5. Adriana #2
Knox has come to stand beside me, both of us facing out into the room. Close enough that the words pass between us and far enough apart that to anyone watching we’re simply two guests who happen to be standing near the same wall.
“Rosewood.” He greets back. “You were vague enough on the phone to be either a waste of my evening or the most interesting invitation I’ve had all year. I came to find out which.”
“And? Your verdict?”
“Still out.” A pause, his eyes on the crowd, not on me. “Though I have a feeling you won’t disappoint.”
Pleased once more, I turn from the clock at last and meet his eyes, letting him see the glint in my gaze for a brief second.
“Trust that you won’t be,” I assure him. “Stay close to the front, Mr. Beaufort. I promise you won’t have wasted the trip.”
Interest moves through his face, and he inclines his head a fraction with that infamous smirk I’ve heard so much about.
“Wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else.”
The minute hand reaches the mark I’ve been waiting for.
“If you’ll excuse me.” I set my untouched glass on a passing tray. “I have a few words to say to my guests.”
As I cross the floor toward the podium, the room turns toward my movement. The conversations thinning, heads lifting, and lights finding me as I take my place behind it. Faces turn up toward me, warm and expectant.
Somewhere near the front, exactly where I told him to be, I feel Knox watching.
William stands a little apart from him, near the front as well, beaming up at me with a proprietary pride that turns my stomach, the devoted husband of the woman running the room, certain this night belongs to him.
Well, it’s showtime.
“Thank you all for being here.” My voice echoes through the hall. “Every year I stand here and tell you about the work this foundation does… The people it lifts, the trust you place in us when you give. Tonight, I want to talk to you about trust.”
The screen behind me wakes and the first slide is the foundation’s logo. Expected, harmless, and I let it sit a moment so they settle.
“Trust is the only real currency in a room like this. We extend it to the people we believe are who they say they are.” A beat. “I’d like to introduce you, properly, to a man many of you have trusted. My husband.”
The spotlight swings to William, and he rises to it with that easy practiced grin breaking across his face. One hand lifting in a modest wave to the room as the applause begins.
I smile wider. And I click.
The applause starts and dies in the same breath, because the slide is not William beaming at a charity luncheon.
It’s William leaving the Carlisle at eleven at night, a woman’s hand in his.
The room doesn’t understand yet. So I click again, and again, and the photographs fall one after another. The parking garage, the scarf, the hand at the small of a back that is not his wife’s, and I watch comprehension move across the crowd in a slow cold wave.
“The man you’ve trusted,” I say, unhurried, every word a scalpel, “has spent the better part of this year lying to all of you. To me. I thought, since trust is our theme tonight, you ought to know exactly what his is worth.”
The room has gone silent. William stands frozen in the dregs of his own spotlight, the color draining out of his face as the photographs glow on the wall above him.
“Don’t stop on my account. He so loved the applause a moment ago.” I let the smile stay, sweet and merciless as I bring my hands together, the clap cracking across the silent room. “Shall we give him another round?”
No one joins me. They only stare, caught between the photographs and the woman calmly applauding her own husband’s ruin.
And then my eyes find her.
“Oh, we also mustn’t forget our other special guest of the evening.”
I hold the look so their heads turn to follow it, to where she stands at the edge of the crowd.
“My protégée, the woman I trained and trusted and brought up through my own company. Blythe. Do come forward, darling. You’ve been such a central part of my marriage. It seems only right you share the spotlight.”
Blythe doesn’t move. She’s gone the color of paper, one hand frozen at her throat, and the whispers start to ripple outward as the room places her against the photographs on the wall.
Near the front, exactly where I put him, Knox Beaufort is not bothering to hide his amusement, one knuckle pressed to his lips, eyes bright with open delight.
The quartet has fallen silent, the music cut somewhere in the chaos, and the room finds its voice in pieces, low and spreading.
“That’s the assistant? Oh, how the little climber repays her.” “Her own husband, a spineless fraud. So shameless.” “Married up into the Rosewood name and this is what he does.”
Music to my ears, every word of it, sweeter than anything the strings were playing all night.
“Adriana…” William has found his feet at last, his voice scraping out of him. “Adriana, stop this. Now.”
“Stop?” I don’t even look at him. “I’m only just being honest, William. You wanted people to see us tonight. To know we’re solid.” I let the word land where he handed it to me. “I’m simply showing them the foundation it’s built on.”
“You’ve made your point.” He’s moving now, coming toward the podium, and the practiced ease has cracked into a raw reaction. “Enough.”
But it isn’t enough, and we both know it.
The murmurs are swelling now, climbing toward the kind of noise a scandal makes. I watch him understand, in real time, that his standing in this room is bleeding out by the second, and that there is no version of charm that erases the photographs.
William crosses to the podium fast, and before I understand what he’s doing, his hand closes around my arm and he’s pulling me down off the step, down to the floor, his grip hard.
“That’s enough, Adriana.” Low, for me, the panic and the rage merging. “You’ve humiliated us. We’re leaving.”
I plant my feet at the base of the stage and shrug him off, my arm sliding free of his hand in full view of the room.
“Take your hand off me.” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t have to. “I’m not finished.”
The space we’re standing in has become the center of everything, the crowd ringed around us.
“Not finished.” William’s composure is going, the color high in his face now, his voice shaking with it. “You drag me up in front of everyone I know, you parade this, this filth on a screen, and you’re not finished?”
“You did the parading, William.” I hold his eyes, perfectly calm against his fury. “I only brought the projector.”
