Chapter 3
YOGA IN THE PARK
“I need you to come over. Right now.”
My sister picks up on the second ring, mid-chew. “It’s nine a.m. on a Monday. I’m eating a breakfast burrito in my car and on my way to the gym.”
“Paulette. Now. Skip the gym. I need you.”
Silence. The chewing stops. She knows this voice—the one stripped down past pleasantries, past the Rachelle-who-handles-things. The voice underneath.
“I’m twenty minutes out.”
She’s there in fourteen. I know because I’ve been sitting at the kitchen island counting the seconds on the microwave clock, my hands wrapped around a mug of coffee I haven’t touched.
When the front door opens and her keys hit the hall table, something in my chest loosens just enough to make my eyes burn.
Paulette rounds the corner into the kitchen and stops.
She’s in gym leggings and an oversized sweatshirt, her dark hair yanked into a bun that’s already falling apart.
She looks at me. At the coffee I haven’t touched.
At my face, which must be doing something terrible, because her expression goes from worried to scared.
“Sit down,” I say.
I tell her everything. The gala. Duane grabbing my arm in the hallway.
Albert Holt on the barstool, his face draining when he realized what he’d said.
Head over heels. A woman named Cassandra.
The yacht—Lisa’s careful words, then the panic, the backpedaling.
He had to, for the promotion. The company has these old-fashioned rules.
I lay it out flat, because if I let any emotion into the telling I’ll crack, and I can’t crack yet. I need someone else to hear this and tell me I’m not insane.
Paulette doesn’t interrupt. She sits across the island with her hands flat on the marble and her jaw getting tighter and tighter until I can see the muscles cording in her neck. When I finish, the kitchen is so quiet I can hear the ice maker cycling in the freezer.
“He married you for a job.”
“Two separate people told me, two days apart. Both of them panicked the second they realized what they’d said.”
“And this Cassandra—”
“The woman he was in love with before me. According to Albert, the whole office knew.”
Paulette stands up. Sits back down. Stands up again and paces to the sink, gripping the edge of the counter with both hands, her shoulders hunched up to her ears. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Get in line.”
“No, Rachelle, I’m serious. Seven years? You’ve spent seven years married to a man who just…needed a wife because some dusty rule says the CEO has to have a wife?”
The word wife hits different now. Not a person. A position. A box checked on a corporate filing.
“I don’t know the details yet,” I say. “I don’t know what the rule actually says. I don’t know if it’s a bylaw or a charter provision or what. Lisa shut down the second she realized I didn’t know about it.”
“Then we find out.” Paulette is already pulling out her phone. “What’s Cassandra’s full name?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Okay.” She drops into the chair next to me and sets her phone flat on the island between us, screen up. “So we start with what we’ve got. If she was involved with Duane when he was at the company, someone knows her. She exists somewhere—LinkedIn, Instagram, something.”
We start searching. Cassandra Webster Industries returns nothing useful. Neither does Cassandra paired with Duane’s name, or with the company’s old name, or with the city. Too common a name, too little to narrow it down.
“Wait.” Paulette tilts her screen toward me. “If Albert said the whole office knew about her, she was probably around. Parties, events, client dinners. Try the company’s tagged photos.”
I pull up Webster Industries’ Instagram.
The feed is corporate polish—quarterly reports, team retreats, charity galas.
Hundreds of tagged photos from events going back years.
I start scrolling. Paulette takes the Facebook page.
We sit side by side, thumbs moving, the kitchen filling with the soft click of screens.
Twenty minutes. Thirty. My coffee is ice cold. My back aches from hunching over the phone and my eyes are starting to blur when Paulette grabs my arm.
“Rachelle.”
She’s on a tagged photo from an industry event—four years before Duane and I met. A group shot at a cocktail bar. Duane is in the back row, younger, sharper-jawed. His arm is around a woman.
Tall. Blonde. Laughing at the camera with the kind of ease that says she belongs in every room she walks into. The tag reads Cassandra Merrill.
My pulse kicks. Paulette is already typing the name into Instagram.
The profile loads—public, curated, aspirational.
The grid is a mosaic of golden-hour selfies, flat-lays of iced coffee and leather journals, sunsets from rooftops I don’t recognize.
She posts every few days. Her bio says breathe deeply, live fully with a lotus emoji, and under other circumstances I’d roll my eyes, but right now my hands are shaking too hard for sarcasm.
Paulette scrolls. Fitness content. Travel.
