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I must’ve fallen asleep as I was waiting for him.

I push myself out of bed, my bare feet finding the cold floor as I pull on the robe that was draped over the chair. The penthouse is dark and unnaturally quiet when I step into the hallway. “Vance?” My voice sounds small in the empty space as I walk toward his office, expecting to find him there, maybe having come home hours ago and decided not to wake me. But all the rooms are empty.

Vance promised he would be home by eleven. It’s nearly three hours later, and he isn’t here.

A knot forms in my stomach, unable to shake the feeling that something is wrong.

After heading into the bedroom to grab my phone from the nightstand, I dial his number.

I walk into the living room as the ringtone blares deafeningly loud in my ear, pulling my robe tighter around me.

Come on, Vance.

It rings again, followed by a third.

Pick up the phone.

The line finally connects.

“Mr. Ashford’s phone.” A woman’s playful giggle comes through the phone instead of the expected rough, familiar timbre of my husband. It’s not just soft; it’s breathless and intimate.

Every muscle in my body goes rigid as my feet root in place, like they’re suddenly encased in cement. My still-groggy brain takes a moment to understand what I’m hearing, but when it does, my pulse pounds so hard that I can feel it in my throat.

“Melanie,” I whisper, the lone word like shards of glass cutting their way out of my face. Saying her name is so painful it barely makes it past my lips.

A breathy mewl wafts through the speaker before she huffs into the phone, “It’s your wife.”

My stomach drops, and I reach blindly for the back of the sofa for support, finding the leather and gripping it hard enough to make my knuckles ache. I need something solid beneath my hand because the entire room feels unsteady. “Put him on the phone.”

“Vance, baby,” she pants, and her breaths grow more ragged, “she wants to talk to you.”

Fabric rustles through the phone as her heavy exhales grow more distant for a moment.

“Sorry… Mr. Ashford… is a little… busy… right now…”

“Put him on the fucking phone.” The words fly out of me like I’m ripping my own heart out by the roots.

“I would… but his face is… buried in my… Fuck, Vance…” The other end of the call softens as though the phone has fallen from her mouth, but the obscene, unmistakable muted moans pour through the line. “Yes… Right there… Oh, God… Don’t stop… Fuck… I’m gonna co⁠—”

I hang up, and the phone clatters against the marble floor before I even realize that it fell from my hand. I am frozen in the center of the living room, staring at the life I thought I was building.

I can’t fucking breathe.

The air has turned to glass, each inhalation so ungodly agonizing I can hardly suck in a breath. I fold over the couch, my hair falling forward to curtain my face as a sob tears out of me, dragging every ounce of pain with it.

I believed him.

The thought repeats like a hammer blow, over and over, each impact driving the nail deeper. I believed him when he said there was no one else. I believed him when he said I was the only one who mattered. I believed him when he said he was mine as much as I am his.

I was a fool for letting myself think that, for as much as he couldn’t love me, with as broken as he is, that he actually cared.

I was able to look past his stunted emotions because I love him. His actions showed me how he felt. He might not have been able to say the words or know how to give me the kind of affection other husbands offer so effortlessly, but I truly believed that Vance simply loved differently. That love didn’t have to be spoken out load to be real. And I could live with that.

But this… This kind of betrayal is unfathomable.

It doesn’t just hurt or wound. It shatters me. Every carefully constructed piece of the life I believed in splinters at once, leaving nothing but jagged edges behind, buried so deeply that I don’t know how I’ll ever pull them out.

My knees buckle, and I crumple, the cold marble slamming into my skin. Tears stream down my face, hot and relentless, burning tracks of mascara that I don’t bother to wipe away into my cheeks. They fall onto my nightgown—darkening the silk—and drop to the floor like rain. I press my forehead on the icy floor as the sobs wrack through me, violent and uncontrollable.