“Margot, please. Look at me.” He’s sitting up now, the mattress dipping under his weight. There’s desperation in his breathing, ragged, uneven, messy. He was always so proud of his control.
Destroyed.I keep the sheet pinned to my chest with white-knuckled hands, staring at the framed architectural sketch of the first bridge he ever designed. I wonder if the steel in that bridge is as brittle as his loyalty.“Get out,” I say.The words are small, quiet, but in the vacuum of the room, they land like a gavel. I mean every syllable.
“Wait, let me explain,” he says, words tumbling over each other. He reaches out a hand, then pulls it back as if I’m made of electricity. “It’s just... the Dubai project. We’ve been at the office fourteen hours a day, every day, for three weeks. Her name is on every memo, every draft, every email. It’s muscle memory, Margot. That’s all. Just a glitch. I’m exhausted, barely conscious, and my brain, it just defaulted to the name I’ve heard a thousand times today. A million over the past few weeks.”
I finally turn my head. I glance at him, and for a moment, the architectural brilliance he’s so famous for looks like nothing more than a cheap façade. His hair is still a mess from my fingers. His eyes are wide, bloodshot, searching mine for a loophole, a grace period, a revision.
Did she run her fingers through his hair too? See his bloodshot eyes after he came?
“Muscle memory,” I repeat. “Even if that’s true, you think that makes it better?”
“I’m telling you the truth,” he insists, his voice cracking. “It didn’t mean anything. It was a slip of the tongue because I’m burnt out. You know how hard I’ve been working. You know what Arthur expects. Tabitha is just the person standing next to me at the drafting table.”
“You were inside me five minutes ago,” I say, and the sheer, graphic reality of the sentence makes him flinch. “Five minutes ago, you were telling me I was the only thing that mattered. And now you’re already thinking about her.”
“I wasn’t!”
“Then why was her name in your mouth, Ross?” A single tear tracks down my cheek, hot and insulting. Not bothering to wipe it away, I let it go. “There is no explanation that fixes this. You didn’t just miss Valentine’s dinner tonight. You missed the entire point of us.”
Slumping, the salt-and-pepper hair, the broad shoulders, the confident jaw—it all seems to deflate, leaving behind a man who is as tired and small as he claims to be.
“I love you,” he whispers. It’s a pathetic sound. A hollow structure.
I don’t believe it anymore.
“You love the idea of me,” I tell him. “You love having a home to come back to when the office is dark. But you’ve spent so long looking at skyscrapers that you forgot how to look at me. And apparently, you found someone else to look at.”
“Nothing happened with her. I swear to you, Margot. It’s strictly professional.”
“It’s never strictly professional when you bring her into our bed.” Lightheaded, the room tilts on an axis. “Get out. Go to the couch. Go to the office. But you aren’t staying in this room.”
He looks like he wants to argue. But he sees my eyes, the total, catastrophic defeat written in the set of my shoulders.
He stands slowly, his nakedness suddenly vulnerable and ridiculous. Then he reaches for his discarded trousers on the floor, hopping on one foot as he pulls them on. The architect of the century, reduced to a man stumbling in the dark.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he says, his voice thick.
Before he leaves, he pauses at the doorway, his silhouette framed by the hallway light. He glances back one last time.
“Margot, I’m so sorry.”
“Go away. I don’t want to hear it anymore.”
He disappears. The click of the door closing.
I sit back down on the edge of the bed. The mattress is still warm from him. The scent of him, the cedar, the espresso, the garlic, and the sex, is everywhere. It’s a sensory assault. I sit perfectly still, my knuckles white as they grip the sheet, listening.
He’s out there. I can hear the low, heavy groan of the sofa in the living room. The deep breath of his existence.
I don’t cry. Not yet.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand. It’s sitting right next to the spot where Ross’s phone lived for that brief, lying hour of darkness. My fingers are steady, which surprises me. I swipe the screen, the blue light blinding in the dim room, and find the one name that doesn’t feel like a betrayal.
Wren. My best friend.
It’s past midnight. The rest of the world is asleep, tucked into their own version of safety. The phone rings once. Twice.
“Margot?” Wren’s voice is thick with the fog of sleep, but the sharp edges are already forming. She knows my midnight-call frequency, it’s zero. “What is it? Is it Ross?”
