Chapter 3
The next Saturday morning, Robert is warm against my back and the lie is eating me up inside.
He stirs. His hand slides up my stomach, and I have to stop myself from flinching.
“Morning,” he murmurs against my shoulder. So trusting. “Sleep okay?”
“Fine.” The lie slides out smoothly, the way all the lies do now. “Just dreaming.”
Robert pulls me closer and kisses the back of my neck.
The guilt twists in my chest because that kiss is the same one he’s given me every morning for fifteen years.
The claim that says I’m his and we don’t lie to each other.
That was always the deal. Robert doesn’t just get off on the sex—it’s the retelling.
Being the one person who knows every filthy thing I’ve done and wants me harder for it.
And I’ve been slowly, deliberately proving that I don’t deserve him.
“I need to shower,” I say, sliding out of his arms before he can see my face.
Under the water, I press my forehead against the tile and make a decision. Tonight. I’ll tell Robert everything tonight. Every ugly piece.
Okay, Shannon. Ten hours. You can hold your shit together for ten hours.
Except the water is going cold and my hands won’t stop shaking. I’m not sure I can.
I dry off and get dressed. He’s at the kitchen table, in the same chair where he pulled me into his lap and made me come four days ago. His coffee is full, which means something derailed him.
His face is different. Closed off. Robert in judgment mode—the verdict already written, waiting for the other party to catch up.
He’s never aimed that face at me before.
“James called me while you were showering.”
My social smile starts to form and dies. I can’t deploy that smile on him. Not today.
“He saw you at the Goldpoint.” Robert’s voice is even, but there’s a coldness underneath that I’ve never heard before. “He thought I should know.”
My stomach flips. I had until tonight. Tonight came early.
His jaw tightens. “I didn’t confirm a goddamn thing. Whatever James thinks he knows, he’s guessing.”
He protected us. The thought hits like a slap. Even blindsided, he kept our secret.
“What I didn’t know,” Robert continues, “is that you already knew James had seen you because he talked to you. And you hid it from me.”
“Robert—”
“Did you know James saw you at the casino?”
His gray eyes on mine. Twelve feet of tile floor and fifteen years of marriage between us, and every inch of it feels like a poker game I’ve already lost.
I could say James was lying. One more performance. But I’m looking at Robert, the man who said “tell me everything” and meant it about things most husbands could never stomach. The man who ate another man’s cum out of me and called me his perfect wife.
If I lie to that face, I deserve to lose everything.
“Yes.” My voice cracks. “I knew.”
And then the truth comes. It’s not organized or the careful speech I was planning for tonight. It pours out in fragments.
Tony’s text with the security footage of James at the casino. I’m shaking as I grip the counter. The business conversations I overheard—a name, Hendricks—
Robert’s hand goes flat on the table. I keep going.
Adrian’s warning after they fucked me, brushing hair off my face and telling me to be careful before shutting down like he’d said too much. My voice wobbles, and I push through it. Men stationed outside Tony’s office with posture that screamed military.
God, I hear myself talking, and I sound like a disaster. A three-carat-ring-wearing disaster who can organize a charity auction for two hundred people but can’t manage to be honest with the one person who matters.
Robert’s coffee sits untouched on the table. Neither of us moves.
“You can fuck whoever you want, Shannon. That was always the deal.” He looks at me, and his gray eyes hold a hurt so total it doesn’t look like pain. It looks like calm. “But you lied to me. You looked me in the eye, and you lied. That’s the deal breaker.”
He’s not yelling. Yelling I could handle. This quiet coldness is worse than anything I imagined, and I imagined plenty while the water ran cold in the shower.
He stands up and pushes in his chair like he’s leaving a conference room.
“I need to go to the office.”
It’s Saturday.
He walks past me. Six inches between us, and he doesn’t touch me or kiss me.
Robert has always kissed me. Even when I came home wrecked and reeking of another man, his kiss has been the punctuation at the end of every sentence of our marriage.
I sit at the kitchen table for a long time. Robert’s chair is still warm. The house smells like lemon and fresh flowers, the scent I’ve been calling sterile. It doesn’t smell sterile now. It smells like something I could lose.
My pussy, who has had an opinion about every moment of the last three weeks—who buzzed and clenched her way through every encounter like a cheerleader with no morals—has gone completely silent. Even she knows I fucked this up.
I go upstairs to my walk-in closet. The purple dress is still shoved behind my silk blouses.
I catch my reflection in the closet mirror and look away fast because the woman in there has a scrubbed face and dry eyes.
She looks exactly like what she is: a woman who just blew up her marriage and couldn’t shower off the evidence.
My wedding ring is on my finger. I remember the night he proposed. He took me to the restaurant where we had our first date, and I said yes before he finished the question.
I look down at it. Turn my hand. The diamond catches the light, and for a second, it’s just a ring. A stone on a band. Then it’s everything I’m losing.
Robert doesn’t come home until midnight, and then he doesn’t come into the bedroom. When I hear the door to the nearest spare room close, I stare at the ceiling with dry eyes.
What else did I expect?