7. Odette
— ? —
Odette
The hurricane warning comes through on Elliott’s phone while we’re sitting in the Key West airport, waiting for a flight that’s never going to leave.
“Tropical Storm Helena,” he reads aloud, scrolling through the alert. “All flights grounded until further notice. Residents and visitors advised to shelter in place.”
I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sky, which has gone the color of a bruise.
Purple and green and angry, clouds piling on top of each other like they’re fighting for space.
The palm trees outside are already bending sideways, their fronds whipping back and forth in a wind that sounds like screaming.
“So we’re stuck,” I say.
“We’re stuck.”
I should be upset about this. I should be panicking, trapped in Florida with a tropical storm bearing down and my whole life in shambles back in New York. But I’m so tired. So bone-deep exhausted that I can’t summon the energy for anything except a kind of numb acceptance.
“There’s an inn,” Elliott says, still looking at his phone. “About a mile from here. They have two rooms available. It isn’t fancy, but it’s better than sleeping on these chairs.”
“Fine.” I stand up, slinging my bag over my shoulder. The folded paper grocery bag is still in there, tucked into the side pocket where I put it at the clinic. I don’t know why I’m still carrying it. A talisman, maybe. A reminder that this is all real.
The inn is exactly what Elliott promised: not fancy.
It’s a two-story building painted the color of a faded sunset, with a wraparound porch and rocking chairs that have seen better decades.
The woman at the front desk looks at our rumpled clothes and red-rimmed eyes and doesn’t ask questions, just hands over two keys and points us toward the stairs.
The rooms are small. Twin beds, mismatched quilts, windows that rattle every time the wind gusts. I drop my bag on the bed and stand there for a moment, listening to the storm build outside.
A knock on the connecting door.
“Odette?” Elliott’s voice, muffled through the wood. “You okay in there?”
I open the door. He’s standing on the other side, his hair mussed from running his hands through it, his shirt untucked. He looks as exhausted as I feel.
“I can’t sleep,” I say. “The noise.”
“Me neither.” He glances toward the window, where rain is starting to sheet against the glass. “There’s a porch downstairs. Covered. I saw rocking chairs.”
“You want to go sit on a porch in a hurricane?”
“I want to not be alone.” He shrugs, a little self-conscious. “And I figured you might not want to be alone either.”
He’s right. I don’t want to be alone. I’ve been alone for years in a penthouse full of expensive furniture and empty rooms, and the thought of sitting in this tiny room by myself while the world falls apart outside makes me want to scream.
“Fine,” I say. “Let me grab my bag.”
The porch is surprisingly peaceful. The roof extends far enough that the rain doesn’t reach us, though we can feel the mist on our faces when the wind shifts.
The rocking chairs creak under our weight.
The storm rages around us, lightning splitting the sky every few minutes, thunder rolling like a drumline.
For a while we just sit there, not talking. Watching the palm trees bend. Listening to the rain hammer against the roof.
Then Elliott says, “Can I ask you something?”
“That depends on what it is.”
“When did you know?” He’s looking at me now, his face half-lit by the porch light, the other half in shadow. “That your marriage was over. When did you know for sure?”
I think about it. The question is harder than it should be, because the truth is I didn’t know.
Not for certain. Not until I saw that video playing on the screen behind me, until I watched my husband’s naked back moving on top of another woman while a room full of people recorded it on their phones.
“I don’t think I ever let myself know,” I finally say.
“I suspected, maybe. There were signs. He stopped looking at me years ago. Stopped touching me. Stopped coming home for dinner, then stopped coming home at all some nights. But I always found ways to explain it away. Work stress. Family pressure. The difficulty of maintaining a long marriage.” I laugh, but there’s no humor in it.
“I was so good at disappearing that I convinced myself I was imagining my own unhappiness.”
“Disappearing?”
“That’s what I did. What I learned to do.
” I lean back in the rocking chair, letting it sway.
“Laurence didn’t want a wife who had opinions.
He wanted someone who would smile at his parties and laugh at his jokes and never, ever make him look bad.
So I learned to be that. I learned to shrink.
To take up less space. To be so quiet and so accommodating that he could forget I existed. ”
“That sounds lonely.”
“It was.” The words come out before I can stop them. “It’s the loneliest thing in the world, living with someone who doesn’t see you. You start to wonder if you’re even real. If you’d just fade away entirely if you stopped trying so hard to exist.”
The rain picks up, sheeting off the porch roof in silver curtains. Lightning cracks across the sky, so close that the thunder follows immediately, a boom that shakes the floorboards under our feet.
