18. Brittney
— ? —
Brittney
The media line stretches halfway down the block.
I can see them through the apartment window - cameras, microphones, reporters in sensible shoes clutching coffee cups and notepads. Someone has set up a makeshift barricade of traffic cones, which does nothing to stop the steady stream of questions being hurled at anyone who walks past.
“Mrs. Ross! Is it true you abandoned your marriage for a construction worker?”
“Brittney! Can you comment on Elise Ross’s statement about your mental health?”
“Shawn! Did your wife leave you for another man?”
I watch a delivery driver try to navigate through the crowd, his face a mask of confusion and irritation. This is what my life has become. Spectacle. Content. A story for strangers to consume with their morning coffee.
“Hey.” Shawn’s hand finds my shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do.” I turn away from the window. “If I hide, she wins. If I let her control the narrative, she wins. I’m done letting her win.”
Helena is pacing the small apartment, phone pressed to her ear, barking orders at whoever’s on the other end. She ends the call with a sharp “Handle it” and turns to face us.
“The statement went live an hour ago. Social media’s already running wild with it. And this address was never public - no listing, no records, nothing. The press didn’t find this place.” She looks at Shawn. “It was handed to them.”
She doesn’t say his mother’s name. She doesn’t have to.
She scrolls through her phone, reading aloud. “‘Confused social climber.’ ‘Abandoned her vows for attention.’ ‘Mental instability runs in certain families.’” She looks up. “She’s not pulling punches.”
“She never does.” Shawn’s voice is tight. “What are our options?”
“Option one: ignore it. Let the news cycle move on. Risky, because silence often reads as guilt.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Not silence. Not anymore.”
“Option two: release a statement through a PR firm. Controlled, professional, forgettable.”
“Also no.”
Helena’s eyes sharpen. “Then what?”
I look at Shawn. He looks back at me. Something passes between us - an understanding, a decision, a leap of faith.
“We go out there,” I say. “Together. And we tell the truth.”
The cameras blind me the moment we step outside.
Flashes. Shouted questions. The surge of bodies pressing forward against the makeshift barricade.
I’ve never done press conferences before - not like this.
Not without handlers, without talking points, without someone telling me what to say and how to say it.
This is chaos. This is real. This is the moment we’ve been building toward.
I watch Shawn step in front of the microphones.
“I want to be clear about something.” His voice comes out steady. Steadier than I expected. “This is my wife. Brittney Ross. The strongest person I have ever known. The woman I failed for years.”
The cameras flash. Questions erupt. He keeps talking.
“I let her be disrespected in her own home. I let my mother treat her like an inconvenience. I let another woman hang on my arm because it was easier than setting boundaries.” His voice cracks.
He doesn’t try to hide it. “I chose comfort over courage. Every single time. And when my wife finally had enough - when she finally walked out - I didn’t even realize what I’d lost until she was gone. ”
The crowd has gone quiet. Even the reporters have stopped shouting.
“There was no affair.” He looks directly into the nearest camera. “On either side. But there was neglect. There was cowardice. There was a man so focused on building an empire that he forgot to build a marriage.”
He turns to look at me. His eyes are wet. His voice breaks on every other word.
“That man was me. And I was too blind to see what I had until I lost it.” He stops. Breathes. Starts again. “I will spend the rest of my life trying to be someone worthy of standing next to her.”
I watch him say every word. My pulse is racing. My eyes are burning. My hands went numb somewhere around “the woman I failed.”
He’s standing in front of cameras - in front of the whole world - and choosing me. Out loud. On the record. No take-backs, no carefully worded statements, no PR spin to soften the blow.
Years. Years I waited for him to see me. To claim me. To stand up and say “this is my wife and she matters.”
And now he’s doing it. In front of everyone. His voice cracking, his composure shattering, every wall he ever built crumbling in real time.
Don’t cry, I tell myself. Don’t you dare cry.
I cry anyway.
The tears slip down my cheeks and I don’t wipe them away. Let them see. Let them photograph this moment - not the polished facade of a society wife, but the raw truth of a woman who’s finally being chosen.
I step forward to stand beside him.
