Sebastian
My mother requested my presence at her townhouse with the kind of formal summons she reserved for matters she considered beneath discussing over the phone, and I arrived to find her waiting in the drawing room with a stack of newspaper clippings spread across the coffee table like evidence in a trial.
"Sit," Victoria Ashford said, not bothering with pleasantries. "We need to discuss the state of your marriage."
"My marriage is fine, Mother."
"Is it?" She pushed the clippings toward me, and I recognized the handshake photograph from the press conference, alongside three other images from various society pages, each one accompanied by increasingly speculative headlines about tension, chemistry, and old flames. "Because from where I'm sitting, half the city seems to believe your
