Chapter 2
Ispend the next few days reclaiming my house in increments.
Not packing. I’m not going anywhere. This house is half mine on paper and entirely mine in practice. I chose the paint colors, the furniture, the neighborhood. Jason chose the TV. He can have the TV.
His coffee cup sits in the sink where he left it before the gala, a ring of dried cream along the inside.
I wash it. I put it away. I take it back out and set it on the counter.
Then I put it in the cabinet above the stove, the one he never opens because he’s too lazy to reach for it.
It can live up there until he comes for it or doesn’t.
My phone has numerous texts I haven’t opened.
A couple from my mother, who heard from someone, who heard from someone.
The rest are variations on whether or not I’m okay from people who want me to say yes I am so they can stop asking.
I type back tiny assurances to a few of them and leave the others on read.
And it doesn’t help that the affair is already public.
Bella posted a photo with Jason on all of her socials yesterday.
Brunch at Margaux’s, the place with the hundred-dollar eggs and the wait list that bends for her last name.
Jason’s hand is on the table next to hers.
No caption. She doesn’t need one. The comments do the work for her, all fire emojis and OBSESSED and one girl writing He left his WIFE?
? Iconic like adultery is nothing more than content strategy.
By this morning, there’s a second post. Jason in a suit I don’t recognize, standing on what looks like the terrace of Bella’s penthouse, city behind him, jaw tilted for the camera.
The suit is Tom Ford. I know because Jason has wanted a Tom Ford suit for six years and I’ve talked him out of it each time because we couldn’t swing it.
He’s swinging it now, or he thinks he is anyway.
Then a third post pops up. This one names me.
There is it is in black and white… @raynaclark in the caption of a photo of Bella draped across a couch in what looks like a bedroom, wearing silk pajamas, Jason’s jacket thrown over the arm behind her.
The caption reads: When he finally comes home to the right person.
And in the comments, Bella has replied to someone asking about me with two words. She’ll adjust.
Heat crawls up the back of my neck and sits there.
My thumb hovers over the comment field. I type four words, delete them, type three different ones, delete those too.
The sentences I’m composing in my head are precise and devastating and would give her exactly what she wants, which is proof that she got to me.
So, I close the app and set the phone face-down on the counter.
I press my palms flat against the tile until the urge to rip her to shreds passes.
I spend the next few hours trying to feel normal, trying to feel like my life didn’t just implode. That afternoon, Jason shows up.
He doesn’t call first. The key turns in the lock while I’m eating lunch in the kitchen. He walks in like he still owns the air in this house. He has a gym bag over one shoulder and a garment bag I don’t recognize. New luggage for the new life, I guess.
“I’m just grabbing a few things,” he says. He moves through the house like he’s shopping, pulling open drawers, checking shelves. He takes his watch from the nightstand, two dress shirts from the closet, his extra laptop charger. He leaves everything else.
“That’s it?” I say from the bedroom doorway. “That’s all you’re taking?”
“I don’t need much. Bella’s place is furnished.” He says it like he’s telling me about a hotel upgrade. “Fresh start, you know? I don’t want to drag all this old stuff into a new chapter.”
All this old stuff. He means the house, the furniture, the eight years of life we built inside these walls. He’s writing it off like inventory from a store that’s closing.
“What about the rest of your things?”
“Donate it. Keep it. I don’t care.” He zips the garment bag. “It’s not like any of it was worth much.”
He pauses in the kitchen doorway on his way out.
“Bella thinks you should take some time. Regroup. She’s starting a wellness program up for women going through big life changes. She said you could reach out to her if you need help with anything.”
His mistress is offering me life coaching.
“That’s generous of her,” I say with sarcasm oozing out of each word.
“She’s a generous person, Rayna. You’d see that if you weren’t so determined to be the victim here.”
I set my coffee down. My hand stays on the mug.
“If there is a victim here, it kind of is me… I’m the one who built your career while you figured out what tie to wear, and apparently, I’m the only one who wasted the last decade of my life pouring energy into this relationship.
So sorry the end of it isn’t as neat and tidy as you’re used to. ”
He stares at me. Something flickers in his face, and for a second, I think he’s going to say something real. Instead, he walks out without closing the door.
I close it myself. I’ve been closing doors behind him for years, but this is the last one.
Someone from Jason’s office sends me a message that night. An acquaintance I mostly spoke to at work events. Cassidy from HR.
Hey Rayna. Just wanted you to know people here are talking. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.
She doesn’t say what they’re talking about because she doesn’t have to. Bella tagged the Hayes Holdings account in one of the posts. The whole company knows.
I type back, Thanks, Cassidy.
I don’t ask what they’re saying. I don’t want the details. I already know the version they’re telling. Jason traded up. Rayna got left behind. The billionaire’s daughter won because Bella Hayes always gets what she wants.
That’s the version that fits in a sentence. The version with eight years of ghostwritten emails and weekends spent building someone else’s reputation doesn’t fit as neatly, so nobody’s telling it.
That evening, I start going through the closet.
Jason left most of his side untouched, hangers pushed to one end, a few ties he didn’t bother with, the gray sport coat with the loose button I kept meaning to fix.
I pull it all down and pile it on the bed.
I want to burn it all, but donation seems better.
I can’t in good conscious destroy things that someone else could genuinely use.
