But my period came, and life went on. It’s for the best, I told myself, and then spent every waking minute attending to First Lady duties and preparing for the upcoming fall semester at Georgetown.

Which is what I’m doing today.

My position doesn’t call for it and I don’t deserve it, but certain considerations have to be made for being a First Lady, and so even though I’m only teaching two undergraduate sections this fall, I now have my own office. It’s small but it has a window and a position in the building that Luc informs me is “strategically comfortable.”

It’s the first day of August, and there’s still plenty of time to set up my office here on campus, but I was eager to escape the White House today, eager to escape the constant scratch of obligation, the incessant appearances and meetings to rehabilitate my image as a wanton wife. And most of all, to escape that cheating, traitorous rake Embry Moore, who still works late into the night with my husband in my living room. Who still opens doors for me, who still stares at me with those melting glacier eyes.

Just the thought of him makes me slam a box of books down so hard that Gavin, my agent today, pokes his head in the doorway to make sure I’m all right. I shoo him away and then take a few deep breaths, calming myself down by thinking of all the synonyms for Embry Moore. Perfidious. False. Capricious. Deceitful.

Unfaithful.

Which is a rich word for me, Greer Galloway Colchester, to use regarding anyone else, and I recognize that. It doesn’t make it less true. And to think my reputation has been tarnished all for him—he who the press has already forgiven, he who took up with Abilene with no warning, he who broke my heart—

Slam, slam. I move more boxes, think of more synonyms.

There’s a knock on the doorframe and I assume it’s Gavin, looking up to tell him it was just more boxes, and then freezing. It’s not Gavin.

Closing the door behind him, Embry steps into my office, his expensive watch and high cheekbones making everything look cheap and dusty by comparison, the blue of his eyes drowning out all other color. He stares at me for a moment, and I’m suddenly conscious of how sweaty and flushed I am, angrily moving books around while the swamp-heat of D.C. in August leaks in through the window.

I straighten up, pushing several stray locks of hair out of my face.

Embry bites his lip for the slightest of seconds and then switches over—as Embry does when he’s uncertain—to charm. “Was it really less than a year ago that I came to you here?” He flashes a smile at me and then makes a gesture I take to mean the Georgetown Humanities Department. His watch glints in the hot sunlight.

The smile, those dimples, the tug and pull of his custom suit against his tall, slender frame—I feel myself drawn into it all, and then I have to make myself resist.

Two-faced. Treacherous. Sneaking.

Unfaithful.

“Why are you here, Embry? I know it’s not to remember the old days.”

“I wanted to talk to you. We haven’t talked since…well, you know.”

“Since you chose Abilene over us?” I ask, not bothering to dampen the hostility in my voice.

Color dusks his cheeks, but he doesn’t contradict me.

The night before Embry confessed that he and Abilene were together, Ash had pulled me into his lap and explained, in a voice so neutral and precise that I knew he was holding back rage, exactly how he believed Abilene had betrayed me to Melwas. Exactly how he believed she’d been the one to leak the video to the press so that there wouldn’t be any traceable ties linking the video to Carpathia.

“It can’t be proven, at least not yet,” he’d said. “But please be careful around her.”

It’d hurt, knowing for sure that my best friend had been the author of so much shame and horror, but I’d found it to be a dull hurt, a punch rather than a stab. Where Abilene had been concerned, my heart had too much scar tissue to feel much more than a distant ache.

But then Embry told us that he’d started dating her, and it felt like my world slid sideways. Knowing what she did, how could he look her in the face? Touch her? Kiss her? Fuck her?

That night, I crawled into Ash’s arms and pressed my face to his chest, unable to cry but desperate for the release it would bring. Where Embry was concerned, my heart didn’t have enough scar tissue. His leaving us for Abilene sliced and severed more than any knife.

Here in my office, Embry gives me a pleading look. “Greer. Please. I didn’t want it to be like this.”

“I don’t think I ever understood what you did want it to be like.”

He looks away, eyebrows drawn together in a delicate aristocratic brood. “I thought it was the best chance I had,” he says, a touch mournfully, and there’s something in the way he says it that makes me look at him more closely, to see the new doors in his expression where there used to be windows.

“The best chance for what?”

He parts his lips. In profile, with his Mr. Darcy hair and proud forehead, he looks like the paperback cover of a Regency romance. “I—”

He glances at me, and something shifts in his eyes. I recognize it for what it is—the moment he decides to change his words and avoid the truth. “I don’t love her,” he says instead, and there is some truth in that, I think, but not enough. Not enough by half.

“Love isn’t just a feeling, Embry. Love is doing, it’s sharing time and space and you’re sharing those things with her. You’re choosing her, after you promised Ash and me that you were choosing us.”