8. Odette
— ? —
Odette
Three Days Later, Manhattan
Inside, it’s something else entirely.
I push through the heavy oak door and breathe in the familiar scent of gardenia and old books and the particular kind of wealth that doesn’t need to announce itself.
Marisol appears before I even have my coat off, her silver-streaked hair pulled back in its usual neat bun, her face carefully neutral in the way that means she already knows something is wrong.
“Miss Odette.” She reaches for my jacket. “The others are in the drawing room. I’ll bring tea.”
“Ginger,” I say, and she nods like she already knew. She probably did. Marisol sees everything and repeats nothing, which is why she’s been managing this house for twenty-three years.
The drawing room is at the back of the townhouse, overlooking a small private garden that blooms with orchids year-round. The women inside look up when I enter, and I feel myself relax for the first time in days.
Dayana rises first. She’s the club president, elegant in a way that makes other elegant women look like they’re trying too hard, her dark hair swept back from a face that gives nothing away until she wants it to. She crosses the room and takes both my hands in hers.
“Odette,” she says. “We’ve been worried sick.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I should’ve called more.”
“You should’ve called at all.” But she squeezes my hands as she says it, and I know she isn’t really angry.
Dayana understands more than she lets on.
She spent years in a marriage that hollowed her out before she walked away from it and into a life with Rhyson, the man she chose after she stopped being afraid of choosing.
She keeps a key on a chain at her throat instead of a ring, and she has never once judged me for how long it took me to leave.
The others crowd around. Isla, sunny and stubbornly hopeful even now, her blonde hair bouncing as she hugs me tight and whispers that everything is going to work out, because Isla believes that about everything, and somehow it never sounds naive coming from her.
Lucia, loud and brash and already swearing under her breath about what she wants to do to Laurence, though her hand when it finds my shoulder is gentle.
Of all of them, Lucia knows. She stood at the front of a cathedral once with seven years and a whole engagement behind her and watched it detonate in front of every person she knew.
She doesn’t talk about it. She doesn’t have to.
It’s why, when I say the word humiliation, she’s the first one whose jaw goes tight.
Ursula, composed as always, the newborn she and Matteo made asleep against her chest in a wrap, one tiny fist curled over the edge of the fabric.
And Cat, the only one of us born into her seat, who inherited the club and its whole history from her grandmother, watching me with the sharp, cataloguing eyes of someone already building a case.
“Sit,” Dayana commands, guiding me to the velvet sofa by the fireplace. “Tell us everything.”
So I do. All of it, start to finish, in a flat voice that doesn’t sound like mine.
The vow renewal and the tape and the paper bag Elliott held while I was sick.
The clinic, and the word pregnant landing in a cold white room.
The plane, the emails, the beach bar, the little boy with the Fairbanks dimple.
They take it in pieces, the way you take a beating.
“Wait.” Lucia holds up a hand somewhere around the part where Elliott catches me. “Elliott? Laurence’s brother Elliott? The hot one who never talks?”
“Lucia.” Isla swats her arm. “Focus.”
Cat is writing in the leather journal she carries everywhere, her pen moving fast, her jaw tight. Ursula reaches over and folds my cold hand into her warm one. When I get to the breakfast table, to Margaux in my husband’s shirt and the child clinging to her leg, the whole room stops breathing.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Lucia says, and no one tells her to watch her language.
Marisol appears with tea. Ginger, in a porcelain cup with no saucer, exactly the way I like it. She sets it beside me and slips out without a word.
When I finish, Dayana leans forward, and I know that look. I’ve seen her wear it in this exact room, for other women.
“All right,” she says. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
“No,” I say.
It’s out before I decide to say it. They all turn to look at me.
“No what?” Dayana asks.
“No, we aren’t going to do anything.” I set the tea down.
“This is my mess. I made it. I married it. I stayed in it far longer than any of you would have. I’m not dragging you into it.
You have your own lives. Ursula has a newborn.
Isla has the gala. I won’t be the woman who shows up bleeding and makes herself everyone’s problem. ”
The room goes quiet. Then Lucia laughs, and it isn’t a kind sound.
“Listen to her,” she says to the others.
“Fifteen years of holding this table together. Of remembering everyone’s birthdays and covering everyone’s secrets and showing up with soup when someone’s mother died.
And the one time it’s her turn, she wants to crawl off and do it alone in a corner so nobody is inconvenienced by her.
” She turns back to me. “That isn’t strength, Odette.
That’s the same disappearing act in a different dress. ”
It stings, because it’s true.
“I don’t know how to ask,” I say. It’s the most honest thing I’ve said in days.
“You don’t have to know how.” Dayana’s voice gentles. “You just have to stop saying no.”
Isla says carefully, “You said we. On the porch. You and Elliott.”
