I sat on the information for nearly a month before I did anything with it, telling myself the whole time that knowing was different from using, that I could hold a weapon without ever actually deciding to fire it.
The decision came faster than I expected, in the end, triggered by something almost embarrassingly small. Alex called to tell me, breathless and happy in a way that used to be reserved for talking about our father, that Law's parents had set a date — an actual wedding, a real one, planned for after the four-year contract technically ended, except they'd decided not to wait. They were doing it now. Early. Because, in Alex's words, we don't need four years to know this is real.
Something in me went quiet and cold, hearing that. Not jealousy, exactly — something colder and more clinical than jealousy, the particular calm that comes right before a decision you've been circling for weeks finally locks into place.
I called Law instead of Alex, two days later, my voice steadier than I expected it to be.
"I need to see you," I said. "Alone. It's important."
"Karen, I don't think that's a good idea, given everything—"
"It's about the casino," I said, cutting him off. "Not about us. About the books. About a $90,000 discrepancy that was never reported to the police, and what your parents might think if they found out you'd been covering up a theft instead of handling it properly, right around the time you started pushing them to finalize the transfer of ownership into your name."
The silence on the other end of the line told me I had his full attention.
"What do you want," he said finally, voice gone flat and careful in a way I hadn't heard from him since that very first dinner, before either of us had let our guard down around each other.
"I want you to call off the early wedding," I said. "Push it back. Slow things down. Give me — " I stopped, searching for the right word, settling on the only honest one I had left. "Give me time. Time to get used to this. Time to figure out how to actually be happy for both of you instead of whatever this is right now."
"And if I don't," he said.
"Then I show your parents what I found," I said, "and you can explain to them, the same week you're trying to convince them you're ready to run their casino responsibly, why you let a theft slide instead of reporting it, and married the thief instead of pressing charges."
I hated myself the second the words left my mouth — hated how easily threat had replaced the apology I'd genuinely meant weeks earlier, hated how thin the justification sounded even to my own ears. But I didn't take it back. Some part of me had crossed a line I couldn't see a clear way back over, and standing on the wrong side of it felt, in that moment, less frightening than admitting I'd never get what I wanted any other way.
"I need time to think," Law said, and hung up before I could say anything else.
I sat alone in my apartment afterward, phone still warm in my hand, waiting for the satisfaction I'd expected to feel at finally having real power in this situation instead of just longing.
It never came. Instead, I felt sick, and scared, and more alone than I had in the entire two years I'd spent in that hospital bed — because for the first time, the loneliness wasn't something that had been done to me. It was something I'd built myself, one bad decision at a time, and I had no idea, sitting there, how to find my way back out of it before it cost me everyone I actually had left.