“To the Cartwrights, yes.” The neighbors my family had feuded with for generations. Until Bristol Cartwright had married my youngest brother, Dawson, a month ago.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It didn’t matter.” I uttered those words with the same finality I did in the boardroom, but they sounded off to my ears.

She tilted her head and those intelligent eyes pinned me in place. Eyes that had seen through my salary and my lifestyle. Eyes that had always seen down to the real me. “You don’t think that marrying me before you lost a ton of money mattered?”

“We’ve been married for four years.” As if repeating it would make it all better. The trust had stipulated a year, but I’d held on to Kate for longer.

She huffed out a gust of air that might have been a laugh. “Four years. I hardly see you and we live in the same house.”

Another ping. Another email. I tried to ignore the way the notifications intruded on my time with my wife. “My hours—”

“And we’re millionaires? You mentioned a trust once, acted as if it were insignificant.” She shook her head and pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.

“It is insignificant. It doesn’t matter.” The trust had seemed to matter so much when I’d first learned about it. Now, it was nothing. My brothers were happily married and for all the right reasons.

A chime. Goddamn messages.

“You keep saying that,” she snapped and I blinked. Kate was the most even-keeled woman I’d met. The lack of drama around her made her my oasis, one I hardly saw in my vast desert of work. “But it does matter. It matters because hearing it from someone who’s not even a part of the family sucks. It sucks a lot.” Pain brimmed in her eyes. “And everyone knows?”

Thanks to my job, I could always answer hard questions. “Yes.”

She let out a sob and sucked it back in, her back ramrod straight. “I’m so stupid.”

“Kate, you’re not—”

“You married me right before—” She squeezed her eyes shut and sniffled. I know what she’d meant to say. We’d married right before I turned twenty-nine. I’d learned about the trust, asked her out two months later, proposed two months after that, and we’d married shortly after. Before I’d turned twenty-nine.

She rose and thrust the folder at me.

I scowled at it. I wouldn’t like what was in that thing. Not one bit.