13. Rhodes #2
I let myself be shepherded off the stage, but the damage is already done. I can see it in the reporters’ faces, the way they’re already typing, already spinning the narrative.
Billionaire Defends Female Colleague: “I’m Not Going to Punish Her”
Calloway Stands by Vaughn While Marriage Crumbles
“Some of the Most Difficult Years”: Did Rhodes Calloway Just Admit Rachel Vaughn Replaced His Wife?
“That didn’t go well,” Rachel says quietly, once we’re backstage.
“I was trying to defend you.”
“I know.” She looks at me with something like pity, and I hate it. “But it didn’t sound like defending me. It sounded like choosing me.”
She’s right. She’s absolutely right, and I don’t know how to fix it. Every time I open my mouth, I make it worse. Every time I try to explain, I dig the hole deeper.
My phone buzzes.
Maren.
My heart lurches. I grab for it, already hoping…
But it’s not a message. It’s an alert. Google, delivering news about my own name.
brEAKING: New Calloway Footage Shows Billionaire “Standing By” Vaughn
There’s a photo attached. Me and Rachel, side by side at the podium.
And I know, without checking, that Maren has seen it too.
I find out where she is by accident.
Julian mentions it casually, too casually, like he’s trying to decide whether to tell me. “Someone said they saw Maren at the women’s health clinic on Fillmore. Probably just a routine thing.”
Women’s health clinic.
The words stick in my brain, refusing to compute. Maren at a clinic. Alone. While I stood in front of cameras defending Rachel.
“When?”
“This morning. Around eleven.”
This morning. Right when I was at the press briefing. Right when I was saying Rachel’s name instead of hers.
I call her immediately. It rings once, twice, three times.
Voicemail.
“Maren.” My voice cracks on her name. “Julian said, someone saw you at a clinic. Are you okay? Are you sick? Please, just, call me back. Please.”
She doesn’t call back.
I go home that night to a half-empty closet.
Nora didn’t just take sweaters and photo albums. She took dresses. Shoes. The silk robe I bought Maren for her birthday three years ago. The pearls she wore at our wedding.
I stand in the doorway of what used to be our bedroom and stare at the gaps where her life used to be. The nightstand is still there. The champagne bottle is still there, the dried ranunculus listing to one side like it’s given up.
I sink onto the edge of the bed.
She’ll come home, I told Julian. I told myself. I told anyone who would listen.
But her grandmother’s jewelry is gone. Her running shoes are gone. The photo albums from the hall closet, eleven years of memories, of holidays and vacations and ordinary Tuesdays, are sitting in a cardboard box at her sister’s apartment.
She’s not cooling off.
She’s not being emotional.
She’s leaving me.
I pick up my phone. Pull up her contact. My thumb hovers over the call button, and I can hear Nora’s voice in my head: Text only. Unless it’s important.
What’s more important than this?
I saw the footage, I type. I know how it looked. That’s not what I meant. I was trying to defend Rachel without making it worse, and instead I made it worse. I keep making it worse.
Please, Maren - come home, let me fix this.
I love you.
I send it.
The minutes stretch on, ten of them, then fifteen.
My phone stays silent.
Somewhere across the city, my wife is going through something without me, and I don’t even get to know what it is.
That’s the shape of my life now. A blank where she used to be. I don’t know where she sleeps or whether she’s eating or if she lies awake the way I do now. Whatever she’s carrying, she’s carrying it alone, because I taught her to.
All I know is the silence. The empty closet. The photograph on my dresser of our wedding day, Maren in white, laughing at something I said, looking at me like I was the whole world.
I don’t remember the last time she looked at me like that.
My phone buzzes.
For one desperate second, I think it’s her.
It’s my mother.
Rhodes. Your father and I are concerned. Please call us.
I don’t call.
I just sit in my empty bedroom, staring at the champagne bottle on the nightstand, and wait for my wife to come home.
She doesn’t.
The next morning, I get a text.
Not from Maren.
From Nora.
She has a doctor’s appointment next week. She’s going alone.
I stare at the message.
What kind of appointment?
Three dots appear, then vanish before they finish.
Ask her yourself. If she wants you to know.
Then nothing.
I call Maren twice and get her voicemail both times, then try a third, desperate now, because doctors and clinics and going alone don’t add up to anything good.
The fourth time, she answers.
“Stop calling.”
“Maren-”
“I saw the press conference.”
“I know, I know how it looked, but-”
“Rachel has been beside you through some of the most difficult years.” Her voice is flat, lifeless. “You’re not going to punish her because your marriage is having problems.”
“I was defending her-”
“You’re always defending her.” I hear her take a shaky breath. “I can’t do this right now. I have to go.”
“Maren, wait-”
“Goodbye, Rhodes.”
The line goes dead.
I sit in my office, phone in my hand, and realize something I should have understood weeks ago.
She’s not coming home.
Not because she’s angry. Not because she needs time.
Because I keep choosing wrong. I keep saying the wrong things, standing with the wrong people, defending everyone except the person who needed me most.
And now, whatever that doctor’s appointment is, whatever Nora was trying to tell me…
She’s going alone.
Because I made her go alone.
The weight of it settles in my chest like concrete. My wife is gone. My closet is empty. And somewhere across the city, something is happening that I don’t understand and can’t be part of.
Because she doesn’t want me there.
Because I’ve proven, over and over, that I don’t deserve to be.
I pick up the dried ranunculus from the champagne bottle. It’s brittle now, the petals crumbling at the edges.
Like us.
Like everything I thought was solid.
My phone buzzes one more time.
An alert. Another story.
Sources Confirm: Maren Calloway Has Moved Out
The photo is Nora, leaving my building with a cardboard box.
The headline doesn’t even surprise me anymore.
I set the flower down.
And I wait for morning to come, knowing it won’t bring her back.
Knowing nothing will, unless I figure out how to become the man she married.
The man who would never have let it get this far.