4. Eve
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Eve
I’ve been wearing the same sweatpants for two days.
They might not even be mine. They might be Simon’s, an old pair he left here back when this apartment was just mine, before it became ours, before ours quietly became his, before everything I owned turned into one collaborative lie.
I should burn them.
I can’t get off the couch.
My apartment has become a tomb. Curtains drawn so tight not a sliver of light gets through.
Phone dead on the floor where I threw it after the forty-seventh missed call from my mother.
Takeout containers building their own small civilization on the kitchen counter.
I ordered Chinese at some point. Or maybe Greek.
I don’t remember eating any of it, which tells you something about the week I’m having.
The wedding dress is crumpled in the corner. I couldn’t bring myself to hang it up. Couldn’t throw it out either. So it just sits there, fourteen thousand dollars of beaded lace and bad decisions, slowly wrinkling into oblivion.
I haven’t showered since the church.
I should be disgusted with myself. I should get up, wash my face, eat something that isn’t four-day-old lo mein, call my mother back before she has Tyler kick the door in.
Instead I pull the blanket tighter and stare at the wall like it owes me money.
My family keeps trying. Mom’s texts went from concerned to panicked to faintly threatening before my phone died. Tyler knocked for twenty solid minutes yesterday and finally yelled through the door that I had one more day before the locksmith. Becca left a voicemail so long it cut her off twice.
Dean came by. Twice. I heard him through the door, voice low and careful, asking if I was alive. I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t figure out what I’d even say.
Yes, I’m alive. No, I don’t feel like it. Yes, I watched my fiancé bend his mistress over the honeymoon desk. No, I have not processed that. Please let me rot in peace.
The knock that comes on day three is different.
Crisper. More entitled. The knock of someone who expects the door to open because she commanded it.
“Evelyn.” The voice turns my blood to ice water. “I know you’re in there.”
Hilda.
“Open this door immediately.” A pause, loaded with contempt. “I’ve come for what belongs to my family.”
I don’t move. Don’t breathe. Maybe if I hold still long enough she’ll assume I’m dead and go away to plan a tasteful funeral she can use for networking.
“The ring, Evelyn.” Impatience now. “The Valentine family ring. You’re no longer entitled to wear it, and I won’t have you pawning a family heirloom out of spite.”
The ring.
My eyes drift to my left hand, to the obscene diamond I forgot I was still wearing.
Four carats. Platinum. Simon’s grandmother’s, passed down through three generations of Valentine women.
He proposed at sunset on the beach, on one knee in the sand while the waves did their thing behind us, and I cried because I thought it meant something. I thought he was handing me his family.
His family never wanted me to begin with.
“I have a key from Simon’s things.” The doorknob rattles. “I’m coming in whether you like it or not.”
The lock clicks. The door swings open.
Hilda fills the threshold in head-to-toe Hermès, pearls at her throat, looking like she just left a country club brunch to deal with a plumbing emergency.
Her nose wrinkles as she takes inventory.
The containers. The dead phone. The dress in the corner.
Me, unwashed and hollow, wrapped in a blanket like the world’s saddest burrito.
“Good God.” She steps in, picking her way across my floor like the carpet might bite her Louboutins. “Look at yourself. I told Simon you weren’t strong enough for this family. A woman with actual breeding would have handled this with grace.”
Something stirs in my chest. Something that’s been asleep for two days, hibernating under the grief and the shock and the bone-deep exhaustion.
“You knew.” My voice is a rasp, rough from disuse and crying. “At the wedding. You smiled.”
“Of course I knew.” She examines a takeout container with open revulsion, then sets it down like it’s radioactive. “I recommended her for his assistant position.”
The words hit like a fist.
“Kiara understands what it takes to be a Valentine.” She straightens a picture frame I don’t remember knocking crooked. “She has ambition. Drive. She comes from the right people.” Her eyes flick to me, dismissive. “You just had sentimentality.”
“You introduced them.” I’m sitting up now, the blanket sliding off my shoulders. “You introduced them and you knew. You knew he was cheating and you let me walk down that aisle anyway.”
“Someone had to save Simon from his mistake.” She says it the way other people say it might rain. “Now.” She extends a manicured hand, palm up. “The ring. I won’t ask twice. They need it before the honeymoon.”
Their honeymoon.
My honeymoon. The one I planned for six months.
The Maldives resort I found after a hundred hours of research, the overwater bungalow I booked because Simon said he’d always wanted to wake up surrounded by ocean.
The fifteen thousand dollars I put on my own card because he promised to pay me back once he moved some things around, and I believed him, because I was stupid and in love and certain we were building a life.
They want my honeymoon.
I look at the ring. Really look at it.
I remember him sliding it onto my finger, his eyes warm with what I told myself was love. I remember showing my mother, both of us crying. I remember wearing it to work the next day and watching it catch the light in meetings, feeling like the luckiest woman alive.
I remember Kiara’s smile in the hotel room. Hilda smoothing her jacket while my whole life caught fire. Simon, annoyed, like I was being unreasonable for objecting to my own public execution.
The thing in my chest finishes waking up.
It has teeth.
I stand. My legs are unsteady after two days of decomposing on the couch, but they hold. I walk to the door she left open, and I feel her eyes on my back, certain I’m about to be a good little reject and hand it over.
