Her Ex-Husband’s Brother (Forbidden Relations #3)

Chapter 1

ONE

LENNON

“I want a divorce.”

My words land in the room like a dropped glass. I guess I’ve always thought there was a script to life, rules, you might say, and if you stuck closely enough to them, no harm should befall you.

Today, I’m going off script.

Jake’s eyes shoot up from his phone.

“What?”

“I want a divorce,” I say again, and the second time, it comes out steadier, even though my heartbeat has officially rocketed into a throbbing cacophony in my ears.

“What are you talking about, Lennon?” Jake half-laughs like I’ve said something absurd. “We just bought a house.”

“I know.”

“We just—” He sets the phone down. Looks at me. “We’ve been working toward this future for nine years. I just got a promotion at work.”

“I know.”

“Everyone in our friend group—at church—”

“I know.”

He’s going to make me say the words, which is fair. The words are the thing I have been swallowing for so long I’d almost convinced myself I didn’t mean them.

“I’m not happy,” I say. “I haven’t been for a long time. And I don’t know how to make that different.”

The script said love, marriage, and a baby in a baby carriage.

I guess it never promised happiness, but it turned out the babies weren’t in the cards for me, either, and lately, I’ve been wondering about the love part, too.

Was it ever there? Or did I just think it was, right at the very beginning, before I was old enough to know better?

“You’re not—” Jake stops. Then starts again, softer. “Lennon. You’ve just got another one of your migraines.”

“I do.” It’s the ice-pick kind, stabbing behind my left orbital socket in an unrelenting way. But I always have migraines these days, don’t I? So what’s the point of waiting for a migraine-free day to leave my husband?

“So you’re not thinking straight. That’s—”

“Jake.”

“—that’s all this is. You’re in pain and you’re not—”

“I am thinking straight.” Something in my chest pulls tight. “I know what I’m saying.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, hands together, massaging a balled fist. Then he stands up from the couch and paces away from me, toward the window and the white picket fence visible through it.

A literal white picket fence. And I watch the set of his shoulders change. When he turns back, his eyes are sheened with tears.

This is the part that usually undoes me.

Jake doesn’t cry. He didn’t cry at his grandmother’s funeral. His dad died not long before we met, but I never saw him shed a tear over it.

He’s a man for whom most feelings seem to arrive already translated into something manageable and practical. Something he can fix.

So tears don’t come easily to him.

And when they do, they mean something. They mean he cares deeply and is truly hurting.

At least that’s what I always thought.

Except…

Except I’ve seen these particular tears before.

Five years ago, in a different living room, I said I needed to leave him. I had the same everything’s-closing-in-on-me feeling I’ve been having lately, like I just needed to run and never stop running.

But he teared up then, too, and I thought: he never cries. Look what you’ve done to him. What kind of woman leaves a man who loves her this much?

So I stayed.

And four years before that, when I was eighteen and had worked up the nerve to tell him I wasn’t sure about the wedding—we were so young, weren’t we?—the tears came then too, soft and devastating.

He told me I was being emotional, and of course we were right for each other, and I thought: he never cries. You must mean everything to him.

So I married him.

I look at the tears in his eyes now, and the thing in me that always immediately softened at the sight of them just...

I wish I could say it doesn’t soften me this time.

But I’m still the sucker I always was, and my chest caves in at the thought of hurting him.

Still, even a sucker can recognize patterns.

If I keep making the same choices, are we going to keep going around the same merry-go-round for another five years? Ten years?

Am I going to be looking down the barrel of my 20th anniversary, knowing something’s not right deep in my bones, but staying anyway?

Because his tears every time I say I want to leave hold me where the script of some child’s nursery rhyme, the church, and societal expectations tell me I’m supposed to be?

Meanwhile, I’m just going through the motions, a side character in somebody else’s story.

So I stay where I am, palms against my temples, migraine pounding, and I wait.

“Lennon.” His voice is broken and careful. “You’re my best friend. You’re my person. Think about everything we’ve built.”

“I have,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about it for years.”

“Then why—” He moves toward me, and I pull back slightly, just a few inches, and he stops. “If something’s wrong, we fix it. We could try for a baby again. I know the house has felt empty lately—”

“I don’t want a baby.” The words come out sharp, and he flinches. I feel the familiar flood of guilt and the even more familiar, exhausted anger underneath it— “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I know this is— I know this is coming out of nowhere for you.”

“Then don’t do it,” he says simply. “Don’t do this.”

“Jake.”

“Sleep on it. Call Brianna. We could call my mom—”

“I’m not calling your mother about this.”

“Why do you always have to be so—” He stops himself. Breathes. “Why do you have to make this so hard? Why do you always have to—”

His hand drops to his side, and he does that slight downward gesture he’ll do sometimes in public that means he’s embarrassed—lower your voice or settle down or, for God’s sake, just be normal.

I know everything that comes next if I stay in this room. The way his tears will work on me the same way they always have. The apologies I’ll make. The trial separation that becomes another year together, and another.

The decade anniversary.

After it, the silver, then the gold. All the while, I shrivel up inside like a body in a coffin, except I’m not dead yet.

I stand up.

The pounding in my head eases, fractionally, when I move. Like something shifting and pressure releasing.

“What are you—” He watches me start toward the bedroom. “Lennon. You’re just going to walk away?”

“I’m going to pack a bag.”

“Is there someone else?”

I stop in the doorway. Does he know me at all? “You know I would never do that.”

“I don’t know anything about you right now.” His voice goes strange and quiet. “This isn’t my wife. This isn’t the woman I know.”

I look at him—at the house behind him, the neutral sectional, the inoffensive art, the rug he chose.

“I know,” I say. “I think maybe that’s been the problem.” Because he’s never known the real me this whole time, only the character I’ve been performing to make him happy.

I pack a bag, and then I walk out the door. He’s still standing in the living room when I go.

I’m the villain in this story.

And also, for the first time in a very long time, the story is starting to be mine.