8. Noelle
— ? —
Noelle
Nancy’s text comes the morning after the hotel opening, as if the universe finally remembered I exist.
Saw the news. Saw all of it. Are you okay?
Stupid question, ignore it. Listen, I’m stuck in Singapore another eight months and my apartment on the Lower East Side is sitting empty doing nothing.
Keys are with the super. It’s yours, no rent, no questions, no Sterlings within a mile of you. Please. Get out of that house.
Nancy from college, who I’ve spoken to maybe four times in five years because Cordelia decided early on she wasn’t the right sort of friend for a Sterling wife.
Nancy, who read about the worst day of my life from halfway around the world and offered me the one thing no one in my own family has. A way out.
I’m packed and gone from the Sterling estate within the hour. Sebastian’s card covers the cab. It’s the first full breath I’ve taken since the altar.
Which leaves one last errand.
The last of my things are still at the penthouse.
Things that Celeste conveniently forgot to pack when she boxed up my life and dumped it at the concierge desk. My grandmother’s pearl earrings. The cashmere throw my college roommate gave me for my wedding. The few good pieces of jewelry I bought with my own money before there was no money.
The little shit did it on purpose. She knew I’d have to come back.
The doorman doesn’t know how to act when I walk through the lobby. His face does this complicated dance, surprise, then pity, then a desperate attempt at professional neutrality that lands somewhere around constipated.
“Ms.... um...”
“Hartley,” I supply. “I’m just here to collect a few things.”
“Of course, Ms. Hartley. Would you like me to call up and-”
“No.” The word comes out sharper than intended. “No, that won’t be necessary. I still have the code.”
The elevator feels longer than it used to. The whole ride up is rising dread, watching the numbers climb while my stomach sinks in the opposite direction. Every ding of a passing floor sounds like a countdown to something I don’t want to face.
The doors open. The hallway stretches out before me, familiar and foreign at the same time.
My hand trembles when I punch in the code. The lock clicks open, and the door swings inward on a life I used to live.
Everything looks the same.
That’s the worst part. The furniture hasn’t moved. The art still hangs in the same spots. The throw pillows are arranged exactly how I used to arrange them, which means someone has been maintaining the illusion of normalcy even after everything fell apart.
Or maybe Celeste just hasn’t bothered to redecorate yet.
The apartment is quiet. Empty, hopefully. Dorian should be at work by now, it’s the middle of a Tuesday, and Celeste... actually, I have no idea what Celeste does with her days. Does she work? Does she just exist on Dorian’s money, raising his secret child and wearing his shirts?
I don’t know my own sister anymore. Maybe I never did.
The bedroom is at the end of the hall. My feet carry me there on autopilot, past the kitchen where I used to make breakfast, past the living room where I used to wait for a husband who was always coming home late.
The closet still has some of my clothes in it. Things I forgot, or things Celeste deliberately left behind to force this exact moment. A few dresses. Some shoes. A jewelry box shoved in the back corner like it doesn’t matter.
It does. It’s the last of what’s actually mine.
My hands are shoving clothes into a bag when the laugh reaches my ears.
Celeste’s laugh. High and breathless and unmistakable.
Then the moan.
I go rigid from the scalp down.
No. Please, no. Not this.
The bathroom door opens.
Celeste walks out wearing one of Dorian’s shirts and nothing else, a towel wrapped around her wet hair.
Her legs are bare. The shirt barely covers her thighs.
She looks comfortable in a way I never did in this apartment, like she belongs here, like this has always been her home and I was just keeping it warm.
“Oh.” She stops when she sees me. A smile spreads across her face, slow and satisfied. “What are you doing here, sis?”
Behind her, Dorian appears in the bathroom doorway.
He’s half-dressed, pants on, shirt off, hair damp from what was obviously a shared shower. His hand is still underneath Celeste’s shirt, curved around her hip like it belongs there. Like it’s always belonged there.
My legs won’t move. My lungs have forgotten how to work. This paralysis is complete, total, like my body has decided that if it stays perfectly still, maybe this won’t be real.
This is the catch. This is what I never got at the altar, never got during the years of business trips and late nights and cold beds. This is what five years of doubt looks like, confirmed, standing in my bedroom wearing my husband’s clothes.
I thought being right would feel like winning.
It doesn’t. The win curdles the second I have it.
Some pathetic, stubborn corner of me was still holding out hope that I’d imagined all of it, that I was the paranoid wife everyone said I was, that the man I married was somewhere underneath the stranger he’d become.
Seeing her in his shirt kills that hope clean.
And I hate that even now, even here, a part of me is grieving him.
My bedroom. My husband. My life.
Except none of it was ever really mine.
“This is awkward,” Celeste says. Her voice drips with false sympathy. “We thought you’d be done by now.”
“You forgot stuff.”
“Did I?” She tilts her head, innocent and cruel. “Must have slipped my mind. Well, don’t let us stop you.”
Dorian finally finds his voice. “Noelle, I can explain-”
“Please don’t.”
The words come out flat and dead, which is exactly how I feel. Flat. Dead. Hollowed out by the sight of them together, casual and comfortable and completely unbothered by my presence.
“I was never anything to you but a cover story,” I continue. “You’ve made that perfectly clear. So please, spare me whatever excuse you’ve rehearsed. I don’t want to hear it.”
Celeste yawns, actually yawns, like this confrontation is boring her, and stretches catlike against Dorian’s chest. “Are you done? This is getting tedious.”
Something in me snaps.
Not loud, not explosive. Just a quiet click, a bone setting back into place after years out of joint.
“You know what? Keep the apartment.” I don’t recognize my own voice. Someone harder is using it, someone who doesn’t give a fuck anymore. “Keep him. Keep the whole pathetic mess. I hope you’re both very happy pretending you didn’t destroy lives to get here.”
I grab the last of my things. The half-packed bag of clothes. My grandmother’s pearl earrings off the dresser. The jewelry box from the back of the closet. The things they couldn’t be bothered to send, the things that are actually mine.
“I’m fucking done with all of you.”
The words feel good in my mouth. Real. Like the first true thing I’ve said in years.
Neither of them tries to stop me as I walk out.
Celeste’s laugh follows me down the hallway.
The elevator doors close, and suddenly I’m alone with shaking hands and a racing heart and a box of memories I’m not sure I want anymore.
My reflection stares back at me from the polished steel walls. Pale. Red-eyed. But standing. Still standing.
That’s something, I tell myself. That’s more than they expected.
The elevator reaches the lobby. The doorman looks up, startled, but I’m already past him and out the doors, the last of my things clutched against my chest, walking into the cold where I can finally let myself fall apart with no one watching.