3. Odette
— ? —
Odette
Two Hours Later
The panic attack hits in the elevator.
One moment I’m standing beside Elliott, watching the numbers climb toward the penthouse I share with my husband, and the next moment the walls are closing in.
The air disappears. My lungs seize up and refuse to work, and I’m gasping, choking, clawing at my throat like I can tear it open and force the oxygen in.
“Odette. Odette, look at me.”
Elliott’s voice, somewhere far away. His hands on my shoulders, warm and solid. His face swimming into focus through the gray spots dancing at the edges of my vision.
“In for four,” he says. “Come on. In for four. One, two, three, four.”
I try. My chest hitches and stutters but I try, pulling air through my teeth in shaky, desperate gasps.
“Hold for four. One, two, three, four. You’re doing great. Now out for four.”
The elevator dings. The doors slide open. Elliott doesn’t let go of me, just guides me down the hallway and through the door I unlock with trembling hands, and then we’re inside the penthouse and the lights are too bright and everything smells like Laurence’s cologne and I want to scream.
“Out for four,” Elliott says again, his voice steady. “One, two, three, four. Good. That’s good. Keep going. In for four.”
I don’t know how long we stand there in the foyer, me counting breaths while Elliott counts with me.
Long enough for the gray spots to fade. Long enough for my lungs to remember how to work.
Long enough for the panic to recede into something duller, a heavy weight in my chest instead of a fist around my throat.
“I’m okay,” I finally say. The words come out cracked and thin. “I’m okay. I just need to sit down.”
Elliott helps me to the living room. I sink onto the couch that Laurence picked out three years ago because it was expensive, not because it was comfortable, and pull my knees up to my chest like a child.
“Can I get you something?” Elliott is still hovering, uncertain, like he doesn’t know where to put his hands. “Water? Tea? Something stronger?”
“I can’t drink.” The words taste bitter. “The baby.”
“Right. Of course. Water, then.”
He disappears into the kitchen and I close my eyes and try to make sense of the last three hours of my life. The text, the speech, the video, the paper bag, the clinic, the baby, all of it crashing over me at once.
The baby.
I put my hand on my stomach, flat beneath the midnight blue silk.
There’s nothing to feel yet, no bump, no movement, just the same body I have always had.
But somewhere in there, something is growing.
Someone. A person who didn’t exist until four months ago, until that cold mechanical night when my husband touched me for the last time.
I’ve wanted a baby for so long. Years of trying, years of failing, years of watching my friends have children while my arms stayed empty. I stopped hoping eventually. It was easier than being disappointed.
And now, tonight, in the middle of the worst night of my life, I find out I’m finally going to be a mother.
The universe has a sick sense of humor.
Elliott returns with a glass of water and a blanket he must’ve found in the hall closet. He drapes the blanket over my shoulders and presses the water into my hands and then sits down on the opposite end of the couch, giving me space.
“Thank you,” I say. “For everything. For getting me out of there, for the clinic, for this. You didn’t have to do any of it.”
“Yes, I did.” He says it simply, like there’s no other possible answer. “You needed help. I was there.”
“Most people would have just called me a cab.”
“I’m not most people.”
No. He isn’t. He never has been, not in all the years I’ve known him.
The overlooked brother, the quiet one, always on the edges of family gatherings, always watching while Laurence held court.
I used to feel sorry for him, back when I still thought Laurence’s shine was real instead of just blinding.
Now I’m not sure which of us deserved more pity.
My phone buzzes. Then again. Then again, a relentless vibration that makes my teeth ache.
I pull it out of my clutch and stare at the screen.
Forty-seven messages. Thirty-two missed calls.
My name trending on Twitter, which I didn’t even know was possible for someone as aggressively unremarkable as me.
“My friends,” I say, scrolling through the chaos. “They’ve been trying to reach me. Dayana. Lucia. They’re asking if I’m okay, if I need anything, if I know who did this.”
“Do you?”
I shake my head. “They talked to the AV company. The tech guy swears he got a text from an unknown number a few minutes before the ceremony. Someone claiming to be me. Saying I requested the video be played during the speech.”
Elliott’s expression darkens. “That makes no sense. Why would you want that?”
“I wouldn’t. Obviously. But someone wanted it to look like I did. Someone wanted everyone to think this was my idea, my public humiliation, my choice to expose my own husband’s affair in front of everyone we know.”
“Who’d do that?”
I don’t have an answer. The list of people who might want to hurt me is short.
The list of people who might want to hurt Laurence is considerably longer, but none of them would need to drag me into it.
And besides, this didn’t just hurt him. This destroyed me.
My reputation, my dignity, my entire carefully constructed life, all of it burned to the ground in sixty seconds of moaning and thrusting.
“I need to know where he is,” I say. “Laurence. He said business trip, but I don’t believe that. Not anymore. Not after this.”
Elliott hesitates. “Odette, are you sure you want to go digging right now? You’ve been through a lot tonight. Maybe you should rest, deal with this tomorrow.”
“I can’t rest. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything except sit here and think about what I just saw, and I’d rather do something useful with all this terrible energy than let it eat me alive.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he nods, once, like he understands.
“His office,” I say. “He has a home office. It’s always locked, but I know where he keeps the spare key.”
“You’re going to break into your husband’s office?”
“I’m going to find out what the fuck is actually going on.”
Elliott stands up. “Then I’m coming with you.”
The office is at the end of the hall, behind a door that’s always felt like a boundary. Laurence’s space. Laurence’s territory. I haven’t been inside in years, not since the early days of our marriage when I used to bring him coffee and he used to smile like he was glad to see me.