“People keep asking why I walked away from a perfect life.” My voice comes out stronger than I expected. “It wasn’t a life. It was a set. Beautiful, expensive, and completely empty the second the guests went home. I wasn’t a wife in that penthouse. I was a prop with a wedding ring.”
The cameras flash. I keep going.
“He’s filling it now. Not with promises - I’ve had enough of those to last a lifetime. With time. With presence. With showing up every single day and doing the work.”
I take Shawn’s hand. His fingers lace through mine, squeezing tight.
“I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know if we’ll make it. But I know this: for the first time in years, I’m being seen. And that’s worth more than any headline.”
Mom appears behind us. Then Fern, his compass tattoo visible beneath rolled sleeves. Then Helena and the whole Rowe & Associates team, forming a wall of solidarity at our backs.
“Any questions?” Helena asks the press. Her voice could silence a stadium. “No? Good. This event is over.”
Later, after the cameras have gone and we’ve retreated back inside, Helena pulls me aside.
“The accounts came back,” she says, her voice dry. “Or better ones replaced them. And Elise’s name is worth less than it was on Monday.”
I stare at her. “What?”
“Word travels fast in this city. A mother who publicly attacks her own daughter-in-law while her son stands by his wife?” Helena’s mouth twitches - the closest she ever comes to a smile. “That’s not a good look for anyone. The Brennan people called this morning. They’re back in. Westfield too.”
I don’t know what to say. I didn’t expect this. Didn’t expect the tide to turn so quickly, didn’t expect Elise’s power play to backfire so spectacularly.
“People like a love story,” Helena says. “Especially one where the underdog wins.”
***
The hotel wasn’t the plan.
We were supposed to go back to Mom’s. Supposed to regroup, decompress, figure out next steps in the quiet safety of her kitchen.
But there’s a conference at the hotel across the street, and we’re both running on adrenaline, and when Shawn looks at me in the elevator his eyes are dark and desperate and I realize I don’t want to wait.
“I need to touch you,” he says roughly. “Right now. I can’t-”
“Then don’t.”
He books a room from his phone without breaking eye contact. The elevator ride takes forever. The hallway stretches endlessly. The second the door closes, he has me against it.
“I watched you stand in front of those cameras and claim us.” I’m gasping as his hands push my dress up. “I watched you destroy her narrative. I watched you-”
“I’ll always choose you.” He walks me backward toward the bed. “Every time. Every day. In front of cameras and behind closed doors and-”
“Stop talking.” I pull him down on top of me. “Stop talking and show me.”
He shows me. His mouth on my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my breast. His hands mapping my body like he’s memorizing every inch. The weight of him pressing me into the mattress, solid and real and finally, finally here.
“Look at me,” he says, positioning himself between my thighs. “I want you to see exactly who’s choosing you. Who’s fighting for you. Who’s never going to let you feel invisible again.”
He pushes inside and my back arches off the bed. The stretch of him, the fullness, the overwhelming rightness of it - I cry out, and he swallows the sound with his mouth, kissing me deep and desperate while he starts to move.
“I’ve got you.” He’s murmuring the words against my skin, punctuating each thrust. “I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere. Never again. Never-”
“Shawn-”
“Say my name.” His hips snap harder. “Say it again.”
“Shawn-”
He reaches between us, finds the place where we’re joined, and presses his thumb against my clit in tight circles. The pleasure builds and builds, coiling tighter with every stroke, every touch, every whispered word.
“Come for me.” His voice is wrecked. “Please, Britt. Let me feel you.”
I shatter. It rolls through me in wave after wave, and I cry out his name against his shoulder. He goes rigid moments later, a low groan breaking against my neck as he lets go.
We lie there afterward, tangled together, breathing hard.
“That was…” I start.
“Yeah.” He presses a kiss to my temple. “Yeah, it was.”
The hotel sheets are cool against my overheated skin. We’ve migrated from the edge of the bed to the center, limbs intertwined, his hand tracing lazy patterns on my back. The adrenaline has finally faded, replaced by something softer. Something that feels dangerously like peace.
“Tell me something,” I whisper. “Something you never told me before.”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
“I used to watch you sleep.” His voice is rough. “In the penthouse. Before everything went wrong.”
I go still.
