Chapter 301: The Breakup Fee

The events following the discovery in Louis's financial records changed the atmosphere between Freya and Louis more than any Crosswind mystery had managed to do. Freya remembers her original plan to stay until Louis recovered and then collect a generous breakup fee.

Freya refused to confuse two separate questions. One concerned whether Louis had possessed legitimate reasons for protecting his contingency network. The other concerned whether those reasons justified allowing his wife to believe something that was not fully true. She could accept the first without automatically forgiving the second.

The irony is painful now that Louis truly has enough wealth to give her almost anything while money is the least important part of their conflict.

That distinction frustrated Louis because strategy had always been easier for him than emotional accounting. In business, withholding information could be measured against risk. In marriage, the same calculation became unstable. A secret might protect both people from an enemy while simultaneously creating a private wound between them.

Freya did not want theatrical punishment. She did not empty accounts, announce a divorce, or use the argument to humiliate Louis publicly. She continued working, answered necessary messages, and kept the investigation moving. But she also stopped smoothing over her anger simply because Louis looked exhausted or remorseful.

For Louis, that was almost worse. Freya's calmness gave him nothing to fight against. He could solve a hostile acquisition, expose a leak, or rebuild a company from damaged pieces. He could not negotiate his way around the fact that Freya needed time to decide what his choices meant to her.

Derek stayed out of their private conversations unless facts were required. Claire did the same. Even Mia, who could normally detect tension from across a room, asked no intrusive questions. Freya appreciated that restraint. She wanted advice only when she requested it, not an audience waiting to learn whether the famous Stone marriage would survive.

Work gave her somewhere useful to place her attention. Sunroom's cultural-center project was entering a demanding phase, while Awake Stories had grown large enough that decisions could no longer wait for Freya's mood. She had built those parts of her life herself. Returning to them reminded her that staying with Louis had become a choice long ago, not a financial necessity.

At night, however, the problem returned. The old apartment had once represented the beginning of their strange partnership: cheap breakfasts, awkward conversations, bags stacked to the ceiling, and a supposedly bankrupt man accepting food from a wife he barely understood. Freya had treasured those memories because she believed they were the first honest days of their marriage.

Now she had to decide whether learning that Louis possessed a hidden recovery plan changed those memories. After several sleepless hours, she concluded that it changed some of them but not all. The coffee had still been real. Her decision to stay had still been real. Louis's surprise when she stayed had certainly been real.

The money complicated the circumstances. It did not automatically erase every feeling born inside them.

That conclusion did not excuse Louis. It simply prevented anger from rewriting the past as completely as the hidden manuscript once tried to rewrite the future.

Freya wrote the thought in her notebook before closing it. She had become careful about stories that were too clean. Louis was neither the helpless bankrupt man she once believed nor a calculating fraud who had manufactured their entire relationship. The truth was less convenient: he had been wounded, strategic, suspicious, protective, dishonest, and increasingly in love with her at the same time.

People were irritatingly capable of being several things at once.

The next step, Freya decided, would depend on what they did with the truth now that both of them finally had it.

And unlike the sealed chapter headings, that decision belonged to them.