Cate had always treated bitterness like a performance art.

Not because it wasn’t real. God, it was real. It sat warm and ugly beneath her ribs, slick as spilled wine, fed by every photo she should not have looked at and every rumor she pretended not to hear. But real things were dangerous when exposed too plainly, so she dressed hers up. She gave it diamonds and a stemmed glass and a roomful of eager faces. She made it witty. Elegant. Harmless, if you didn’t look too closely.

That was the trick, really. Everyone at the table thought they were being invited into the joke, into the intimacy of Cate Dunlap rolling her eyes over her ex-wife’s latest offense against taste and decency. They never understood that Cate’s mockery was proprietary. It wasn’t dismissal. It was possession in another language.

Only she got to do it.

The second Emma overstepped, Cate had felt it instantly, like someone else slipping a hand into a drawer of private things. Not because the insult itself mattered. {{user}} could survive being called arrogant, tasteless, too much. {{user}} had built half her personality out of surviving that kind of thing with a grin and a raised middle finger.

No, what Cate couldn’t stand was the presumption of it. Emma saying such things as if {{user}} were ordinary. As if she were available for public consensus. As if Cate’s history with her could be flattened into cocktail gossip and cheap approval.

It left a strange taste in her mouth, the shape of a truth she disliked admitting even to herself: divorce had not made {{user}} common property. If anything, it had made the boundaries feel rawer, more absurdly alive. The world was welcome to look, of course. Everyone always looked. But it was intolerable when they thought looking meant understanding.

Around her, conversation had resumed in careful, brittle little streams. Glasses clinked. Someone laughed too loudly. Emma had gone quiet in the way humiliated people did, shrinking without physically moving. Cate knew she should feel a little bad about that. She didn’t. Not really.

She lifted her wine and stared into it instead of at her friends, watching the red shift against the candlelight. She told herself the pulse fluttering low in her stomach was leftover adrenaline. Not longing. Certainly not the old, humiliating instinct to defend {{user}} as if the papers had never been signed, as if some part of Cate’s body had not missed the memo and still believed mine in the language of blood and instinct and want.

Then the energy at the edge of the patio changed.

It happened before anyone spoke. Before one of her friends half-turned in their chair. Before the hush of interest rippled outward. Cate felt it first, some awful internal compass swinging true. She looked up.

{{user}} was crossing the room toward them with that infuriating, unhurried stride, all broad shoulders and dark shirt sleeves shoved to her forearms, like she had nowhere better to be and every right to arrive exactly where Cate was. Her face gave away almost nothing, but Cate knew that face. Knew the dry set of her mouth, the sharp color of her eyes under lowered lashes, the way her body always seemed slightly coiled even in stillness.

And worst of all, she was looking directly at Cate.

The room blurred at the edges. Cate kept her posture elegant by force, one leg crossed neatly over the other, chin lifted just enough to pass for indifference. Inside, something hot and treacherous unfurled.

Of course she’d come over now. Of course {{user}}, with her catastrophic timing and impossible instinct for the exact point of pressure, would choose this moment to step back into Cate’s orbit.

Cate took a slow sip of wine she could no longer taste and schooled her expression into something cool, amused, devastating.

Only her traitorous heart broke rank, beating harder as {{user}} walked straight toward her and her friends.