Carissa met his eyes. “Be seen with me. Be kind to me. Hold my hand if it looks natural. Nothing beyond that unless I ask.”
Jackson nodded once. “Okay.”
She blinked. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You don’t need time?”
“I’ve had about thirty-eight years of context,” he said. “That helps.”
For the first time since the kitchen, Carissa felt something other than pain in her chest.
Not relief exactly.
Alignment.
“What if it makes things worse?” she asked.
Jackson’s mouth twitched. “For whom?”
That afternoon, Damen texted twelve times.
Where are you.
Did you talk to Jackson.
Don’t drag him into this.
You’re acting unstable.
We need to handle this privately.
You always have to make everything humiliating.
Call me.
Carissa.
She did not respond to any of them.
Instead she went to work, billed six hours, called her family attorney from a private conference room, and started asking questions women too often postpone until after the damage is expensive.
Whose name is on the deed?
Mine only.
What about the cars?
One leased in my name. One paid off in mine.
Joint accounts?
Yes, but he contributes very little.
Retirement?
Separate.
Any children?
No.
Infidelity relevant?
Not much for division. Very relevant for your clarity.
The attorney, a sharp-eyed woman named Denise Kessler whom Carissa knew by reputation and now liked on sight, asked her one question that stuck.
“Do you want to save the marriage,” Denise said, “or do you want to stop losing yourself inside it?”
Carissa had no answer right away.
That was answer enough.
The first dinner with Jackson happened that Friday at a steakhouse in River North that Damen always dismissed as “too corporate” whenever Carissa wanted to celebrate something. Jackson picked her up at seven in a charcoal overcoat and dark suit, not overdone, not underdone, exactly appropriate in the way affluent men often were when they had learned long ago that competence is its own kind of style.
Carissa wore a black dress she had bought two years earlier and never found the right room for because Damen had once said it made her look “intense.”
That night, she was in the mood to be intense.
When she came downstairs, Damen was in the foyer with one hand on the banister. He looked at her, then at the lights outside, then back at her face.
“No.”
Carissa paused. “No what?”
“You are not going out with him.”
She almost admired the reflex.
“With whom?”
“My brother.”
She stepped past him toward the front door. “Watch me.”
Damen caught her arm.
Not hard enough to leave a mark. Hard enough to remind both of them that marks were not the threshold for wrong.
Carissa stopped moving and looked down at his hand.
Then she screamed.
Not in fear.
In volume.
A sharp, full-throated sound that bounced off the foyer walls and would absolutely carry through the transom and into the street where Jackson’s headlights had just swept across the front windows.
Damen let go instantly.
Carissa smoothed the sleeve of her dress, looked him directly in the eye, and said quietly, “Interesting. So you do know how fast to release a woman when you think someone might hear.”
Then she opened the door and walked outside.
Jackson took one look at her face and one look at Damen in the hallway behind her and asked, “Everything okay?”
Carissa smiled without humor. “It will be.”
Dinner itself was almost shockingly normal.
That was what made it dangerous.
Jackson asked about her cases and actually listened to the answers instead of waiting for a place to redirect the conversation back to himself. He remembered she took her bourbon neat and that she hated being asked if she was “one of those women who likes whiskey to seem cool.” He did not flatter her intelligence like it was a surprising quirk. He assumed it as fact and built conversation from there.
At one point, halfway through the main course, Carissa laughed so suddenly and genuinely she startled herself.
Jackson saw it happen and smiled. “There you are.”
It was such a small sentence. It landed with unreasonable force.
When he dropped her off, he walked her to the door and kissed her cheek—not possessively, not performatively, just enough to be warm.
Damen was visible through the front window, standing in the dark living room with his arms crossed.
Carissa went to bed that night understanding two things she had not allowed herself to understand before.
First: her marriage had not merely become unhappy. It had become contemptuous.
Second: she had forgotten what it felt like to sit across from a man and not feel managed.
The dinners continued.
Once a week at first, then twice.
Sometimes they were actually dinners. Sometimes coffee. Sometimes a late walk along the lake after work with both of them in coats against the wind, talking about nothing dramatic—books, parents, the absurdity of school fundraisers, the way Chicago made every season feel like a test of character. Jackson never pushed for confession. He asked, and when she answered, he made space around the answer instead of crowding it.
At home, Damen came apart in predictable stages.
First he mocked it.
“So what, this is your revenge now? You and Jackson playing house to upset me?”
Carissa shrugged. “Interesting theory.”
Then he minimized it.
“You don’t even like him like that.”
“Do I not?”
Then he turned suspicious in the way unfaithful people so often do when they realize other people are also capable of keeping secrets.
He started checking the location history on the shared iPad. Started asking neighbors if they had seen her car. Started standing in the kitchen when she got home with the expression of a man convinced he had been wronged by being treated as he treated others.
