Liam stared at the first page inside Olivia’s leather folder as though it had personally betrayed him.
The ballroom noise continued beyond the archway—the quartet, glasses touching, low conversations pretending not to be about them—but the narrow side corridor suddenly felt sealed off from everything except the two signatures at the bottom of the document.
His.
Hers.
Olivia kept one hand on the edge of the marble console.
She had spent months imagining this final exchange as something administrative.
Two adults.
A folder.
A signature.
An ending.
She had not imagined Liam standing there with champagne drying on one cuff while half the room strained to hear him breathe.
“What is this?” he asked.
“You know what it is.”
The top page was part of the final separation paperwork that remained after the divorce settlement: the last formal documents cutting Olivia away from the professional life that had once overlapped with their marriage.
For years, she had worked beside Liam as Hayes Vision became something larger than either of them had expected.
She had shaped campaigns, rewritten speeches, sat through product failures, investor panic, and nights when Liam had been too exhausted to believe his own company would survive.
When the marriage ended, his lawyers had treated that history like clutter that needed to be cleared from a table.
Olivia had signed what she had agreed to sign.
She had refused to fight merely for the pleasure of making him uncomfortable.
Tonight she had brought the remaining executed copies because she wanted the last administrative thread severed cleanly.
Liam turned another page.
Then another.
His irritation returned as soon as he realized the folder was not hiding some lawsuit designed to destroy him.
“So this is why you came?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her stomach.
“No.”
Olivia’s expression barely changed.
“No?”
“You didn’t walk into this gala looking like that just to hand me paperwork.”
Looking like that.
Six years of marriage, and even now he could reduce a woman carrying his children to an image disrupting his evening.
Olivia closed her eyes for one second.
When she opened them, Khloe was standing several feet away near the archway.
She had followed them, but the possessive grip she had kept on Liam all night was gone.
Behind her, flashes kept firing.
Liam lowered his voice.
“You knew there would be cameras.”
“So did you when you brought Khloe everywhere three weeks after I moved out.”
His mouth tightened.
“That’s different.”
“Of course it is.”
The calmness in Olivia’s voice bothered him more than anger would have.
He had prepared himself for accusation.
Tears.
Demands.
A scene he could later describe as proof that she had never accepted the divorce.
Instead, Olivia stood in front of him with one palm resting gently over the twins and looked almost peaceful.
That peace made him suspicious.
“How far along?” he asked again.
“Six months.”
Liam stopped moving.
Khloe’s eyes flicked from Olivia to him.
The number did what shouting could not.
Six months.
The same stretch of time since Liam had stood beside the penthouse elevator while movers carried Olivia’s boxes out.
