5. Adriana
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Adriana
Maybe I’ll have them bound.
The thought arrives dry and a little vicious as I spread the photographs across the study desk, and it pleases me more than it should. Forty-one photographs of my husband’s affair, bound and ribboned just to commemorate it.
I’ve looked at each so many times they’ve stopped being a wound. Now I just feel numb as I stare at them, sorting the betrayals by usefulness. Three days of having him followed, and the man couldn’t keep a secret past a parking valet.
There’s a certain humor in it. A week ago these would have undone me, and they did, for a while. I spent the better part of three days coming apart in private, in the car, in a room at the end of the hall, in the shower where the sound of the water covered it.
I broke as many times as I needed to, alone, where no one could ever use it against me. And somewhere in all that breaking I wore the wound smooth, until what’s left is this. A woman who can look at the proof of her own ruin and feel almost nothing. It’s its own kind of progress.
“Adriana?” William’s voice, coming down the hall.
I close the folder and slide it into the desk drawer in one motion, the photographs gone before the door opens. By the time he leans in I’m just his wife at a desk, and my face is already arranged into the soft thing he likes.
“In here.”
He’s holding two suits on their hangers, one in each hand, his tie loose around his neck. “Help me. You organized the whole thing, you’d know better than me what fits the room. The charcoal or the navy?”
“The charcoal.” I rise and cross to him and take it off the hanger myself, the way a good wife would, as I’ve done a hundred times. “The navy photographs too dark under that lighting. You’ll disappear into the back of every picture.”
I hold the jacket open for him and he turns, sliding his arms into it as I settle it onto his shoulders and smooth my palms down the lapels.
Straightening the line of him, fixing his collar, the small domestic choreography of a marriage.
I tip my chin up and give him the smile I’ve been giving him for a year.
“There,” I say. “Now you look like a man worth trusting.”
An emotion flashes across his face, surprised and pleased. He catches my hand against his chest before I can step back.
“You’ve been different this week,” he says with a smile. “Softer. I’ve missed this. You should be this way all the time, Adriana. It suits you.”
“I’m trying,” I say, and I let him kiss my cheek. I don’t flinch, which costs me less than it used to.
“Save me a dance tonight,” he says, straightening his cuffs, already halfway out of the moment the way he always is. “A real one. People should see us happy.”
“They’ll see exactly what they need to.” I laugh lightly and reach up to fix the collar I already fixed, just to keep my hands busy and my face turned up at his. “Go on. You’ll be late, and you’re the guest of honor whether you know it or not.”
“Guest of honor.” He likes the sound of that, the way he likes anything that puts him at the center of a room.
God, was he always this easy to flatter? I must have spent our entire relationship not letting myself notice.
“You know, I wasn’t sure about you throwing this whole thing together so suddenly. It’s not like you but I’m glad you did.” His hand closes over mine. “It’s good for us to be seen out. Reminds people we’re solid.”
“I knew you’d understand.” I keep my voice easy. “I’m sorry we had to lose our Saturday over it. Ardith will keep.”
“Don’t even think about it.” He waves it off, pleased, relieved, already past it. “Honestly, this is better. A whole room full of the right people instead of just the two of us at some table. Smart girl.”
Smart girl. He has no idea how much.
The truth is uglier than the excuse I gave him.
I canceled Ardith because I couldn’t sit across a candlelit table from him after the garage, not with that perfume still living behind my eyes.
He never questioned it for a second. Either he can’t feel a room change right under his nose, or he can and doesn’t care.
I’ve stopped trying to decide which because I’m numb to it.
“Tonight’s going to be about you.” I straighten his tie and let the warmth reach my eyes. “I made sure of it.”
He kisses the top of my head, pleased with his evening, and goes to find his shoes. I wave him off from the study door until he’s down the hall and out of sight.
Then the smile goes, and what’s left underneath is the truth I’ve held all week.
Tonight, William loses everything.
The circle will look at him and see a fraud. Blythe will lose the proximity she clawed her whole life toward. The night I built will take them both apart, and he is going to stand in the middle of it never having seen it coming.
I draw one slow breath, press my hands down the front of my robe, and put the feeling back where it belongs before I leave the study and head for the dressing room.
As it happens, I have just the dress for the occasion.
