Chapter 3
Ellary
My finger feels naked without my ring on it.
Light.
Pale.
Bare.
Almost as empty as the hole in my heart.
Tears slide down my cheeks. I don’t sob, and I don’t brush them away.
I have to get home.
That’s all I can think of.
That’s all I want to think about.
Not about Jackson’s soft groan. Not the sight of his assistant getting to her feet with a grin, wiping her mouth after she…
My fingers tighten around the steering wheel.
Stop. Thinking. About. It.
But my mind goes where it wants, and it wants to relive pink lipstick on Jackson’s flaccid cock.
My God. I stood in his office doorway and watched a woman pleasure my husband right in front of me.
I turn on the radio, needing something—anything—to distract me. Two beats into an excruciatingly cheerful pop song later, my face twists in disgust, and I stab the off button.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the pregnancy test in my purse on the passenger seat. This was supposed to be the happiest day of our lives, yet my body feels encased in ice. My heart hasn’t stopped bleeding since I walked out of Jackson’s office.
The drive home from downtown Melton is hazy.
I park up outside a small, two-story three-bedroom home in a quiet subdivision in the suburbs, cut the engine, and climb out with my purse.
I feel so numb and cold, as if I’m in a dream.
Leo, our veterinarian neighbor, calls out to me from where he’s mowing his front lawn.
His voice barely penetrates my daze.
Ignoring him, I walk to the house, focused on planting one foot in front of the other. That’s it. Nothing else.
Just get inside the house, and you can fall apart in private and not in the street.
My hands shake as I unlock the front door. Tears wet my cheeks.
The second I’m inside the house, pushing the door closed behind me, I’m drowning in Jackson’s amber and cedar cologne.
Thump.
My eyes snap to the purse I dropped on the floor when it vibrated, startling me. From within, something furiously hums.
My cell phone.
Heart in my throat, I reach for my purse, suspecting I know exactly who is calling. I pull out my cell phone and stare down at it.
Jackson's name illuminates the screen.
The phone rings and rings.
It stops.
Then it starts up again.
It feels like the worst kind of torture.
All I want to do is open the front door and fling it outside, as far away from me as I can.
But that’s childish. Immature. I’ve always been sensible and reasonable, and that was before I graduated with a 3.
9 GPA in business management. But my ability to think is a crutch someone kicked out from under me.
I want to scream and yell and punch a wall.
I’m driven to do things I never dreamed of doing before.
Loud, crazy things that might distract from the pain squeezing my heart.
I stare at my ringing phone until it stops.
Something inside me feels broken, shattered into pieces so small there’s no putting them back together. Everywhere I look, I see memories of the life we built together. A happy life, I thought. One that felt full and happy for both of us.
But it was a lie.
I head for the kitchen, bypassing the living room and Jackson’s home office, wanting to be somewhere with as little of his presence as possible. Other than the backyard, that’s the kitchen.
Pictures cover almost every wall.
Our engagement, wedding, honeymoon, family BBQs, and vacations with my sister and his best friend’s family. I avoid looking directly at every single one. Glimpsing them out of the corner of my eye is painful enough.
In the kitchen, I set my purse down on the dining table and walk over to the sink to pour myself a glass of water.
My face is wet and my cheeks tight from the tears I shed as I fought to get into my car outside Jackson’s office. My hands shake as I fill a glass and walk back to the dining table.
A notification has popped up on my phone. A message from Jackson.
I glance at it but don’t read it. Whatever he has to say would only crush me.
The pregnancy test peeks out at me from my open purse.
I pull it out along with the blood test results confirming my pregnancy.
The doctor said I didn’t need the blood test. The at-home tests are similar to the ones I would take at the clinic.
But he knows how long Jackson and I have been trying to get pregnant, and he agreed to the blood test to humor me as much as because he felt sorry for me when I told him I so badly wanted to believe the at-home pregnancy tests, but I was so scared it would be wrong.
Again.
I’m bringing a child into this world. A piece of Jackson and me.
I stuff everything back into my purse. The pregnancy test and the blood test results filled me with so much joy before; I was overflowing with it. Now, both hurt too much to look at.
I don’t know how long I sit at the dining table, my ringless finger wrapped around a glass of water I poured for myself. I don’t drink it. I just hold it, needing something—anything—to stay grounded.
