Clara turned to me.“Are you okay, Cassidy?”
I couldn’t speak.
I stammered something about needing the bathroom, barely heard my own voice.
I turned and walked fast.
I had to move, to get away.
Down the hallway.Around the corner.
Into the bathroom, where I braced my hands against the counter.
I stared at myself in the mirror, willing the room to stop spinning.
Andrew had a son.
I knew about his wife.But he was withher, while textingme, that they were done.
He has a fucking child.He said they didn't...
They had a whole life.
A sob rattled through me.
I’d been the secret tucked into the shadows of his world, their life.
I had been exactly what I was terrified of being, the homewrecker, the lie, the dirty secret...And she looked at me like she knew...
Had anything he told me been real?
Bile surged up my throat, and I ran for the first stall that was open and barely got the door closed behind me.
Everything I’d been afraid of was true.I was the secret, the shadow, the woman on the wrong side of his story.
Chapter 8
6 Months Ago
I’d felt it in my bones for the last few weeks.
The shift.The change.
It started with the phone, always face down, always locked.
Then came the new excuses.The new meetings.The lingering scent that didn’t smell like me.
He said he was busy.Said he was tired.Said I was imagining it, that nothing had changed.
But somethinghadchanged.
I could feel it every time he made love to me, and then he was out the door shortly after.
And I hated what I was becoming.
Paranoid.Small.A woman waiting for proof of her own heartbreak.
Had the signs always been there?