His temper breaks loose at that. His jaw clenches, and the careful husband falls away entirely. What’s left is a man who has decided that if he’s going down, he is not going down quietly.
“Fine.” He bites it out. “Since you want the theatrics, Adriana, you leave me no choice.”
He turns from me, and crosses the open space. He goes to stand beside Blythe, and when he speaks again it isn’t to me at all. It’s to the room.
“You’re right to be appalled.” His voice carries clean across the silent hall.
“I won’t insult you by denying what’s on that wall.
Yes. I had an affair. I’m not going to stand here and pretend otherwise.
” He spreads his hands, a man laying down his weapons.
“But my wife showed you the photographs. She didn’t show you the marriage behind them. ”
The floor under me shifts an inch.
“She won’t tell you how long it’s been over between us.
” He stops, and his voice drops, the cruelty of what’s coming dressed so perfectly as grief that I feel everyone lean toward it.
“We wanted a family. For our entire marriage I worked myself to the bone but we couldn’t have a child… She couldn’t.”
No, not this. Anything but this.
I keep my face still while my hands stay loose at my sides. Inside, the ice is giving under my feet, fast and silent, the way it does just before it cracks.
Of all the cruelties I prepared myself for tonight, I never once imagined this one. That he would take the thing that broke us both, the child we couldn’t make, and the grief I held alone, as a weapon against me, after everything he already did.
William heaves a breath. “And while I poured everything into that company, Blythe was simply there. Kind to me. Present, in a house that had gone cold…”
Bullshit. This is all bullshit.
I never thought he had this in him but I should have. That is the part that guts me, that even now, even here, some small fool in me is shocked that he could do this.
“I’m not proud of how it happened.” He reaches for Blythe and draws her in against his side, and she comes soft and tearful, lovely and devastating. “But I won’t apologize for the rest of it. Because something did come of it. Something I’d given up ever having.”
I brace for his words, his pause that has the shape of a blade being raised. The noise of the room thins to a high hum at the edges of my hearing.
Blythe’s hand drifts to rest low against her stomach, deliberate, unmissable. And she lifts her eyes and finds mine across the open floor. She does not look away.
“We’re going to have a child,” William says.
The word detonates under my sternum.
A child. The one thing he always blamed me for, the one thing I could never forgive myself for either.
And the one thing my mother has wanted from me like a debt owed, the empty room I have apologized for with my silence for a year. At this moment, Blythe is carrying it, her hand spread over the proof of it while the whole room watches.
I did not know.
Of everything I gathered, every photograph, every lie laid bare on that wall, I never had this.
“I never wanted you to find out this way.”
William is looking at me now with an expression I can only call pity, and the room is turning. I can feel it turning, the sympathy sliding off me and pooling toward the weeping girl and the grieving father.
“You didn’t have to do this, Adriana. You didn’t have to drag her up in front of everyone, in her condition, to make your point. She fell in love with a man whose marriage was already dead. Whatever I am, she’s innocent in it.”
Innocent. Blythe lifts her wet eyes to mine, and underneath the tears there’s a flash only I am close enough to read. The smallest gleam of triumph, the hunger I trained and aimed at the wrong target. Then it folds back under the performance, gone.
The murmurs find me now, the room turning its voice against me the way it turned for me only minutes ago.
“Tasteless. She crossed every line there is.” “Poor girl, expecting, and humiliated in front of everyone.” “A woman that cold to her own husband. Perhaps it’s no surprise he cheated.”
I have lost their sympathy.
Suddenly, I cannot move.
For one suspended moment I just stand there, breathing the wreckage of my own gala, hurt cracking open in my chest so wide I think it might take my knees. They are looking at me the way you look at a thing to be pitied.
The cold wife, the barren one. The woman whose husband had to go elsewhere to get the family she couldn’t give him, and who then had the gall to make a scene about it.
And the hurt, somewhere in the staring, curdles.
It turns over in me and comes back up as heat, slow at first and then all at once, rage rising to fill every place the grief just hollowed out. Because I see exactly what happens next.
I see the story they’ll carry out the doors tonight and tell over brunch tomorrow, the discarded wife, the empty woman, abandoned for a younger, softer girl who could give him what she couldn’t.
Pitiful. Unwanted. Left.
No.
The thought arrives fully formed and almost without me, narrowing to a single point of refusal.
They can have the scandal. They can have the affair and the baby and their tidy tragic story.
But they will not have me as just the woman left behind. Whatever else I am when I walk out of this room, I will not be pathetic.
I don’t decide to move so much as find myself already moving.
“How generous of you both.” I let it land dry and cool over the room. “A child, after everything. I’m touched.”
William’s grief falters. This isn’t the script. I’m not crumbling, I’m not screaming, and a man who built his whole defense on my collapse has no idea what to do with a woman who won’t give it to him.
“You’ve worried for nothing, William.” My voice stays even, almost kind. “I’d hate to stand in the way of all this happiness. You should be together. Truly.” A beat. “So you’ll forgive me if I don’t stand here and watch. I’ve more than earned the right to move on.”
My rage takes the wheel, and reason goes quiet.
Knox is near the front, watching, close enough to reach. So I reach and I close the space between us. For one breath, his eyes hold mine.
Then I fist his tie in my hand and pull.
“Make it look real,” I breathe against his mouth.
His brow raises, just for a second.
And I crash my lips into Knox Beaufort’s. The man my cheating husband hates most in this world.