Ex-Husband, Inc

Chapter 4: The Invitation

Three days passed, and nobody at Sinclair Group called Marcus back.

He wasn't surprised. He knew what silence like that meant. Gerald wasn't the type to admit he was wrong out loud. He was the type to go quiet, make a few calls, try to find a way to make the problem disappear without ever saying sorry.

Marcus let him try.

He spent those three days above the laundromat with Teddy, watching Dominic Vale's offer on the headquarters lease slowly fall apart. Vale's lawyers had finally traced the ownership six layers down and found Marcus's name sitting at the bottom of it. After that, the calls from Vale's office got a lot more polite, and a lot more nervous.

"He wants a meeting," Teddy said, reading off his laptop screen Thursday morning. "Vale himself. Says he had no idea Meridian was involved, wants to talk terms before he walks away clean."

"Let him walk away clean," Marcus said. "I don't need his money. I need Gerald out of the game, not Vale."

"You're a strange kind of ruthless, you know that?"

"I've got a plan. Ruthless comes later, if it needs to."

His phone buzzed on the table. Not Teddy's number. Not Sinclair Group's front office either. This one he had saved.

Gerald Sinclair: Sunday dinner. 6pm. Family only. Hope you'll come.

Marcus read it twice. Then he set the phone down and let out a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh.

Teddy leaned over to read it upside down. "Family only," he said slowly. "He humiliated you at that table eleven days ago and called it 'new beginnings.' Now it's family only?"

"Now he knows exactly who's sitting at the head of it," Marcus said.

"You gonna go?"

Marcus thought about it. He thought about the lamb, and the laughing, and Gerald's voice saying a birdhouse, then like it was the funniest thing he'd heard all week. He thought about Naomi in the hallway, telling him she hoped he'd figure out what to do with himself, not knowing he already had.

"I'm going," Marcus said. "I want to watch him try."

Sunday came fast.

The Sinclair house looked exactly the same from the outside — the long driveway, the lit-up windows, the same brass door knocker Marcus used to think was a little too much for a family that already had everything. Nothing about the house had changed. Only what was underneath it.

Mrs. Alcott opened the door before he knocked. She gave him the same small nod she always did, but this time there was something else behind it. Something close to a smile.

"Good evening, Mr. Kane," she said, and the way she said his name, careful and formal, told him Gerald had already talked to the staff about how tonight needed to go.

Inside, the table was set differently than he remembered. Somebody — probably Diane — had moved his old seat, the one at the far end, up closer to Gerald's side. A better chair. A better view.

Vanessa was the first to see him walk in, and Marcus watched her face do something complicated — surprise, followed fast by a kind of nervous recalculation, like she was trying to remember every joke she'd made about him at this same table and hoping he hadn't kept count.

"Marcus!" she said, too brightly. "You look — is that a new jacket?"

It was the same jacket. The same worn brown one she used to make fun of every week.

"Same one," Marcus said.

"Right. Of course. It looks good on you. Very... classic."

Diane came around the table next, and for a woman who three weeks ago hadn't looked directly at him during an entire dinner, she suddenly couldn't stop smiling in his direction. "We're so glad you came," she said, taking both his hands like they were old friends. "Gerald was just saying how much we've missed having you at the table."

Marcus let her hold his hands for a second before he answered. "Is that what he said."

"Of course." Her smile didn't move, but something behind her eyes did, quick and careful, like she was recalculating faster than Vanessa. "Family is family, after all. Divorce or no divorce."

Naomi was the last to come in, and she stopped in the doorway when she saw him, the same way Gerald had stopped in his office three days before. She hadn't been told anything yet, Marcus realized. Nobody had explained to her why her father had suddenly invited her ex-husband back to family dinner like nothing had happened.

"What's going on," she said, looking between her parents and Marcus, slow and careful, the way a smart person looks at a room they know isn't telling them the full story.

"Nothing's going on," Gerald said, walking in from the study with a glass of wine already in hand, his voice pitched loud and warm in a way Marcus had never once heard him use before. "Marcus is family. We don't need a reason to have family to dinner."

Naomi's eyes moved to Marcus, searching his face for something. He kept it still. Whatever this was going to become, it wasn't going to start with him explaining it to her across a dinner table, in front of everyone else.

"Sit, sit," Gerald said, gesturing at the better chair, the one Diane had moved up close to his own. "Marcus, right here, next to me."

Marcus sat down slowly, in the seat where three weeks ago Gerald had called him a waste of a chair. Nobody laughed this time. Nobody made a joke about birdhouses. Gerald raised his glass before the first plate had even hit the table.

"To family," Gerald said, his eyes flicking to Marcus for just a second too long, checking, the way a man checks a door he isn't sure he's locked. "All of us. Together."

Marcus raised his water glass an inch, same as last time, and set it back down without drinking.

Across the table, Naomi hadn't touched her wine at all. She was still watching him, still trying to read whatever had changed in three days that made her father's whole face rearrange itself around a man he used to barely look at.

She wasn't going to get an answer tonight. But she was smart, and she was already asking the right question, and Marcus knew — watching her watch him — that she'd find her own way to the truth a lot faster than her father would ever be comfortable with.