Page 23 of Holding Penalty

“Come in,” Crew says, ushering me inside and toward the couch, “I have Abbie on a video call. We’ll clear this up.”

“Abbie?” I ask. My brain is a second late in connecting the obvious dots.

I sit next to him on the couch, his laptop placed open on the coffee table. I recognize the woman who fills the video call screen. I saw her on Crew’s phone two nights ago, wearing a lot fewer clothes than she is now.

“Piper,” she says, seeing me drop into the frame. “Oh my gosh, you have no idea how embarrassed and sorry I am.”

My lips are a thin, flat line, skepticism radiating from me as I look at her on Crew’s screen.

She takes a deep breath. “Okay, here’s what happened …”

I listen as Crew and Abbie explain themselves.

Abbie meant to send that text to someone else, a guy she’s seeing.

Why is she in Crew’s phone in the first place? They’re coworkers.

Why did Crew tell her to contact him via a different number? That’s his work phone, which he showed me to confirm. He used to just tell people to contact him on his personal number because it’s easier for him, but recently management implemented a policy of only discussing work-related matters on company-issued devices.

Why did she preface her picture by saying that she knew she wasn’t supposed to text this number? Because she was in the opposite situation with the guy she meant to text: she was messaging his work phone when she knew she shouldn’t, because he was ignoring his personal phone while pulling an all-nighter on Friday night for an important client.

How did she make that mistake in the first place? Because the two numbers just happened to be really similar, and she didn’t save them under a specific name in her contacts because she was trying not to use them.

As proof, Crew shows me his work phone, and their entirely professional text thread. Abbie holds up her phone to the camera and shows me that her message history with the guy she’s seeing corroborates her story.

Any question I have, they have an answer for, and visual proof. It seems … like they’re telling the truth.

Crew ends the call with Abbie when I don’t have anything left to ask her, and I look into his eyes. I try to reach into them with my gaze, searching them, seeing if there’s anything I can read in them to help me decide whether or not to fully accept their explanation.

I don’t know if I really find something in Crew’s eyes that I can grab onto and trust. But I do feel the gears in my mind shift towards a decision.

I think about the bakery that my inheritance can buy me. I think about being able not just to continue working at my dream job that I love, but to own it for the rest of my life.

I think about all the people in our lives planning to make the trip here for us in just a couple days.

I think about how much I don’t want to have to start from square one and rebuild my whole life. Go through the whole process of first dates and finding someone new who I want to try to build a relationship with, all the while losing my apartment and my job.

I like to think that if I truly didn’t believe what I just heard from Crew and Abbie, that none of those reasons would be enough to make me stay with someone who was unfaithful. I like to think that I’d have the courage to face down all those reasons to stay, and step over them to leave.

But do I have any reason to doubt the explanation they just gave me, and the evidence they showed me to back it up?

Crazy, unfortunate coincidence like this can happen. They do happen. Maybe one happened to me.

Can I read anything in Crew’s eyes, in his expression, in his demeanor that tips me off that he’s lying, that this was all an elaborate ruse to cover his tracks?

I can’t.

When I agreed to marry him, didn’t I agree to trust him, too? Isn’t that what a lifelong relationship is all about?

For some reason, the imagined words of the last person I should be thinking about right now, Nash, sound in the back of my head. I imagine him telling me that no matter Crew’s explanation, the way he drove off in a limo and let me walk home was too messed up and selfish to forgive.

But looking at it from Crew’s perspective, if he’s telling the truth … I did just smash up his phone over something that wasn’t his fault, without letting him explain himself. Didn’t he have a right to be mad, too, to maybe not be in the best decision-making frame of mind, either?

After everything I just heard and saw from both Crew and Abbie, do I have enough reason to call off the wedding that’s less than a week away? And if he’s as innocent as he seems, how could my and Crew’s relationship ever come back from that if I do?

The gears in my brain slide into place. I’ve made my decision.

I nod to Crew’s questioning eyes, and I hug the man I’m going to marry.