3. Adriana
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Adriana
There is a room in this house I have never once used, and tonight I find out it was waiting for me all along.
I push the door open on the spare room at the end of the hall and I shut it behind me. In a blink of an eye, the thing I’ve held upright since the parking garage gives way all at once.
My hand finds the cut-glass vase on the side table, the white tulips I’ve put in this house every week of this marriage, and I throw it. It bursts against the wall. Water, glass, and white petals down the wallpaper.
The sound is so loud and so wrong in this silent house that it tears me open inside.
I have never done this, not once in my life.
But tonight I take the matching candlesticks and hurl them, one and then the other. They bring down a framed print and a row of porcelain that I let shatter.
Unwanted memories surface in my mind, as if mocking me.
“I keep meaning to say it properly.” She’d leaned in earnestly, turning the company badge over in her fingers, still unable to believe it was hers. “You changed my whole life, ma’am, and you don’t even seem to know you did it.”
“Adriana. Or Miss Adriana, if you must. Not ma’am, you make me sound like my mother.”
“Miss Adriana, then.” She’d grinned, hugging the compromise to herself. “I won’t forget this. Any of it, thank you.”
“You earned it. I just gave you a chance.”
“I want to be like you.” She beamed at me. “Smart like you. Untouchable like you. I look at you and I think, that’s who I want to be.”
I sweep my arm across the dresser and the perfume bottles go down, the trinket dishes, a small framed thing I don’t even look at.
She wanted to be me so badly that being like me stopped being enough. She had to take what was mine.
The lamp goes next, ripped from the wall, and a chair I kick onto its side, and I’m reaching for the drawer of the writing desk when another stupid memory rises up and stops my hand.
“I’ll be there, I swear,” he’d promised that morning. He’d caught my hand and kissed the knuckles. “No phones, no work, just us. I know this year’s been hard on us. Let me give you one good night.”
And yet that night, I’d sat at that corner table for an hour and a half. I’d told the waiter twice that he was on his way. I’d watched the candle burn down between two place settings and finally paid for the wine I didn’t drink and went home, only to find him already in bed, asleep, untroubled.
It was my birthday.
“You forgot,” I’d said into the dark.
“Mm. God. Today was your…” He hadn’t even turned over. “I’m sorry, baby. Business ran long. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
Fucking liar.
I’d believed him, every time, and what a fool I was.
Wrenching the drawer all the way out, I overturn it, and the contents go skidding across the floor. As I let it drop, my hand comes down wrong, hard, across the broken edge of the lamp.
The pain doesn’t come.
When I look down, there’s a line opening across the side of my palm, deeper than the burn that’s still healing two fingers over, dark and welling fast, running into the cuff of my sleeve. I feel nothing but a distant, clinical interest, as if it’s happening to a woman I’m only watching.
My knees go.
I sink down into the middle of the wreckage, careful of the glass out of a habit I can’t switch off even now. The bleeding hand cradled against me, and I let it come.
Ugly tears with no dignity in them, the kind I’ve never once permitted myself. I curl into my body and empty my chest out, and I let myself grieve every piece of me I gave away to a marriage that was ruining me the whole time.
The blood from my palm soaks warm into the silk of a dress I’ll never wear again, and I don’t move to stop it, and I don’t get up.
For once, I allow myself to just break and fall apart.
The room swims and doubles through the wet of my eyes until the wreckage loses its edges. My own sobs come back to me off the bare walls, too loud, the sound of a woman I don’t recognize, and I wrap my arms around myself. My chest pulls tight around each breath.
Outside the window, the last of the light goes, and the wreckage around me fades into shapes and then into dark while I sit in the middle of it.
I don’t know how much time passes, or how I pick myself up off that floor, but somehow I do. Somehow I drag myself out of the ruined room and down the hall and bury myself in our bed, and the next thing I’m aware of is the door opening and the weight of his presence in the dark.
It’s past midnight now.
He came home late, as always. The only word he ever keeps.
And worse, I know exactly where he’s just been.
I lie still with my back to the room and listen to him move around, the small rustle of him undressing, and I don’t turn over.
I don’t trust myself to. I don’t know which version of me would surface if I faced him right now, the one who breaks down sobbing in front of him or the one who reaches for the nearest thing and aims it at his head.
Neither one ends anywhere I can afford to go tonight.
“Adriana?” His voice, low, careful. “You asleep?”
I don’t answer. I keep my breathing slow and even, pretending to be asleep.
The mattress dips as he leans over me. His lips brush the top of my head, brief, absent, a kiss for a wife he thinks isn’t awake to receive it.
It takes everything in me to stay still, to not flinch, to not let the disgust climbing up my throat turn into anything he can see.
I feel sick as I lie there and don’t move a muscle.
More rustling follows, the click of the lamp, the shift of his weight settling into his side of the bed.
I count, silent and steady, through the small sounds of him getting comfortable, through the long minute where he’s unmoving, until his breathing finally lengthens and slows, going deeper.
William is asleep and I remain wide awake beside him.
My hand curls into a fist under the blanket, the cut across my palm stiff with dried blood. I lie that way for a long time, counting his breaths in the dark, holding myself very still. But stillness has its limit, and mine runs out in the smallest hours.
I slide out from under the blanket. He doesn’t stir.
For a moment, I just stand over him in the dark and look.
He sleeps so easily. That’s the thing I can’t get past. He did all of this and he sleeps as if he has nothing on his conscience, because as far as he knows, he has nothing to fear from me.