Instead I twist the ring off my finger.
And throw it as hard as I can into the hallway.
It pings off the wall, skitters across the floor, and drops straight through the stairwell grate with a small, musical clatter that I will be hearing fondly for years.
“Fetch.”
Hilda’s face contorts. The mask cracks, and something ugly shows through. “You little...”
“Get out of my house.”
“You’re nothing.” She advances, finger pointed at my chest like she’s casting a curse. “You’re trash. Simon told me everything about your family, your pathetic little...”
“GET OUT.”
The voice that comes out of me isn’t one I recognize. It’s feral. It’s been building for two days, maybe longer, maybe my whole polite, accommodating life. I grab her arm, and her gasp of outrage is so satisfying I almost smile, and I steer her toward the door.
“And tell your precious son,” I say, low, “that the honeymoon he’s planning? The one I booked? The one I paid for?”
She stumbles into the hallway, catching herself on the wall.
“He might want to check his reservations.”
“You’ll regret this.” Her voice shakes. “You’ll...”
I shut the door in her face.
For a long moment I just stand there, breathing hard, heart going like a fist on a door. My hand stays on the knob. I’m shaking again, but it’s a different shaking this time. The grief and the shock have burned off, and what’s under them runs hotter.
Adrenaline.
I go to my laptop. Plug it in. Wait the agonizing thirty seconds for it to wake up, then open the browser.
Maldives confirmation. There it is. Overwater bungalow, seven nights, non-refundable deposit of fifteen thousand dollars. Cancellation policy: no refunds within thirty days.
I cancel it anyway.
I watch the money evaporate and I do not flinch. Fifteen grand, gone. Their romantic getaway, gone. It isn’t enough. It isn’t close to enough. But it’s a start, and a start has its own pulse.
Then I open a new tab. Then another. Then another.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, home visit requested. I enter Simon’s address, double-checking every digit like I’m defusing a bomb instead of building one.
Scientology, information packet. Same address.
Mormon missionaries, appointment confirmed. Same.
Herbalife distributor sign-up, Simon’s email, Simon’s cell.
Mary Kay consultant inquiry. Vector Marketing recruitment. A daily Cat Facts subscription. Fifty motivational quotes a day. One furry convention mailing list, because variety is the spice of revenge.
I’m laughing now. Tears on my face, something manic and a little broken bubbling up out of my chest. It’s petty. It’s childish. It will almost certainly not dent his life in any meaningful way.
And it feels incredible.
My phone. I should charge my phone before Tyler arrives with a battering ram.
I plug it in, and the screen floods. Forty-seven missed calls. A hundred and twelve texts. Three voicemails from numbers I don’t know and don’t intend to learn.
And one message from an unknown number that stops me.
Hey. It’s Dean. Got a new phone, the old one drowned in coffee. Your family’s losing it. Tyler’s one missed call from hiring a locksmith. You alive in there?
I stare at it. I think about Dean in that hallway, fury banked behind his eyes while he hauled his brother out of the room by the collar.
I think about him stepping in front of me so I wouldn’t have to keep looking.
I think about his face in the elevator mirror, the thing I saw there that I’m still pretending I didn’t.
I type back: Alive. Planning crimes.
Three dots, immediately. Then: Legal crimes or illegal crimes?
Depends. Does signing my ex up for Scientology count?
Legally? Tragically, no. Morally? You’re doing God’s work.
I huff out a sound that’s almost a laugh. It’s been so long since my face did that it actually aches.
What else is on the list, he sends. Asking so I know whether to bring snacks or an alibi.
Cat Facts. Furry convention. A LOT of motivational quotes.
You’re a menace, comes back. I’ve never been prouder to know someone.
And there it is. The flutter. Low and unwelcome and absolutely the wrong week for it, this stupid warmth spreading through my chest because a man I have no business thinking about is making me smile at a screen in the dark.
I tell myself it’s relief. It’s the adrenaline still draining out. It’s that he’s the only person who texted me something other than are you okay, the only one who met my crazy with more crazy instead of pity.
It is definitely not the way I keep rereading “I’ve never been prouder to know someone.”
A pause on his end. Then: Want help?
I bite my lip. My heart does something complicated.
I want to destroy him, I type. I don’t want to scare him. I want to take everything.
The reply comes so fast he must have already been typing it.
Then let’s take everything.
My doorbell rings.
I cross the wreckage of my apartment and open the door, and there’s Dean. Two laptops under one arm, a bottle of whiskey in the other hand, and a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes but is trying very hard, for my benefit, which is somehow worse.
He looks like he came straight from somewhere he was supposed to be.
Sleeves shoved up his forearms, tie gone, collar open.
He’s too big for my doorway, all of a sudden, in a way I never noticed across all those family dinners where he was just Simon’s quieter brother, the one in the background, the one I never let myself look at twice.
I’m looking now. I catch myself looking and yank my eyes back up to his face, and I file the moment under stress. Grief does strange things. That’s all this is.
“You said you wanted to make his life hell.” He steps past me like he’s done it a thousand times, sets the laptops and the whiskey on my coffee table, and surveys my disaster of a living room without a single flicker of judgment. “I know all his passwords.”
I shut the door behind him.
For the first time in three days, I feel something other than grief.
I feel dangerous.