“Yes.” My voice cracks. “I knew.”
And then the truth comes. It’s not organized or the careful speech I was planning for tonight. It pours out in fragments.
Tony’s text with the security footage of James at the casino. I’m shaking as I grip the counter. The business conversations I overheard—a name, Hendricks—
Robert’s hand goes flat on the table. I keep going.
Adrian’s warning after they fucked me, brushing hair off my face and telling me to be careful before shutting down like he’d said too much. My voice wobbles, and I push through it. Men stationed outside Tony’s office with posture that screamed military.
God, I hear myself talking, and I sound like a disaster. A three-carat-ring-wearing disaster who can organize a charity auction for two hundred people but can’t manage to be honest with the one person who matters.
Robert’s coffee sits untouched on the table. Neither of us moves.
“You can fuck whoever you want, Shannon. That was always the deal.” He looks at me, and his gray eyes hold a hurt so total itdoesn’t look like pain. It looks like calm. “But you lied to me. You looked me in the eye, and you lied. That’s the deal breaker.”
He’s not yelling. Yelling I could handle. This quiet coldness is worse than anything I imagined, and I imagined plenty while the water ran cold in the shower.
He stands up and pushes in his chair like he’s leaving a conference room.
“I need to go to the office.”
It’s Saturday.
He walks past me. Six inches between us, and he doesn’t touch me or kiss me.
Robert has always kissed me. Even when I came home wrecked and reeking of another man, his kiss has been the punctuation at the end of every sentence of our marriage.
I sit at the kitchen table for a long time. Robert’s chair is still warm. The house smells like lemon and fresh flowers, the scent I’ve been calling sterile. It doesn’t smell sterile now. It smells like something I could lose.
My pussy, who has had an opinion about every moment of the last three weeks—who buzzed and clenched her way throughevery encounter like a cheerleader with no morals—has gone completely silent. Even she knows I fucked this up.
I go upstairs to my walk-in closet. The purple dress is still shoved behind my silk blouses. I catch my reflection in the closet mirror and look away fast because the woman in there has a scrubbed face and dry eyes. She looks exactly like what she is: a woman who just blew up her marriage and couldn’t shower off the evidence.
My wedding ring is on my finger. I remember the night he proposed. He took me to the restaurant where we had our first date, and I said yes before he finished the question.
I look down at it. Turn my hand. The diamond catches the light, and for a second, it’s just a ring. A stone on a band. Then it’s everything I’m losing.
Robert doesn’t come home until midnight, and then he doesn’t come into the bedroom. When I hear the door to the nearest spare room close, I stare at the ceiling with dry eyes.
What else did I expect?
Chapter 4
Sunday is just silence, and the longer it’s silent, the more restless I become. My body has been humming in a way I don’t want to examine too closely.
Robert leaves before dinnertime, and all he says is he’ll be back late. I don’t ask him where he’s spending his time. I don’t have that right.
My pussy has been throbbing since dinner. An insistent pulse that doesn’t respond to deep breathing or telling myself to get a fucking grip. It’s the casino. I need to go again. Not because it’ll fix anything but because it’ll make me someone who doesn’t care.
I pick up my phone and text Robert because, for some fucked up reason, I don’t want him to come home to find me gone.
SHANNON:Going out for a bit.
His response takes four minutes.
ROBERT:Okay.
That’s it. One word sent the way you’d respond to your wife saying she’s running to Target.