The spare key is in the drawer of the hallway console, hidden under a stack of takeout menus. Laurence thinks he’s clever with his hiding spots. He doesn’t know that I’ve spent our whole marriage watching him, cataloging his habits, learning his patterns. When you’re invisible, you see everything.
The lock clicks open. The door swings inward. Elliott reaches past me and flips on the light.
The office is exactly as I remember it. Dark wood desk, leather chair, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with books Laurence has never read.
A crystal decanter of whiskey on the side table.
A framed photo of the two of us on our wedding day, young and smiling and completely unaware of what was coming.
I start with the desk. The drawers are unlocked, which surprises me until I realize that Laurence never expected me to look. Why would he? I’ve spent our whole marriage being exactly what he wanted: quiet, compliant, unquestioning.
The first drawer is junk. Pens, paperclips, a broken watch he’s been meaning to fix for years. The second drawer is files, tax documents and investment statements, nothing interesting. The third drawer is locked.
“Do you have a key?” Elliott asks.
I don’t. I try the letter opener, jamming it into the seam, working it back and forth until the metal bends and my hands are shaking, and it doesn’t give. Fifteen years of locked drawers, of rooms I wasn’t allowed into, of things I wasn’t allowed to see. Something in me comes loose.
“Odette.” Elliott’s voice is careful. “Let me find a screwdriver.”
I’m already crossing the room. There’s a marble bookend on the shelf, a heavy slab shaped like a lion, and I wrap both hands around it and bring it down on the drawer front.
Once. The wood splinters. Twice. The lock face caves.
I hit it a third time, harder than I need to, harder than makes sense, and I’m aware in some far-off way that I’m making a sound, a low furious noise in the back of my throat, and that Elliott has stopped moving entirely.
The drawer breaks open. My knuckles are scraped. I don’t remember when that happened.
I look up. Elliott is watching me with something that isn’t quite fear and not quite awe, both hands half-raised like he isn’t sure whether to stop me or applaud.
“Sorry,” I say, breathing hard. “I’ve wanted to do that for a very long time.”
“Don’t apologize.” His voice is rough. “That was the most alive I’ve ever seen you.”
Inside the drawer, neatly stacked, is what I’m looking for.
Confirmation emails. Two of them, printed out, for a villa in the Florida Keys. Arrival date: yesterday. Departure date: next week. Guest names: Laurence Fairbanks and Margaux Delacroix.
I stare at the name. Margaux. It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it, can’t connect it to anything in my memory.
“Who’s Margaux Delacroix?” I ask.
Elliott has frozen beside me. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard that name.”
There’s more in the drawer. Receipts for jewelry, expensive pieces I’ve never seen, not one of them ever given to me.
A birthday card in a woman’s looping handwriting, signed with a heart.
And a child’s drawing, crayon on printer paper, a wobbly stick figure family under a yellow sun.
A mommy. A daddy. A little boy between them, holding both their hands. The daddy isn’t standing next to me.
A whole second life, carefully hidden, meticulously documented.
“He’s been planning this,” I say. The words feel distant, like they belong to someone else. “This wasn’t a mistake. This wasn’t a one-time thing. He’s been living a double life for... how long? Years?”
“Odette.”
“He has an apartment. He’s been sending money. He’s been buying her jewelry. And I had no idea. I had no idea at all.”
I sink into Laurence’s leather chair, the confirmation emails still clutched in my hand. The villa in the Florida Keys. Sun and sand and a woman named Margaux while I stood in a ballroom and gave a speech about choosing each other.
He chose. He chose her. And he chose to humiliate me instead of just asking for a divorce.
“I’m going to Florida,” I say.
Elliott blinks. “What?”
“I’m going to Florida. To the Keys. I’m going to find him and I’m going to look him in the face and I’m going to get some fucking answers.”
“Odette, that’s insane.”
“Maybe.” I pull up the airline app on my phone, still cracked from when I dropped it in the ballroom.
“But I can’t stay here. I can’t sit in this apartment that smells like him and wait for him to come home and explain.
I need to see it. I need to see them. I need to know what I’ve been competing with for god knows how long. ”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
I look up at him. He’s standing in the doorway of the office, his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw set in a way that reminds me suddenly and painfully of his brother.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t your problem.”
“Maybe not.” He crosses the room and crouches down in front of me, putting himself at my eye level. “But you aren’t going alone. You’re pregnant and you’re in shock and you just found out your husband has been living a double life. You need someone with you. You need a friend.”
“Are we friends?”
The question comes out before I can stop it.
We’ve known each other the length of my marriage, but always at a distance, always with Laurence between us.
I don’t know Elliott’s favorite color or what he does on weekends or whether he takes his coffee black.
I know nothing about him except that he showed up tonight when no one else did.
“I’d like to be,” he says.
I hold his gaze for a long moment. Then I nod and turn back to my phone.
“Two seats on the first flight to Key West,” I say. “We leave in four hours.”
“I’ll pack a bag.”
“Elliott.” He stops at the door and turns back. “Thank you. Really. I don’t know why you’re doing this, but thank you.”
“Because someone should,” he says again. “And because you deserve better than this, Odette. You always have.”
He leaves to pack. I sit in my husband’s chair, in my husband’s office, surrounded by evidence of my husband’s betrayal, and I think about all the years I spent being invisible. All the years I spent shrinking. All the years I spent waiting to be seen.
I’m done waiting.
I stand up. I walk to the hallway closet. I reach for my passport, and my hand doesn’t shake.