Chapter 10: Pool House

We did not talk in the car.

Joaquin drove my sedan home himself, one hand on the wheel.

I watched his profile pass in and out of the streetlights.

At the house I walked straight through the kitchen and out the back door.

The pool glittered under the lawn lights.

Beyond it stood the little white pool house where nobody had slept in two years.

I heard him follow.

I unlocked the door and turned around inside it.

"What did you come home for?" I said.

He shut the door and leaned against it.

"I came to propose to Noelle," he said. "That was true."

"And the rest?"

"I came to buy Heyward Freight."

The words sat in the dark between us.

"All of it," Joaquin said. "The docks, the cranes, the name."

"My father's last day was in your yard."

"Your uncle blamed him for the collapse, and he died eight weeks later in a rented room."

"You told me that already."

"I didn't tell you I wanted to own the ground he was fired from."

I stared at him.

I had been ready for an apology, or an excuse.

I was not ready for him to say it so calmly, and mean it.

"And me?" My voice shook. "Was I the shortcut? A wife with the controlling shares?"

"No."

"You said yes in the restaurant without hesitating."

"Because it was you."

His face twisted.

"I didn't plan you, Daphne. I planned a ring, a company and a clean ending."

"Then a woman in a navy suit stood up for me in front of forty people, and nothing was clean anymore."

I crossed the room and hit his chest with my open hand.

It made a flat sound.

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