A carousel of her at a farmer’s market. And then—a repeating pattern.
Every Saturday, a new post. Same park, same time.
An outdoor yoga class on a wide green lawn with a woman in white leading the flow.
Sometimes a selfie on the mat. Sometimes a boomerang of her in warrior two.
Always Saturday morning. Always the same location—Hopper Park, east lawn.
Paulette looks at me. “What are you doing Saturday?”
The lawn at Hopper Park is soft from last night’s rain.
Women are unrolling mats in neat rows across the grass, thirty of them at least, settling into spots facing a raised platform where the instructor fiddles with a portable speaker.
The air is cool and sweet—cut grass, something floral from the garden beds, a trace of damp earth underneath.
Paulette and I are on a bench near the walking trail, fifty yards from the class. Close enough to see faces. Far enough to be nobody.
“She knows what I look like, Paulette.”
“I know.”
“If I walk onto that lawn and she recognizes me—”
“You’re not walking onto that lawn. I am.” Paulette pulls her hair back, ties it fresh. “You’re going to sit here with your sunglasses on and your phone in your lap like every other woman in this park.”
My stomach clenches. Four days of staring at Cassandra Merrill’s Instagram, and it hit me at two a.m.—if Duane has been promising her a future, she’s looked me up. She’s studied my face. She knows exactly what the wife looks like.
“Call me right before you walk up,” I say. “Leave the line open. Put your phone in your pocket—speaker down, mic up. I need to hear it.”
“And I’ll record on my end.” Paulette opens her voice memo app, tests it against the fabric of her leggings. The audio comes through muffled but legible. “If she says anything worth keeping, we’ll have it.”
The class starts. I sit on the bench with my sunglasses on and my phone pressed to my thigh and I watch thirty women flow through sun salutations on the bright green grass. A jogger passes behind me. A dog barks somewhere near the pond.
I spot her in the third row. Tall, blonde braid, mint-green mat.
She folds forward, rises, sweeps her arms overhead—fluid, easy, her body moving like this is the simplest thing in the world.
Like Saturday mornings are for stretching in parks and feeling the sun on your face and not sitting on benches with your pulse in your throat and your sister’s phone number queued to dial.
My fingers curl around the edge of the bench. The wood bites into my palms.
The hour crawls. Every pose Cassandra holds, I’m watching. Every time she tips her head back or shifts her weight, I’m cataloging—the length of her, the blonde catching light, the way she smiles at the woman on the next mat. My jaw aches. I’ve been clenching it for fifty minutes.
The instructor brings the class to rest. Women sit up, stretch, roll their mats. Cassandra tucks hers under one arm and checks her phone.
I dial Paulette.
She answers without a word. I hear her breathing, then fabric rustling as the phone slides into her pocket, and then her footsteps on grass—getting softer, farther, moving away from me and toward the third row.
“Excuse me—I love your mat. Where did you get it?”
Paulette’s voice, tinny through the speaker but clear. I keep my sunglasses locked forward. Two figures on the grass. Paulette’s dark ponytail, Cassandra’s blonde braid. They’re facing each other. Cassandra tilts her head.
“Oh, thanks! It’s from—actually, hold on.” A pause. “You look really familiar. Have we met?”
My breath catches. The bench slats press into the backs of my thighs and I dig my nails into the wood.
But Paulette laughs—bright, easy, not a single crack. “I get that all the time! I just have one of those faces. I’m Paulette—first time at this class. I was so bad.”
“Oh, stop. Everyone’s terrible the first time.
” Cassandra’s voice loosens. I watch her shoulders drop, her posture open.
Whatever she saw in Paulette’s face—our mother’s jawline, the dark hair, the cheekbones that made people ask if we were twins growing up—she’s letting it go.
“I’m Cassandra. I’ve been coming for like two years. ”
“You’re so good. I was literally dying in warrior two.”
They laugh. Paulette shifts her weight toward Cassandra, one hand on her hip, her body angled in—warm, open, interested. Two women chatting after yoga class. Nothing to see.
Then Cassandra’s left hand moves. She pushes a strand of hair behind her ear, and even from fifty yards, even through sunglasses, I see it.
A flash. Sharp. Bright. A splinter of white light off her ring finger.
My hand flies to my mouth. A sound comes out—small, strangled—and I press my palm hard against my lips to kill it. A diamond. On her finger. On her finger.
Through the speaker, Paulette’s voice jumps half an octave. “Oh my GOD. Is that an engagement ring?”