Adeline Maybe it was because everyone in the house was already sick, but Zach went down faster than anyone I’d ever seen. One minute, he was standing in my kitchen pretending he hadn’t just sneezed hard enough to rattle the cabinets, and the next, he was slumped over the counter, reading through my divorce papers while sagging a little more by the second. I watched him for just one more moment, then walked over and pressed the back of my hand to his forehead. He glanced up at me, those green eyes shot through with red and a bit hazy now. “What are you doing?” he asked. “I was just confirming what I already knew,” I said. “You’re running a fever.” “It’s allergies.” I sighed. “Allergies won’t cause a fever.” “It’s not a fever. I never get sick.” I shook my head and smiled, turning toward the cabinet where I k ept my arsenal. Children, it turned out, required a level of pharmaceutical pr eparedness unlike anything I ever could’ve imagined before I’d had them. “You never get sick?” I asked, pulling out a bottle. “Never,” he confirmed. “It’s been years. It can’t be that.” “Well, I hate to break it to you, but it is that. It’s exactly that.” I picked up a bottle of the tablets I’d been taking and turned back to him. “You’ll need two of those now and another two in four hours.” He glanced at the bottle. “Thanks, but I don’t need it.” “You do.” I crossed my arms and waited for him to relent, noticing that his cheeks were flushed now, but the rest of his face had gone ashen. “You’re taking the medicine, Zach. We need to break that fever.” He stared up at me, his lips pursing. He shook his head, then seemed a little woozy for having done it. “It’s not a fever. It’s just cold in here.” “Then why are you hot?” He managed a very weak smirk. “I was born this way?” “Are you asking me or telling me?” I reached for the bottle and nudged it a little closer. “Take them, and while you’re at it, you need to get rid of the jacket and tie.” His dark blond eyebrows hiked up. “Now? The girls are right over there.” He tilted his chin toward the living room and I sighed, but my heart skipped a beat that might not have only been due to the fact that my body was currently fighting the plague. “You’re not as charming as you think. Now, take it off and swallow the tablets. Down the hatch, Zach.” I filled up a glass of water and pointedly set it down on the counter next to the pills. He stared at me for another full minute before he shrugged out of the jacket, physically flinching when a shudder passed through him. He loosened his tie and took the medicine.
“Thank you,” I said sweetly, leaving the water in front of him but returning the tablets to the shelf. “Drink the rest of it too.” “I resent this.” “I’m sure you do, but it’ll help. I promise.” Begrudgingly nodding, he took another sip of the water and shivered as he set it back down. “Why is everything so cold?” “The fever,” I said slowly. “Jeez. You’re really not used to this, are you?” He shook his head, finally leaning back a little on the stool and giving up on reviewing the divorce papers. The soundtrack currently blasting from the living room seemed to catch his attention and he turned toward the girls, who were dancing energetically to Takedown from the K-Pop Demon Hunters movie. They’d watched it approximately six times in the last twenty-four hours. I’d learned to tune it out, but Zach winced when Jennifer shrieked a line of the song. “Have they been like this all day?” he asked incredulously. “Where are they getting all that energy? They must be feeling awful.” “They’re always like this,” I said, smiling as I watched them dance with zero coordination but apparently having the time of their lives. “Kids are just magic like that. You wouldn’t know Lu is running a fever of a hundred and two.” He turned back to look at me sharply. “She’s what? Should we take her to the emergency room? That seems high.” “She’s fine,” I reassured him quickly. “I promise. Look at her. It’s when they start getting lethargic that you need to worry.” After blinking a few times rapidly, he nodded and glanced back down at the papers. “Can we discuss these while they’re right there?” “Trust me, they’re not listening, so discuss away.” I pulled up a stool of my own and sat down. “Besides, if you want to talk about it today at all, it’s going to have to be ninja style while they’re with us. We’ll just ke ep an eye out to make sure they stay entertained so they’re not eavesdropping.” “Where’s your nanny? Amber, right? I don’t mind waiting if you want to ask her to take them somewhere.” “Amber, yes, but I sent her away to stay healthy. The timing actually worked out really well. She was already planning a long weekend to visit friends upstate, so I told her to go early. There’s no point in all of us being miserable.” “So you’re just handling this alone, while you’re also sick yourself?” I shrugged. “I’ve been handling things alone for a while now. What else am I going to do?” “Right,” he said quietly. “Sorry. That was a stupid question. I’m still, uh, trying to get my head wrapped around it all, I guess.”
