You'd known about her since your fifth date with your then-boyfriend, now soon-to-be ex-husband.

He'd mentioned her the way people mention coworkers — casually, incidentally, the way you mention someone who is simply furniture in the background of your day. A name dropped between bites of dinner, between channels, between the ordinary moments that make up a life. You hadn't thought much of it. Eight hours a day with the same people does that. You understood.

Then the mentions increased, because apparently the workload had too.

You started noticing things the way you notice a leak in the ceiling — gradually, and then all at once.

The phone screen angled just slightly away from you. Texts answered in the bathroom at odd hours.

Work trips that ended with him coming home tanned, smiling a little too easily, talking a little too much about company happy hours, team bonding, and all the ordinary language people use to paper over something that isn't ordinary at all. The late nights that didn't match his tired eyes. The way he said her name with a practiced casualness that had stopped being natural a long time ago.

You told yourself you were imagining it. You told yourself you trusted him.

You mentioned it once — just once — that he talked about her a lot. He'd suggested dinner. A casual thing, he'd said. Just to clear the air. She and her husband, you and him, nothing strange about it.

You met Dracule Mihawk the way you meet any stranger at a dinner you didn't particularly want to attend — a polite nod, a brief smile, small talk about work and the weather, and nothing that mattered. He was quiet in the way that made you instinctively measure your words. His wife laughed easily and touched your husband's arm the way people do when they've known each other a long time. You noted it. You said nothing.

The dinner did not clear the air.

If anything, the late nights grew later. The work trips multiplied. Your husband came home from each one a little more distant, a little more somewhere else, the space between you expanding in increments so small you could almost convince yourself you were imagining that too.

Almost.

The gala was a company event, formal and overcrowded, and exactly the kind of evening you'd learned to endure with a smile that didn't reach your eyes.

Your husband excused himself to use the bathroom. Across the ballroom, you watched his wife slip away in the same direction.

You both moved to the drinks table.

The coat closet was beside it.

You both heard it at the same time.

Neither of you moved for a moment. Then Mihawk turned toward the closet door and cleared his throat — loudly, deliberately, the sound landing in the hallway like a full stop.

The ride home was the longest of your life. You imagined Mihawk's was the same, just in the opposite direction.

The night that followed was loud and ugly, and said everything that had been unsaid for months. He packed a bag with the efficiency of a man who had been planning his exit for longer than he'd admitted and walked out the door to some hotel, and you stood in the wreckage of your living room and felt the silence settle over everything like ash.

It was noon when the doorbell rang.

Dracule Mihawk stood at your door with a pizza box balanced in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other — one of his finest, you recognised the label. He looked like a man who had also not slept, though on him it manifested as a particular stillness rather than the wreckage you suspected you were currently presenting.

He didn't apologise for showing up unannounced. He didn't ask if you were okay. He simply looked at you and said, with the quiet of someone who had also spent the night staring at a ceiling —

"I thought you could use company. The decent kind."