“You’d curl up on your side with one hand under your pillow, and I’d lie there thinking, ‘How did I get this lucky?’” He exhales.
“And then I’d get up and go to work and not say anything, because saying it out loud felt too vulnerable.
Like admitting how much I needed you would give you power over me. ”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
“Because needing someone felt like weakness. Because I watched my mother need my father, and I watched what it did to her when he stopped showing up. Because I spent my whole life learning that the person who cares less has all the control.” His hand stills on my back. “I was an idiot.”
“A little bit.”
“I’m not scared of it anymore.” He pulls me closer. “The vulnerability. The needing. I spent so long trying to be the man who didn’t need anyone, and all it did was make me lose the only person I couldn’t live without.”
I press my forehead to his chest. Feel his heartbeat, steady and strong.
“I need you too,” I admit. “I tried not to. For all this time I tried not to. But I do.”
“Good.” His arms tighten around me. “Then we’re even.”
***
Mikayla’s video hits at dawn.
I’m half-asleep, drifting in the warm space between dreams and waking, when Shawn’s phone starts buzzing. Then mine. Then both at once, an insistent chorus of notifications.
The video is exactly what she threatened.
Edited clips stitched together to suggest things that never happened.
My voice, taken out of context, made to sound vindictive and unstable.
Photos from events where I was standing too close to someone who wasn’t my husband.
It’s the landmine she set before we destroyed her. One final attempt at scorched earth.
“It’s already noise,” I say, scrolling through the comments. “The Oxford revelation landed too hard. No one with any credibility is taking this seriously.”
Shawn looks at the video, his jaw tight. “I should address it anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because I want a record.” He meets my eyes. “Of choosing you. Publicly. Every single time someone tries to tear us apart.”
He records a response right there in the hotel room, his shirt untucked, his hair mussed, nothing polished about it. He addresses the video point by point - the edited clips, the manufactured implications, the desperate last gasp of someone who couldn’t stand to lose.
“This is my wife,” he says into the camera.
“I failed her for years, and she had every right to leave. She didn’t leave because of another man.
She left because I wasn’t being a man at all.
The video you’re seeing is fabricated by someone with a personal vendetta.
The truth is much simpler: I was a bad husband, and I’m trying to be better. ”
He posts it without a filter, without a PR review, without any of the careful image management that defined his life before.
Word reaches us eventually: Mikayla left the city.
Nobody’s saying where. The Oxford lie follows her like a shadow.
Whatever new life she tries to build will be haunted by the truth she tried so hard to bury.
I can’t bring myself to feel sorry for her.
His phone buzzes again that afternoon. He glances at it, and something shifts in his expression.
“The transition closed.” He sets the phone down. “I’m out. Clean break.”
I study his face, looking for grief, for regret, for some sign that he’s mourning the empire he just walked away from. I find nothing but relief.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I should feel worse than I do.” He pulls me closer on the hotel bed. “But I don’t. That world was never mine. It was my mother’s. I was just borrowing it.”
“And now?”
“Now I figure out what’s actually mine.” His eyes find mine. “Starting with you.”
Elise’s final text arrives at midnight. We’re still at the hotel - we should have checked out hours ago, should have gone back to real life and real responsibilities, but neither of us wants to leave this bubble.
This temporary space where nothing exists except the two of us and the future we’re building.
His phone lights up on the nightstand. He reads the message, his face going carefully blank.
“What does it say?”
He shows me the screen.
Walk away from her tonight or I will use every connection this family has to erase her from any career, any circle, any future. Choose blood, Shawn. This is your last chance.
I read it twice. Then I look at him.
He’s already reaching for the phone. His thumb hovers over the screen for a moment - not hesitation, but deliberation. Making sure of what he’s doing. He blocks the number.
“I already chose,” he says quietly. “Years too late. But I chose.”
He sets the phone face-down on the nightstand and turns back to me. In the dim light, he looks younger somehow. Lighter. Like he’s finally set down a weight he’s been carrying his whole life.
“Come here,” I whisper.
He comes.
And for the rest of the night, we don’t think about his mother, or the media, or the wreckage we’ve left behind. We think only about this: two people in a hotel room, choosing each other, over and over again.