“Technically, we still have a few filings being recorded,” she said. “But this is the executed deed.”
She turned it toward me.
My eyes went to the owner’s section.
ELENA MARIE BROOKS
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
There was no Marcus Hale beside it.
No company name.
No trust controlled by him.
Nothing.
Just me.
I looked up.
“Why is only my name here?”
Marcus’s eyes were wet now.
“Because when you were a kid, adults made decisions and suddenly your home disappeared.”
My chest tightened.
He continued quietly.
“You told me once that what hurt wasn’t just losing the farm. It was realizing you had no control over whether it stayed or went.”
I couldn’t speak.
“So this one is yours.”
“Marcus—”
“If we ever become idiots and get divorced someday, it’s yours. If my business fails tomorrow, it’s yours. If I get sued, it’s yours. If something happens to me, nobody gets to tell you to leave.”
That did it.
I sat down in the grass.
Not gracefully.
Not dramatically.
My legs simply stopped cooperating.
For nearly two weeks, I had prepared myself to discover that my husband had betrayed me.
Instead, I was staring at legal paperwork for the dream I’d buried years ago.
And somehow that didn’t immediately erase the anger.
I cried anyway.
Marcus sat beside me.
He didn’t touch me until I reached for his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I laughed through tears.
“Do you have any idea what I’ve been thinking?”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t.”
I wiped my cheeks.
“I thought you were taking Sophie away from me.”
His face fell.
“I thought you had another woman. Another house. Another family.”
“Elena—”
“She told me you had a secret lady.”
Camille burst out laughing behind us.
Marcus groaned.
“I told Sophie Camille was helping with a secret.”
“She’s seven!”
“I know that now.”
“You told a seven-year-old not to tell the woman she had just started calling Mom that her father spent Saturdays with a mysterious woman at a secret house?”
“When you summarize it like that—”
“It sounds completely insane?”
“Yes.”
“Because it was.”
Tessa folded her arms.
“I would like the record to show that I have been saying this for several minutes.”
Camille nodded.
“I’ve been saying it for two months.”