The girls screamed again when Rumi did whatever awesome thing Rumi had done, but Zach didn’t flinch this time and I smiled. “See, you get used to it.” He widened his eyes. “Yeah, I’m not sure that’s what I would call it. Maybe it’s just an insensitivity to loud noises due to severe overstimulation.” “Potato, potahto.” He looked back down at the papers and visibly rallied, like he was trying to force himself back into work mode. “According to this, you get full custody of the girls, but nothing else.” I nodded. “That’s what we agreed to in the settlement.” Zach swiped his tongue across his lips and inhaled de eply before glancing back up at me. “He might’ve made some terrible decisions, but Louis is still a wealthy man, Adeline. He’s got a huge real estate and investment portfolio and he drained your trust fund on top of all that.” “I know, but I didn’t want any of it. Not the house in the Hamptons. Nothing.” I held his gaze, needing him to see how sure I was about this. “I wanted the girls. That was the only thing that mattered to me, and like you said, I get full custody. That’s a win in my book.” Something unreadable flickered across his expression. “Are you sure? It doesn’t seem fair that he’s ke eping everything, including the money he took from you, and expecting you to sign when this contract leaves you with nothing.” “Nothing but the girls,” I emphasized gently. “They’re the only reason I fought and I know he was just using them as a bargaining chip. Honestly, he only wanted to be a dad until we found out Lu was another girl. After that, he checked out and he really never checked back in. I don’t care about the houses or the money. The only thing I care about are the girls he never wanted and I got them. Everything else pales in comparison.” The music swelled in the background and Jennifer laughed, Lu shouting something unintelligible at the screen. He didn’t even glance toward them, just looking at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “This is the part they don’t put in the brochures, Zach.” I motioned vaguely around the apartment. “When arranged marriages are being negotiated, no one talks about what it looks like when they fail. When those contracts they spend entire days hammering out can’t be upheld. This is the dark side.” He huffed out a quiet breath, but that iciness that had been in his eyes almost all along had melted. Maybe he was feeling sorry for me, or maybe that was just the cold medicine finally doing its job, but he finally seemed to warm up a little bit. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m starting to see that.” As we sat there, locked in a silence that wasn’t of our own making but rather reality sinking in, I watched him, slightly flushed in my tiny kitchen but somehow not completely out of place, looking at the girls when they danced past like he was paying attention.
My own defensiveness melted a little as I saw him absorb the weight of what I’d said. Zach always had made me feel like he was really listening to me and hearing what I was saying instead of simply formulating a response, and it seemed like he hadn’t lost that ability. “You didn’t deserve that,” he said suddenly. I frowned. “I didn’t deserve what?” “Any of it,” he clarified as he swung his eyes back to mine. I held his gaze, not really knowing what to say or if there was even anything to say, but eventually, I felt my lips curve into a ghost of a smile. “Neither did you, Zach.” Suddenly, it felt just a bit less like we were on opposite sides of what I’d broken. Like maybe we were even remembering how to be on the same side again. It felt good. Right. Until he pushed the papers toward me. “Okay, then. If you’re sure you’re happy with the terms, nothing else jumped out at me. I think you can sign.” I nodded and picked up the pen, not hesitating to put an end to this chapter of my life. Zach watched me from the other side of the counter, his edges softer now than they’d been since before I’d had that conversation with him so many years ago. “You don’t have to rush, Adeline. You can take another day, or hell, even another week.” “I’m not rushing. I’m just not dragging this out any longer,” I said, glancing up at him. “I think I’ve done enough of that.” I glanced at the line where my signature belonged and signed, surprised by how anticlimactic it was. There was no lightning bolt or giant, flashing neon sign that read FREE popping up above my head. Just a quiet, swe eping sense of relief. I exhaled a long, slow breath, then pushed the papers back toward him. “There you go. That’s it, right? There’s nothing else to sign?” He shook his head. “That’s it.” Carefully sliding the papers back into the folder, he stood up and immediately swayed and grabbed the counter for balance. My eyebrows shot up. “Oh, good. You’re dying. You should’ve just taken that damn medicine sooner.” “I’m not dying,” he argued lamely. “I just stood up too fast.” “You stumbled like a Victorian woman in a corset,” I said. “Sit down before you hurt yourself.” “I’m fine.” He took in a de ep breath, then slowly released the counter and picked up the folder. “I’m returning these to your lawyer, then I should get back to the office.” “You’re sitting down,” I countered. “Do you honestly think you can drive right now?” Although he’d been turning toward the door, he suddenly stopped and looked back at me. Breathtakingly handsome as always, he also looked like complete crap. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot, his complexion totally off, and he didn’t seem very steady on his feet. “Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll stay, but I want it on the record that I don’t like this.”
