The room went incredibly still.
"And what does that realization feel like?" Dr. Thorne prompted, pushing him to go deeper.
"It makes me sick to my stomach," Simon admitted, his voice breaking. He leaned forward, burying his face in his hands for a moment before forcing himself to look back at Audrey. "I spent those two months lying to your face. I would come home from seeing her, and you would ask how my day was, and I would just smile and kiss you. I made you doubt your own reality to protect my own skin."
Audrey felt a sudden, sharp ache bloom behind her ribs. The anger she had been using as a shield slipped, exposing the raw, bleeding wound underneath.
"You did," Audrey whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears. "I spent the last two months feeling like I was losing my mind. You kept handing me cheap apologies, expecting me tojust swallow the betrayal because you were suddenly sorry. You wanted me to comfort you."
"I know," Simon choked out, a single tear escaping to track down his pale cheek. "And I am so sorry for that. I was a coward, Rey."
Hearing him use that name—the quiet, intimate nickname he had given her in college, the one he only ever used when they were alone in the dark—sent an unexpected, physical pang straight through her heart. It wasn't the toxic pain of the betrayal; it was the deep, agonizing grief for the connection they used to share.
"I was so terrified of the mess I made," Simon continued, his voice shaking violently, "that I tried to rush you through the grief. I wanted the guilt to stop, so I demanded that you hurry up and forgive me. I was completely selfish."
"You didn't just break my trust, Simon. You broke it so incredibly fast," Audrey cried, finally letting the heavy, suffocating sorrow spill over. The tears tracked hot and fast down her cheeks. "She was only at the agency for a couple of months. Two months, Simon. That is all it took. I need to know how. How did you go from interviewing a twenty-four-year-old girl to sleeping with her in a hotel room in just eight weeks? How did you throw ten years away that fast?"
Simon flinched, the sheer shame of the truth turning his face ashen. He looked at Dr. Thorne, who gave him a steady, uncompromising nod. There was nowhere left to hide. He had to give her the ugly, pathetic truth.
"She started in late winter," Simon rasped, forcing himself to hold Audrey’s tear-filled gaze. "She was assigned to my team for the Lumière Gala. And Rey... I was drowning. The pressure was suffocating me, and I was too arrogant to ask for help."
The memory rose up in Simon’s mind, vivid and sickening, spilling out into the quiet space of the therapy room.
The floral warehouse in the industrial district had been freezing, smelling aggressively of damp earth, crushed stems, and impending failure. It was 2:15 AM on a Tuesday. Simon had been sitting on the concrete floor, his back against a pallet of dying hydrangeas, staring at the invoice in his hands. He was operating on three hours of sleep and pure, corrosive adrenaline. The vendor had mixed up the delivery dates. Three hundred centerpieces for the Gala were sitting on a cargo plane somewhere over the Midwest instead of in the warehouse.
His career wasn't just flashing before his eyes; it was actively burning to the ground.
Okay. Breathe, boss, Emily had said, dropping down onto the cold concrete beside him. She was wearing leggings and an oversized college sweatshirt, her hair in a messy bun, holding two lukewarm containers of lo mein they had ordered an hour ago. She didn't look panicked. She looked entirely in her element.
I can't breathe, Emily, Simon had told her, dropping his head into his hands, a stress headache driving a spike behind his left eye. David is going to slaughter me. Audrey... Audrey is going to ask why I wasn't on top of this. I'm drowning.
Emily had set the food down and bumped her shoulder gently against his. Audrey isn't here. David isn't here. I am. She had handed him a pair of cheap wooden chopsticks. And I already fixed it. I called the secondary wholesaler in the garment district. Woke the guy up. Told him if he didn't pull every white orchid and calla lily he had in his greenhouses by 6:00 AM, Lumière would blacklist him for the next decade. His trucks will be here at dawn.
The relief that had washed over Simon was so intense it actually made him dizzy. He had felt a sudden, profound rush of gratitude for the woman sitting next to him on the dirty floor. She saw how hard he was working. She was in the trenches with him.
You carry too much, Si, Emily had told him, the harsh overhead fluorescent lights catching the warmth in her eyes. You take care of everyone else—the firm, the clients, your family. Who takes care of you?
It was exactly the right thing to say to a man who was utterly starved for validation. It slipped past every defense Simon had built.
By 3:30 AM, they were in the back of an Uber heading back to the boutique hotel downtown where Lumière had booked a block of rooms for the senior staff. They rode the elevator up to the sixth floor in a heavy, companionable silence. When they reached Emily's door, she slid her keycard into the slot. The little green light flashed, but she didn't push the handle down. Instead, she turned to face him in the quiet, carpeted hallway.
I have a mini-bottle of Macallan in the room, Emily had said, her voice dropping to a softer register. Her eyes locked onto his, dark and intentional. You look like you need a drink before you try to sleep.
Simon had known exactly what that invitation meant. He was thirty-six years old; he wasn't naive. Every alarm bell in his head, every vow he had made ten years ago, screamed at him to say goodnight, walk down the hall to his own room, and call his wife. But he was so incredibly tired of being the responsible one. Just for one night, he wanted to be the center of someone's attention. He wanted to escape the heavy expectations of his own life.
Just one drink, Simon heard himself say.
The door had clicked shut behind them, plunging the room into the dim, amber light of a single bedside lamp. Emily didn't go to the minibar. She dropped her purse on the floor, turned around, and stepped directly into his space. She reached up, her hands sliding over his shoulders, her fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck.
You don't always have to be perfect, Simon, she had whispered.
When she kissed him, Simon didn't pull away. He closed his eyes and leaned into it, letting the sheer, undeniable reality of the mistake wash over him. It wasn't about love. It was about the desperate, selfish need to feel alive, to feel desired without the heavy baggage of a ten-year marriage weighing it down. He kissed her back, his hands dropping to her waist, pulling her flush against him. The kiss turned frantic, fueled by the lingering adrenaline of the night and the intoxicating, destructive thrill of crossing a line he could never uncross.
His hands moved over her, rougher than he intended. He grabbed the hem of her oversized sweatshirt, pulling it up and over her head. Her skin was hot under his palms, and her scent—something sweet, floral, and aggressively young that smelled absolutely nothing like Audrey—filled his senses, a constant, dizzying reminder of exactly what he was doing. She pushed his jacket off his shoulders, her hands mapping the tense muscles of his chest through his shirt.
Emily broke the kiss just long enough to reach down to her discarded purse on the floor. She pulled out a small foil square. Without breaking eye contact, her gaze dark and challenging, she caught the edge of the wrapper between her teeth and tore it open.
The sound of the foil tearing was deafening in the quiet room—the final, irrevocable severing of his vows.
