The video was already mid-way — the camera was at a higher angle, as if mounted on the wall. Someone with Jason’s exact physique and wearing a mask was pinching her tits and slapping her breasts. I watched three seconds of it before I closed my eyes. Three seconds was enough.
“He reached out to me,” she said, as I slowly opened my eyes, avoiding the phone completely. “Because Jason has fetishes. He loves twisted sex, like this one, from just last night, when he wanted to be a masked intruder in my stateroom, and take me by force. See…” she moved the screen closer to my face. The man in the video was plummeting her, and thrashing her ass.
I closed my eyes again.
The girl continued. “Actually, Camila, honey, what Jason needs — the things he enjoys, the way he likes it — you can’t give him that. You’re not built for it. You’re just the sweet, domesticated wife. But what he wants is not domesticated. He doesn’t want Camila. He wants Scarlett.
I opened my eyes.
“He’s been with me since not long after the wedding.” She tucked the phone away. “I know you think you know him. But the man you think you married — he came to me because I give him everything you can’t.” She tilted her head slightly. “You seem like a good person. So I’ll say this kindly: let him go. Sign whatever papers you need to sign. Walk away.”
She showed me the message on her phone — her own message to Jason, the fantasy she’d described, the instructions for last night — and said:thisis what he wants. And she looked at me the way she’d looked at me from the bed, with that measuring, dismissive calm, and I felt something happen in my chest that was less like breaking and more like a light switching off.
I stopped crying.
Just like that. The tears simply stopped, as if some internal mechanism had reached its limit and shut down.
Scarlett held my gaze for a moment, seemingly satisfied, and then she left, the tattooed man stepping aside to let her pass and then following her out. The door swung closed behind them.
The stateroom was quiet again.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. Not thinking. Not feeling, particularly. Just sitting.
Then I stood up, went to the bathroom, washed my face with cold water, and changed into the yellow sundress Jason had arranged, for the anniversary I’d woken up this morning believing in completely.
I went to the bed.
I picked up my wedding ring and held it in my palm for a moment — that small, familiar weight, the one I’d stopped noticing years ago because it had simply become part of me.
I set it down carefully beside the flowers.
I picked up my bags. I took one look around the stateroom. And I left.
CHAPTER 10
JASON
CocoCay was beautiful.
That was the obscene part — the island was exactly as beautiful as I’d imagined when I booked this trip a month ago. White sand, water so clear it looked invented, the kind of sky that made you feel like the world had been freshly cleaned. Everywhere I looked, people were happy. Children ran into the shallows. Couples spread towels on the sand and reached for each other’s hands.
I moved through all of it like a man walking through a dream he couldn’t wake from.
I checked every beach bar, every shaded cabana cluster, every stretch of shoreline. I walked the length of the main beach twice and then doubled back through the interior pathways where the shade was deep and the music from the resort speakers floated down through the palm fronds. I checked the private cabana I had reserved for us — still set up, still waiting, two cold drinks sweating on the small table between two empty chairs.
I stood there and looked at those two empty chairs for a long moment.
Then I kept moving.
She wasn’t on the island. I knew it with increasing certainty with each passing hour, the way you knew things you didn’t want to know — quietly, in your chest, before your mind caught up. Camila had not disembarked. Or if she had, she had found a way off this island that I couldn’t trace.
By mid-afternoon I gave up. I went back to the ship.
The stateroom was a complete contrast to how I’d left it.
All her things were gone from the side tables. Her books, her yellow sundress. Everything. I ran to the closet and opened it.
Her side was empty.
