent need to pause for oxygen.
She crosses Beckett's kitchen threshold, sets her bag on the counter, pulls out a block of good cheese and a box of fancy crackers, and announces: "This is a celebration. Sparkling water counts as celebration if we decide it does."
"I appreciate the commitment to the reframe."
"Years of friendship means I know when to pour and when to pivot." She holds up the rosé, tilts it in my direction. "This is for me. The water is for you and the baby. The cheese is for both of you."
She arranges everything on the island, talking the entire time about a client who rejected four rounds of her creative work and then asked for the first option back.
Then she vents about the man she's been seeing who texts in full paragraphs but can't hold a conversation at dinner, about a new restaurant on the east side that has a waiting list two months long and a burrata dish that apparently justifies both.
She doesn't mention Gary once.
I don't realize how starved I've been for exactly this until I'm laughing at the paragraph-texter story and the laughter comes out loose and unguarded. Sloan raises her glass, and we clink.
"To your money," she says.
"To my money."
She notices the house and comments on the grounds with the appreciative economy of someone who grew up with a postage-stamp backyard. She doesn't ask about Beckett, which is deliberate restraint, which means she's storing questions for later.
The sun is high by the time I suggest the pool.
"Beckett said he'd be at the office all day," I tell her, and the statement lands without commentary from either of us.
We change and settle by the water — Sloan on a sun lounger with her rosé balanced on the armrest, me floating on my back in the deep end with my eyes half-closed against the light.
The water holds me without asking anything of me. The sky is flat and blue and enormous. My shoulders drop for the first time in weeks, the constant low-grade readiness bleeding out of my muscles in the heat.
Sloan talks. I float.
"Apparently the paragraph-texter has a twin," she calls from the lounger. "Friends say the twin is the interesting one…"
"So you're dating the decoy," I say to the sky.
"I'm aware of that, Waverly. I'm considering the decoy anyway."
This is what I forgot. That normal exists.
That there are days that don't require a strategy.
It feels like before — before the gala, before the locked hotel room, before I started measuring every room I entered by its exits.
Then the back door opens and I hear it before I see them. The click of the handle, footsteps on the stone patio. I right myself in the water and push the wet hair from my face.
Beckett comes through the door with Ridley half a step behind him. He's still in his office clothes — shirt sleeves already rolled to the forearm, jacket presumably in the car.
He stops at the edge of the patio when he registers the scene, and his eyes find me in the pool with the directness of a man who isn't looking for me and finds me anyway.
He looks. And then he works very deliberately to stop looking, which is its own kind of admission.
Ridley, for his part, is considerably less subtle about the fact that Sloan has just sat up on her sun lounger and is watching them both with the calm, unimpressed attention she usually reserves for presentations that have gone slightly off-script.
Beckett clears his throat. "There's something I need to discuss with you."
I pull myself up the pool ladder, reach for the towel on the lounger, and wrap it around myself before I turn to face him.
"Sloan knows everything," I tell him. "You can say whatever you need to say."
He glances at Ridley. Ridley's expression communicates nothing, which is the same as communicating everything. Then Beckett looks back at me. "You need to leave by Friday."
The patio goes quiet. The water behind me makes the small sound of settling.
I don't react. I hold his gaze and keep my face arranged into the composed stillness I've spent years perfecting — the one that shows nothing, costs everything.
My fingers press into the towel at my waist, and I don't let them tighten. But the pause stretches too long. Four seconds, five, and the silence exposes what my face won't.
Beckett sees it. Ridley sees it. Sloan definitely feels it.
Sloan stands up from the lounger in one fluid motion, unhurried, like this is something she's been planning. She comes to my side and wraps her arm around my shoulder.
"Perfect timing, actually," she says with warm certainty. "We were literally just talking about Waverly moving into my place. I have a spare room."
The sentence lands complete and airtight, no seams, no gap where anyone could fit the fact that neither of us said a word about it until thirty seconds ago. Sloan's arm is steady across my shoulders and I lean into it, exactly a fraction.
Beckett nods and I see something move across his face — not relief, not guilt. I can't name it before it's gone. Ridley says nothing and then both of the men leave.
Sloan stays another hour. She squeezes my hand before she goes and whispers that the spare room has good light and she'll set it up tonight. The hug at the door lasts long enough that it means something.
I stand by the pool alone as the sun starts its descent. The water has gone still. The estate settles into its evening quiet — the trees, the gravel, the warm stone of the house holding its heat.
I look at the guest wing window. I look at the kitchen through the glass door, where the island still holds the remnants of our afternoon. I look at the patio chairs where Beckett and I sat over takeout arguing about acquisition timelines while candles pushed shadows across the table between us.
I liked it here.
The thought arrives without permission and without apology, and I stand there with it, because there's no one left to see my face.
I might even miss him.
My phone buzzes in my hand and I look down. It's a news alert — loud words and a photograph that make the quiet evening crack open at the seams.
MORROW-DUVAL MERGER: CONFIRMED ENGAGEMENT IN THE WORKS, SOURCES TELL US.
Eleanora Duval's face smiles up at me from the screen, and somewhere behind her in the background, visible at the edge of the frame, is the unmistakable facade of Beckett's estate.