***
The ballroom fills in slow, expensive currents. Old money flowing toward older money, and I stand near the entrance, greeting them all by name. After all, I am very good at this, raised to glow in exactly this kind of room.
William stays at my side, playing the devoted husband, until his gaze snags on the door and his hand tightens on my arm.
“Why is Beaufort here?” He asks, low, the smile staying fixed on his face for the room while the words come through his teeth.
“Because he’s one of the largest donors in the city, and snubbing him would embarrass the foundation.” I keep my own expression pleasant. “I’m just being professional.”
“You know what he is to me, Adriana.”
That’s exactly why he’s here, I think, and keeps it to myself.
Before I can give him the gentler version out loud, the matter walks up to us.
Knox crosses the floor languidly, Blythe on his arm in deep green silk and a confidence I taught her stroke by stroke. The sight of her there lands harder than I let it show. But it’s Knox who finds me first, already looking, as though he’d known precisely where I’d be standing.
“Beaufort.” William says it with disdain barely under the surface.
“Langford.” A beat, just long enough. “Forgive me. Rosewood now, isn’t it? I keep forgetting you took her name.” Knox says it pleasantly, looking William dead in the eye while the insult does its quiet work. “Old habit. You were Langford so much longer.”
William’s jaw goes tight. I feel him stiffen beside me, the snide thing already forming behind his glare, and I move before he can speak.
“Blythe.” I turn to her, warm, the host greeting a guest. “I’m so glad you came. You look lovely.”
She doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “Miss Adriana. Thank you for having me.”
The old name slips out before she can stop it, and a flush climbs her throat. For a moment she’s the girl I once adored.
Meanwhile, William has gone rigid at my side, caught between his rival, his mistress, and his wife. The strain of holding all three in one place is affecting his composure in a way that pleases me to watch.
The silence stretches a beat too long, and none of us moves to fill it. Heads begin to turn, the conversations nearest us dipping a register as people notice the four of us standing too still. We’ve drawn an audience and the awareness of it tightens every spine in our little circle.
Blythe feels it first.
“I should find the powder room.” She touches Knox’s sleeve, already angling them both away from us. “Knox, come with me? I hate walking into these things alone.”
“Sure, sweetheart.” The endearment lands flat as he lets her draw him a step back before his gaze slides to William with lazy, deliberate amusement. “Rosewood. Always a pleasure to watch you work a room.” A nod at me, brief, unreadable. “Adriana.”
The smile I’m wearing pulls into a real one. I didn’t have to tell him a thing. I knew the moment his name came to me that he’d be the perfect piece to set on this board, and I was right.
“Enjoy the evening,” I say gladly.
Blythe is already towing Knox into the crowd before William can summon a reply, the two of them folding into the press of bodies and gone.
The moment they’re out of earshot, William’s hand closes on my arm and steers me a few paces clear, his grip just shy of polite.
“What is wrong with you?” He grits, the words furious now that we’re moving. “Beaufort, of all people. Do you have any idea how it looks, you fawning over him at the door while people watch?”
“I greeted a donor, William.” I don’t even slow my step. “If it looked like fawning, that’s a problem with your eyes, not my manners.”
“Don’t be cute. You know exactly how I detest him, and you put him in my room anyway.”
I look at him properly then, and finally see him for what he truly is. Strip away the name he borrowed and the rooms he struts through, what’s left is just an insecure man. Small and frightened of being found out.
“You’re making a scene,” I say mildly. “At our own gala. Lower your voice.”
His jaw works. He pulls breath to escalate, the lecture loading behind his teeth until another voice interrupts us.
“Mr. Rosewood.” A man in a good suit materializes at his elbow, one of the donors he’s been circling all week, hand already out. “I wanted a word about the spring campaign…”
William turns back to me with a warning. “We’ll finish this later.”
I give him nothing. Just a flat, even stare until he turns and lets the donor draw him away.
Now, I’m alone in the middle of my own party with a glass I’m not drinking in my hand and my eyes on the antique clock above the doors.
Quarter to nine.
Fifteen minutes until I take the floor. I watch the minute hand and feel the whole night narrowing to a point.
“You keep checking that clock,” a voice says behind me, low and amused, “as if you’re waiting to stand in front of a moving train.”
I don’t turn right away. “Mr. Beaufort.”