For a moment, the dining room noise dropped away, and all I could hear was the low hum of the ship and my own pulse in my ears.
A thousand ugly possibilities crashed through my mind at once.
Was this my husband’s lover? Had they been together for years? Or perhaps he was a business partner Marcus had wronged? Had my whole marriage been a stage set whose hidden workings I’d never been allowed to see?
The man slowly shook his head, almost as if he’d guessed exactly what I was thinking.
“No,” he said softly. “It’s not what you think.”
“Then who are you?” My voice sounded thin, foreign, borrowed from someone else. “Why would you say something like that to me?”
“Because you deserved to hear it from a person, not from paperwork.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket.
My hands turned cold. I gripped the edge of the table, bracing for the worst.