“I know what that’s like,” Elliott says quietly.
I turn to look at him. “You do?”
“The second son.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“The one the family shine always skipped. Laurence was the golden boy. The heir. The one everyone wanted at their parties, the one who got the best education and the best opportunities and all of our parents’ attention.
I was just... there. The spare. The backup plan.
The one who got forgotten on holidays and overlooked at family dinners. ”
“I noticed you,” I say. “At those dinners.”
“I know.” He looks at me, and the quiet certainty on his face pulls me up short. “I noticed you noticing. It was the only thing that made those dinners bearable.”
“You always asked how I was doing.”
“And you always actually answered.” He shakes his head.
“Everyone else in that family, they ask questions they don’t want answers to.
How are you, fine, how are you, fine, let’s never speak of anything real.
But you’d actually tell me. You’d say you were tired, or stressed, or sad.
And I’d think, there’s someone else who isn’t pretending. There’s someone else who’s real.”
The wind gusts hard enough to send a spray of rain across the porch. I shiver, pulling my cardigan tighter around my shoulders.
“I didn’t think anyone noticed,” I say.
“I noticed everything.” His voice drops. “I noticed when you stopped smiling. When your laugh started sounding forced. When you’d come to family events looking perfect and polished and completely hollow, like someone had scooped out everything inside you and left just the shell.”
“Elliott.”
“I noticed when he stopped touching you. When he’d talk to everyone in the room except you.
When you’d sit at the dinner table looking like you wanted to disappear, and I’d think, someone should say something.
Someone should do something. But I never did, because he was my brother, and I told myself it wasn’t my place. ”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Maybe not. But I still feel like I failed you.” He looks down at his hands. “All those years, watching you fade away, and I never said a word.”
The silence stretches between us, filled with the sound of the storm. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to process the fact that someone was watching me, seeing me, all those years when I thought I was invisible.
“You kept the bag,” Elliott says suddenly.
I blink. “What?”
“The paper bag. From the night of the vow renewal.” He nods toward my purse, sitting on the porch railing. “I saw it in your bag at the airport. You kept it.”
My hand goes to my purse automatically, fingers brushing the folded paper edge sticking out of the side pocket.
“I don’t know why,” I admit. “It’s just a bag. A stupid grocery bag that I threw up in while my life fell apart. But I couldn’t make myself throw it away.”
“It isn’t stupid.” He reaches over and pulls the bag out gently, unfolding it enough to see the creases, then folding it back the way it was. “It’s proof. That the worst happened, and you survived it. That you’re still here.”
He tucks the bag back into my purse and his hand brushes mine. I feel the contact like a struck match, a jolt that runs up my arm and settles low, lower than my chest, somewhere I have no business feeling anything for my husband’s brother.
My mouth has gone dry. I watch his hands instead of his face because his face is too much, and his hands are almost worse, the veins standing up along the backs of them, the way his sleeve is shoved to the elbow and I can see the muscle in his forearm shift when he moves.
I think about those hands. I think about them in ways that make heat gather between my thighs, slow and shameful, and I press my knees together on the rocking chair and hope the dark hides it.
“Odette.” His voice is low. Careful. “You aren’t invisible to me. You never were.”
I look at him. Really look at him, the way I’ve been avoiding looking at him since that hug in the villa, since his arms came around me and I breathed in the sandalwood on his skin and my whole body turned traitor in the space of a breath.
He isn’t Laurence. He’s softer than his brother, and kinder. He doesn’t fill a room the way Laurence does. But he sees me. He’s been seeing me all this time, and I never knew.
“Elliott,” I start, but I don’t know how to finish.
He reaches over and tucks a strand of wet hair behind my ear.
His fingers trail along my jaw, warm and unhurried, and my breath goes ragged.
His thumb grazes the corner of my mouth.
I feel it everywhere, feel it in the tightening low in my belly, and it takes everything I have not to turn my head and catch that thumb between my lips.
He doesn’t pull away. I don’t pull away either.
We sit there on the porch, the storm raging around us, his hand still on my face, and I feel something shift between us. Something that’s been building for longer than either of us realized.
This is dangerous. This is wrong. He’s my husband’s brother.
I’m pregnant with another man’s child. My life is in shambles, and I’m sitting on a porch in a hurricane, wet through and wanting, letting a man I barely know touch me like I belong to him.
Every rule I’ve ever kept says get up, go inside, lock the door.
I’m so tired of keeping rules for men who never kept a single one for me.
But I don’t pull away.