A leaf blower starts up. My hand jerks, water spilling over the table.
You have to pull yourself together before Jackson comes home from work.
I didn’t plan on telling anyone.
The shame of walking in on my husband cheating on me with his assistant is too pathetic to want to share.
Like a TV show about a blissfully unaware wife, too stupid to notice the obvious signs that her husband doesn’t love her anymore.
But when I think over the last few months, if there were any signs he was being unfaithful, I’m still too stupid to see them.
I don’t think I can keep this to myself.
I pick up my cell phone, check the time, and then scroll through my contacts.
It’s after three o’clock. Lila will be at the restaurant she works at, prepping in the kitchen for dinner service at five, but she can stop and talk for a bit. I need to lean on my big sister for just a little bit right now.
The phone rings five times in my ear.
“Westley Restaurant, Pris speaking. How can I help?”
I clear my throat and force a smile onto my face that I hope hides how much crying I’ve done. “Hi, Pris. It’s Ellary. Can you put me through to my sister?”
“Sure thing. Everything okay?” The bar supervisor asks.
I swallow the lump in my throat and fiddle with the strap of my purse, fighting back tears. “Fine. Thanks.”
Footsteps echo down the line. A door creaks as it opens, followed by clanging pots and the distant hum of conversation.
“Lila?” Pris’s voice rises. “It’s Ellary for you.”
“Ellary?” I hear my sister’s confusion.
I rarely call her at work unless it’s an emergency. She’s a busy sous chef at one of Melton’s most popular high-end restaurants. We usually catch up when we have dinner at our parents' house on Sundays or when we go shopping at the mall and have lunch afterward.
Today, I’m not behaving like myself, and there’s nothing I can do to change that. Today, my life feels like it’s over.
“Ellary?”
My eyes instantly fill with tears at the sound of my sister’s voice. She’s a couple of years older but fiercely loyal, and my best friend in the world.
I try to speak. Nothing comes out.
My throat tightens, and my eyes burn with more tears than I believed I had in me.
“Ellary?” Footsteps echo down the phone. The distant sound of a busy kitchen fades, and a door clicks shut. She must be in the head chef’s office or the staff room. Nowhere else is likely to be quiet with all the staff busy preparing to open. “What’s wrong?”
I haven’t said one word, and she knows. She always knows.
I swallow, my fingers tightening around my cell phone. “I… I saw something.”
“Something bad?”
My mind brings up Jackson’s assistant rising from under his desk, wiping the back of her hand across her lips after she made my husband cum right in front of me.
“Ellary? Talk to me. Is something wrong? Did something happen to Mom or Dad?”
I clear my throat yet again, reminding myself she has to get back to work and I’m wasting her time. “No. They’re okay. It’s… Jackson.”
“Is he okay? Was he in an accident? Do you need me to come with you to the hospital? I can leave right now. My boss will fight me about it, but if he knows it’s an emergency, he’ll let me go.”
A door clicks, a sign she’s ready to walk out as soon as I say the word.
“No. He… he did something.”
God, I can’t even say it out loud.
She repeats, “Did something? I don’t understand.”
I can feel her confusion, but I struggle to find the words that won’t make me spew all over my dining table.
“What did he do, Ellary?” A bite of anger creeps into her voice.
Not aimed at me.
She’s guessed, or at least worked out that I wouldn’t be calling her unless it was something bad. Our parents are fine, and Jackson isn’t hurt either. The next best guess is that he did something wrong.
“I went to tell him I was pregnant,” I whisper. “The doctor confirmed I was pregnant when my blood test results came back.”
My parents and Lila had already told me that the tests were right.
Yes, I’ve had one with a false positive before, but this time I took the test five times, and each time it showed two pink lines.
They tried to convince me. I didn’t want to believe.
My doctor tried to convince me of the same thing.
I still didn’t want to believe. The blood test confirmed it for me, and I knew I wanted that confirmation before I told Jackson and we started celebrating.
And I wanted to wait. After two positive test results, only to wake up bleeding days later, I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a happy surprise that would go away with stained sheets one morning. But it hasn’t gone away. Not in the three days I’ve been waiting for the blood test results.
Maybe I should have told Jackson first, but I refused to let myself believe this was actually happening. I wanted to be sure before I surprised Jackson with the news we’ve wanted for six years.