"Colin?"
A sigh escapes me, part breath, part groan. "Here."
He steps into the room, and the second his eyes land on me, his face twists into a grimace.
“What the hell are you doing down there like that? Did someone die and no one bothered to tell me?”
He really needs to stop with the jokes.
“I didn’t call you here for stand-up,” I say, my voice flat, parched from the burn of liquor and the ache that’s been sitting in my chest since the moment Ceci walked out the door. “I need your help.”
Oliver lifts his hands in mock surrender. “Easy. I’m just trying to make sense of the melodrama. You’re sitting on the floor, drinking alone.”
His gaze sweeps the room, searching. “Where’s Cecily? And the kids?”
“I cheated on her.” The words scrape out of me like gravel. “Ceci found out, and now she thinks she wants a divorce. I need you to tell me what you did to make Felicity forgive you that time… so I can fix this. I want to be here. With her. With our children. Inourhome.”
Every word feels like another nail driven into the coffin of my denial. A confirmation that this isn’t a nightmare I’ll wake up from.
Oliver staggers back a step, like I’ve just hit him. “Man, tell me you’re joking. Tell me you didn’t screw up like that. Not after all this time.”
I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose. The pressure does nothing to dull the pounding in my skull. “Are you going to help me or not?”
He studies me for a long moment, hands on his hips, jaw tightening. Then he turns toward the liquor cabinet. “I’m going to need at least one strong drink before we start.”
He pours three fingers of whiskey and drops into the armchair across from me. His voice softens—his eyes don’t. “How is she?”
I stare at him, incredulous. “Devastated. How do you think she is?”
“You look like hell yourself, so I can only imagine it was worse for her… especially since it must have been a shock when she found out.”
I fall silent, my gaze drifting to the spot where she’d been sitting earlier. My chest tightens at the memory, the sound of hervoice, the way her face twisted into an expression I’ll never be able to erase.
I press my fingers hard against my eyes, as if I could blot the image from my mind, as if pressure alone could undo the past.
“How did this even happen, Colin?” Oliver asks, not with judgment this time, but with genuine confusion, almost disbelief.
I open my eyes and glare at him, irritation flaring. “Does it matter? It happened. Nothing changes that. What matters now is making Ceci listen to me… making her understand. And forgive.”
I know she will.She has to.She's hurt, blindsided. She never expected this from me. I tried to protect her from it, to keep it separate, away from us. I never wanted her to find out. And now she's convinced it's something it isn't.
Oliver exhales, swirling the amber liquid in his glass before pointing it slightly in my direction. "Well, if I'm going to help you," he says slowly, "I need to know what kind of damage we're actually talking about."
Against my will, my gaze drifts to the binder. It sits on the console table.Still. Accusatory. Heavy with the weight of my ruin. Waiting for the final blow.
Oliver follows the shift in my eyes, and before I can react, it's already in his hands.
"Don't touch that!" The words tear out of me, harsh and desperate, but too late. He's already flipping through the pages.
Every nerve in my body screams for me to move. To lunge forward. To rip it from his hands, shred it until nothing recognizable remains, or burn it until only ashes are left and the proof is gone.
But my body won’t obey. It feels leaden, locked in pain, longing, and desperation.
“Cecily put this together?” Oliver’s voice softens, almost reverent.
“No wonder she nearly won the Pulitzer last year.”
He goes quiet after that. The only sound in the room is the slow, damning rustle of pages turning.