“No one does.” I waved him toward the couch and watched as he dropped down beside the girls. Within twenty minutes, I had fully committed to disinfecting every surface in the apartment while my head pounded and my body strongly disagreed with all the movement, but with all four of us sick and here, it had to be done. Meanwhile, Zach kicked off his shoes and even undid the top few buttons of his shirt. He curled up under a blanket with Jennifer on the couch and was watching the movie with them. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I mean, that’s not possible.” “It does make sense,” Jennifer argued without hesitation. “What’s so impossible about it?” “How about the fact that she just jumped off a building and landed without getting hurt?” “She’s a demon hunter.” “Physics doesn’t work that way and neither does gravity.” Lu glanced at him from her perch on the armrest. “He’s right.” I paused with the spray bottle still aimed at the counter and the cloth halfway through a swipe. Zach’s eyebrows arched. Jennifer gasped like she’d been betrayed. “Lu!” “I’m just saying.” Lu shrugged weakly. “It’s not realistic. Mommy said demon hunters aren’t even real.” “It’s a movie,” Jennifer said, dead pan. “It’s not supposed to be realistic.” “It should still follow some internal logic,” Zach argued lightly. “This doesn’t.” Jennifer threw her hands up. “You’re both ruining it.” I pressed my lips together to hide a smile. Lu didn’t do that. She never agreed with anyone and she didn’t just soften, but she was looking at him now like she might not hate the very fact of his existence. For everyone else, that wouldn’t have been much, but for her, it was huge. I didn’t want to make a big deal about it though, so I went back to cleaning. Zach shook his head but turned back to the movie. A short while later, a knock sounded at the door and he twisted on the couch, straightening up to look at me. “That should be the runner Alex sent to collect the papers. Do you want me to get it?” “No, I’ve got it.” Swiping the folder off the counter, I headed over to the door and pulled it open to find a man in a suit on the other side. “Are you from W&S?” “Yes, ma’am.” I handed over the folder. “Then I believe these are for you.” He inclined his chin in a curt nod. “Your lawyer will receive confirmation shortly. I’m headed straight there from here.” “Thank you,” I r eplied, and then he was gone. After more than a year of threats, negotiations, and demands dropping like bombs during a war, it was actually done. The papers were signed. Louis and I were officially over.
I stood there for a second after closing the door, just breathing and trying to acc ept that it had taken the Westwoods less than a week to achieve what I hadn’t been able to in a year. It was crazy, really, but I was too relieved and it felt too surreal to absorb the full truth of the fact in just that one moment. I pushed off the door and walked back to the living room. Zach and Jennifer were still arguing about the movie while Lu watched, quiet. It did something strange to my chest to see them all there together, just bundled up and bonding. He stayed for two more movies after that, not once seeming bored or put out by whatever they chose. When the sun started dipping lower and the girls finally lost some of their impossible energy, he stood up again, definitely a little more steady on his feet now that he’d had two doses of medicine. “Alright,” he said, sliding his feet back into his shoes. “I should get going. Ladies, thank you for the movie day. It was insightful.” The girls both giggled and politely said their goodbyes. Even Lu, which was a first. After he’d gotten his shoes on, he slid back into his jacket, stuffed his tie into his pocket, then strode over to the door where I was waiting to let him out. As he reached me, he paused. His green eyes bored into mine for a touch too long before he dragged a hand through his hair and glanced back at the girls. When he finally looked at me again, his voice was quiet, too low for them to overhear us. “You don’t have to do this.” I frowned. “Do what?” “Get married to a stranger again just because someone else decided it would be a good idea.” I held his gaze. “You’re not a stranger.” As soon as I said it, the softness I remembered returned to his features. For just one, fleeting second, he looked like the guy who used to hold me like I meant something to him, but it was gone in a flash. “Right. Of course not.” He looked at me for just another beat, nodded like he was trying to acc ept a truth he wasn’t entirely sure about, and left. The door clicked shut behind him and I sighed heavily, wondering if maybe he was the one who didn’t want to do this. Ultimately, however, now wasn’t the time for me to try to figure out what was going on in Zachary Westwood’s head. I had two sick girls to take care of and they were sprawled across the couch, arguing weakly about what to watch next. I walked back to them, but all through the night, the bedtime routine, and administering more medication than felt humanly possible, one question k ept rattling through my head—and I truly didn’t have an answer to it. Now what?