Well, he should be afraid.
The thought arrives quiet and certain, with none of the heat of the tears, colder than anything I’ve felt all night.
William thinks he’s going to get rid of me easily. I’m going to make him regret thinking that. Him and Blythe both. I am going to find a way to make them pay for every piece of me they spent.
My gaze moves to where his bag is. Inside the closet door, slumped against the dresser.
I’m on my knees in front of it before I’ve decided to be. My hands open it and go through its contents with the frantic, graceless hunger, digging for the bottom of his betrayal.
Receipts, a charger, his tablet I can’t unlock. I push past all of it, breathing hard, hunting for the worst thing, ready for it, almost wanting it.
But what my hand closes on is a magazine.
Glossy, folded back on itself, which means he read it more than once. I pull it out into the band of streetlight from the window, expecting nothing until the cover stops me cold.
A man on the steps of some gala, dark suit, darker expression, the kind of face that’s used to cameras and bored by them. The headline runs across his chest in cream letters.
‘Beaufort Bachelor No More? The City’s Most Eligible Man Steps Out With a Mystery Woman.’
Knox Beaufort.
I know the name the way everyone in our world knows it. I know it better than that, because I’ve watched what it does to my husband.
“And for the new account,” the host announced, warm into the microphone, “we’re thrilled to say, goes to Beaufort Holdings!”
It’s the account William had chased for half a year. I’d felt him go rigid in the seat beside me, the wine stem held too tight in his hand.
Across the room, Knox Beaufort had turned and found him.
He hadn’t gloated. That was what cut deepest, the part that kept William awake for a week after.
He’d simply caught William’s eye through the crowd, this man who’d taken the deal without seeming to want it very much, and he’d lifted his glass a bare inch, a toast so small and so dry that anyone not looking for it would have missed it.
Then he’d turned back to his own table and forgotten my husband existed, which was the part William couldn’t bear, that to Beaufort the rivalry wasn’t even a rivalry.
It was nothing. He was nothing.
“Arrogant son of a bitch,” William had said in the car, three times, the wine loosening it out of him. “Everything is handed to him. He’s never had to work for a thing in his life.”
On and on, the whole drive home. A man circling the one wound that wouldn’t close, while I comforted him with my words.
This is the one person William hates the most.
And it is his face on the cover in my hands.
My eye drops to the woman on his arm. Blonde, laughing, in a dress too expensive for her.
Blythe. Again.
I stare at it, the photograph going soft and strange the longer I look. It isn’t enough for her to be in my husband’s bed. She’s on this man’s arm too, laughing into a camera as though she was born to it.
The humble girl I found in a stack of forgettable applications, the one who turned a company badge over in her hands as if it was made of gold, has somehow threaded herself into every powerful corner of the world I was raised inside.
She is everywhere I look now. Attached to everyone, wanting more each time.
And now, for once, I’m looking at her without the warmth in the way, and the person I see is a stranger. Not the girl I mentored, not the protégé I was proud of, just a calculating woman who wore her sweetness as a costume. I’d been so busy loving her that I never once saw her clearly.
The worst of it, the part that turns my stomach, is how small I let her seem to me, how I mistook the wanting in her for a hunger I could feed, when all along it was hunger for the things that were mine.
My fingers close around the magazine unconsciously, the glossy page crumpling inward, and the last thing to fold under my grip is her laughing face. I sit there with it crushed in my fist, breathing, and from the ruin of the paper, a plan begins to take shape in my mind.
I find myself wondering why someone like Blythe would cheat on a man like Knox Beaufort, why she’d risk a man that powerful for my soft, faithless husband, and I almost laugh, because it tells me she isn’t half as clever as I made her.
For everything I taught her, she still doesn’t know any better.
She thinks she can keep them both. She has no idea what she’s standing next to.
Under the grief and the rage, I feel a cold thread of gratitude. Because in her greed, in the one mistake she was too vain to see, she has handed me the very thing I need.
The key to making them both pay.
I sit back against the foot of the bed and study his face in the cover light, the lazy, unbothered gaze of a man who has never once had to chase anything.
Then I reach for my phone and start scrolling.
I know his name is in here somewhere. I’ve never had reason to look for it, never once thought of him as someone I’d contact, but I never deleted it either, so it’s buried somewhere in years of names.
Associates, common friends, my family’s circle, the whole glittering directory of my suffocating life.
I scroll past all of them until I find it, low and forgotten.
Beaufort, K.
He’d put it there himself, years ago, at one of those interminable family functions where the men talked and the wives arranged themselves decoratively around the talking.
I’d corrected something, a figure in a deal my father’s people had wrong, quietly, almost to myself, and he had been the only one at that table who heard it. He’d held out his hand for my phone without quite asking.
“You’re wasted here,” he’d said, dry, amused, thumbing his number in and handing it back. “Hang on to that. You never know when you’ll want to do business with me.”
I’d thought him presumptuous and taken the phone back and never thought of him again. I certainly never imagined I’d use it.
My fingers move before I’ve fully decided to let them, my mind clear and pounding.
: Mr. Beaufort. You once offered to do business with me. I find myself with something I think you’ll want very much.
My thumb hovers over the screen. I look back at William, at the man sleeping peacefully with no idea the ground has already shifted under him.
I press send.
And I wait. I have always been good at waiting.
Only this time I’m not waiting to be chosen, or forgiven, or finally seen.
This time I’m waiting for everything to fall into place exactly where I want it, and for the people who did this to me to never see it coming.