On the top shelf, behind a box of old tax files, I find a manila folder. It slides out across the carpet when I pull the box down.
Inside is the mentorship framework. My handwriting on the margins.
My outline, my research tabs printed and stapled, my draft email to the board with suggested talking points.
Jason’s name is on the cover page in his handwriting, blocky and confident, written over the sticky note where I’d put ready for you to review.
He didn’t review it. He submitted it.
There’s another box buried in the back of the closet under a bunch of Jason’s files.
This one is mine. Client proposals I never sent.
A pitch deck for a corporate contract that would have tripled my revenue.
I shelved it last spring because Jason needed me at the gala planning meetings instead. I pull it out and set it aside.
I take it all to the kitchen table and spread it all out, looking at it like it’s telling the story of my marriage.
I gave, he took… There are more of these projects, more papers, more folders.
I know there are. So many years of work done at the kitchen table, on this laptop, in this house, while Jason slept or watched TV or told me he’d “look it over in the morning.” I never had an office at Hayes Holdings.
I had a kitchen counter, a laptop, and a husband who walked out the door every morning carrying my work in his briefcase.
Eight years of folders with my work inside and his name on top, and I let it happen because his career was our career, his wins were our wins, and I believed that.
I believed that right up until the night of the gala, when he kissed another woman in a catering lounge and called me the past and her his future.
The doorbell rings, pulling me from the past and back to the present. I’m still at the table, folders open, sticky notes fanned across the surface in my handwriting.
I open the door expecting a package.
Gideon Hayes stands on my front step in a charcoal overcoat, no driver in sight, holding nothing. He looks like a man who drove himself here and spent five minutes in the car deciding whether to knock.
“Ms. Clark. I hope I’m not bothering you.”
“Rayna,” I say. Then, before I think about it. “Rayna Booth, actually. I’m going back to my maiden name. Booth.”
It comes out of my mouth finished, like a decision I made days ago and forgot to tell myself. Gideon doesn’t blink at it. He nods once, the way you’d acknowledge someone writing their own name on a form.
“Rayna Booth it is then. I won’t stay long. I came to apologize.”
This catches me off guard, and I know I must be looking at him like he’s nuts. “For what?” I finally manage to ask as I soften my face.
“My daughter’s behavior. And for the fact that it happened at an event I hosted, in a building with my name on it.”
I lean against the doorframe. My arms want to cross but I keep them at my sides. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Didn’t I? I raised her.”
That stops me. I don’t have a response ready for a man who shows up to claim a fault that he doesn’t have to.
“You drove here yourself,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think of that isn’t about his daughter or my husband.
“I don’t like sending people to do things I should do in person.
” He looks past me into the hall, and I know what he sees.
Jason’s leftover clothes piled on the hallway bench where I threw them when I came back down here to look at the files.
The sport coat with the loose button draped over the banister.
The signs of a woman taking her house back, one closet at a time.
He doesn’t comment on any of it. A lesser man would have. A lesser man would have made a face or said something soft and useless about fresh starts. Gideon stands where he is and treats me like someone making decisions, not someone falling apart.
“I won’t pretend this is a social call or that I’ve only come to absolve my sins. I have a reason.”
“People usually do.”
“I’d like to connect you with a divorce attorney. Jerry Davis. He’s not on my payroll, but I’ve known him twenty years and he won’t let anyone steamroll you.”
“Why?”
“Because Jason will hire someone expensive and loud, and my daughter being the petty thing she is, will encourage him to take everything even though as long as he’s with her, he’ll never need it.
You shouldn’t have to figure any of this out on your own while my daughter is part of the reason you need to. ”
I study him. He’s not fidgeting. He’s not selling. He’s standing on my porch in the cold offering me a name, and the offer has no handle on it, no string I can see that leads back to a favor I’ll owe.
“I don’t want charity, Mr. Hayes.”
“It isn’t charity. It’s a phone number. What you do with it is yours… And please, call me Gideon.”
I could say no. I probably should say no.
The smart move is to cut clean from everything Hayes, put distance between myself and the family that just blew my life apart, and figure this out alone.
I’ve been figuring things out alone my entire life.
I know how to do it. I’m tired of knowing how to do it.
“Okay,” I say.
He pulls a card from his coat pocket. Not Jerry’s card. His own, with a number written on the back in blue ink, precise and small.
“Jerry’s is on the back. The front is mine, if you need anything Jerry can’t help with.”
He turns and walks to his car, a black sedan that looks expensive but not overly flashy. No driver. No entourage. Just a man who rang a doorbell because he thought it was the right thing to do and left before it could turn into something uncomfortable.
I close the door and look at the card. Gideon’s number on one side, Jerry Davis’s on the other.
Then I look at the kitchen table. Folders spread across the surface, sticky notes in my handwriting, eight years of proof that I was the one doing the work. My house. My table. My name on every draft underneath his.
I pick up my phone and call Jerry Davis.
He answers on the second ring.
While I wait for him to pull up his calendar, I close the nearest folder and set my hand flat on the cover.
Jason’s name is on the front in blocky marker.
Underneath, if I peel the label, I can see where I wrote the title first. His handwriting over mine.
The story of our whole marriage in one folder.
Rayna Booth.
I write it on a sticky note and press it over Jason’s name. Then I reach for the next folder and do it again.