The room shifts. Lucia sets down her cup with a decisive click.
“And now you’re in love with his brother.”
I don’t deny it. I should. I should explain that it’s complicated, that I’m pregnant with another man’s child, that the last thing I need is to fall for someone new. But the words won’t come.
“It isn’t...” I start.
“It is,” Lucia says flatly. “You’ve been invisible for fifteen years, and someone finally saw you, and now you look at him like he hung the goddamn moon. Don’t bother denying it.”
The doorbell rings.
Everyone freezes. Marisol’s footsteps echo in the hallway, then her voice, low and firm, followed by a deeper voice I recognize immediately.
“I know she’s here. I just need five minutes. Five minutes to explain.”
Laurence.
I set down my tea cup. My hands are steady. I don’t know how my hands are steady.
“Stay here,” Dayana says, rising. “I’ll handle this.”
“No.” I stand up. “I will.”
The foyer is long and narrow, lined with portraits of orchids in gilded frames. Laurence is standing just inside the door, Marisol’s arm blocking him from coming any further. He’s holding an armful of white orchids, and there’s a small card tucked among the stems.
He sees me and his whole face changes. Hope and desperation and something that might be genuine emotion, though I no longer trust myself to tell the difference.
“Odette.” He takes a step forward. Marisol doesn’t move. “Please. Just let me explain.”
I walk toward him slowly, my heels clicking against the marble floor.
“What’s there to explain?”
“Everything. The video, Margaux, the child, all of it. I can explain all of it if you just give me a chance.”
“A chance.” I stop a few feet away from him. “You want a chance. After fifteen years of making me invisible. After the video. After the secret family. After all of it, you want a chance.”
And then he does the thing he’s always done. The thing that kept me.
He softens. His shoulders drop, his voice goes low and rough, and his eyes fill, actually fill, with tears I’d swear on my life were real if I didn’t know him better.
He looks at me the way he looked at me at twenty-five, across a crowded room, back when I still believed I was the only person he could see.
“I know I don’t deserve it,” he says, and his voice cracks on the word deserve.
“God, Odette, I know. I’ve been a coward and a liar and a stranger to you for years, and I hate myself for it.
You have no idea how much.” He takes another step, and Marisol glances at me, uncertain, because I haven’t told her to stop him.
“Do you remember the cabin? Our second year. The power went out in the storm and we played cards by candlelight until three in the morning and you laughed so hard you cried. I keep thinking about that night. I keep thinking, when did I lose her? When did I let that woman go?”
And God help me, it works. For one horrible moment it works.
Because I remember the cabin. The candlelight, the cards, the way he looked at me then, and a decade and a half of loneliness rises up my throat all at once and my eyes sting and some starved, stupid part of me wants to believe him so badly it hurts.
This is the man I married. This is the man I gave everything to.
This is the man I planned a vow renewal for, wrote a speech for, waited up for a thousand nights.
I want it to be real. That’s the worst part. Even now, even after all of it, some ruined piece of me wants it to be real so much I can hardly breathe around it.
“You remember the cabin,” I say quietly.
“Every second of it.”
“What was I wearing?”
He falters. Just for a heartbeat. “What?”
“That night. Every second of it, you said. What was I wearing?”
“Odette, come on, that was fifteen years ago, no one remembers what...”
“I do.” My voice comes out even, and I’m almost proud of it.
“Your green flannel. It was too big on me and it smelled like woodsmoke and I never gave it back. I remember what I was wearing because I was there. Because I was paying attention. You don’t remember because you were never really there at all.
You’ve been performing this marriage for years, and I mistook the performance for love because I wanted it that badly. ”
The tears in his eyes haven’t gone anywhere. But now I can see them for what they are. Not grief. Frustration. The face of a man watching a deal come apart.
I reach into the orchids and pull the card free. Read it in his own handwriting.
Our child deserves a family. Let me give you one.
“Our child,” I say, and let the card drop to the marble. “There it is. Not me. Never me.”
Something shifts in him then, all at once, the softness draining out of his face until what’s left is cold and flat and finally honest.
“You’re carrying my heir,” he says, and his voice has changed entirely, low and hard. “Margaux’s boy is a bastard. He’ll never carry the name. But that baby is a Fairbanks. Legitimate. Mine. And you think you’re going to hand my son to my brother and play house? You think I’ll allow that?”
“You didn’t come here for me,” I say. “You came for the baby. You can’t even pretend all the way to the end.”
“I came to give you the chance to be reasonable.”
“There’s nothing reasonable left between us.” I lift my hand, and Marisol steps in and takes the orchids from him. They belong in the trash and we both know it. “Go home, Laurence.”
“Odette...”
“Goodbye, Laurence.”
I close the door in his face.