Page 48 of Mile High Ex's Dad
I know the voice before I turn.
Alina.
She comes up beside me in cream silk and diamonds, as polished as ever, one hand lifting to rest lightly on my arm as if she still has some standing there. My ex-wife has always understood the power of presentation. She’s beautiful in the way certain women remain beautiful because they have spent a lifetime treating beauty as both weapon and occupation.
She also has dreadful timing.
“Good morning,” I say.
She smiles as if I have offered something warmer. “That sounded almost civil.”
“We were married, not at war.”
“Those are not always different things.”
That, at least, is true.
Alina and I were never a love story. We were a merger that lasted longer than it should have because we were both too proud to end it before pride itself became the reason. She came from the right family, understood discretion, understood power, understood what it meant to stand beside a man like me and never once ask him to be smaller for her comfort.
What she never understood was that tolerance and intimacy are not the same thing.
We made Ethan. We made a life that looked excellent from the outside. Eventually we made each other miserable enough, quietly enough, to separate without anyone having the pleasure of calling it scandal.
Now we are what many divorced people become when they still share blood and history and too many social obligations: cordial in public, careful in private, and occasionally tempted to revise the past into something kinder than it was.
Alina is more tempted by that than I am.
Her fingers remain on my sleeve. “You left dinner early.”
“I had seen enough.”
“I know there was some unpleasantness—” she starts.
“Unpleasantness?” I say. “Is that what you’re calling your son?”
She scrunches up her face. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Right.” I turn back to watch the arrangement.
Below us, guests begin drifting out toward the lawn, glossy and under-rested, women in morning dresses and men pretending not to resent collars before noon. Somewhere to the left, Ethan’s laugh rises briefly and dies just as fast.
I look for Sienna before I mean to.
I don’t see her, and the absence catches at me more than it should.
Alina notices where my eyes go. Of course she does. “You are distracted.”
“No.”
She gives me a look that says she’s too old to indulge obvious lies. “You didn’t sleep.”
“I slept enough.”
“You look like you were up thinking.”
That I ignore.
She leans in slightly, perfume and memory arriving together. Once, years ago, I liked that scent on my sheets. Now it only tells me she’s standing too close.
