5. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
My hand was shaking when I pressed it to my cheek. The skin was hot, already starting to swell. Sandrine’s ring had caught the corner of my mouth, and I could taste blood on my tongue, copper and salt, sharp against my teeth.
“Your son,” I said, the words coming out thick, “left me to die.”
“Liar.”
The word was flat, final, delivered without a flicker of doubt. Sandrine turned and walked toward the kitchen, her heels clicking on the marble, her spine perfectly straight. Like nothing had happened. Like she hadn’t just slapped her daughter-in-law across the face in her own foyer.
I followed because I didn’t know what else to do.
The kitchen was bright and clean and exactly the way I’d left it yesterday, when I’d stood at this counter making coffee and thinking about how proud I was of what we’d accomplished. The granite gleamed. The copper pots hung in their precise row. Everything in its place, everything perfect.
One night. That’s all it took for my entire life to become unrecognizable.
Stan came in behind me. Ivy followed, still filming, her phone steady in her hand. The three of them arranged themselves around the island like they’d rehearsed it. Sandrine at the head, Stan to her right, Ivy perched on a stool with her phone positioned to catch every angle.
“Sit down, Blythe,” Sandrine said.
I didn’t sit. I stood at the edge of the island with my hand still pressed to my cheek and my heart pounding in my chest, watching them watch me.
“I’m not lying,” I said. “There’s a witness. A man named Reid Navarro. He was anchored nearby. He saw everything - Stan at the rail, the yacht leaving, all of it. He pulled me out of the water.”
“Reid Navarro.” Sandrine said the name like it tasted bad, her lips curling with distaste. “The hedge fund person. The one who’s been trying to buy his way into Newport society for months.”
“He saved my life.”
“He’s telling you what you want to hear.” She picked up her teacup, took a delicate sip. Her hands were perfectly steady. “Men like that - new money, no family, no connections - they’re always looking for an angle. A woman in distress is an opportunity.”
“He saw-”
“He saw nothing.” Stan’s voice cut through the room, and I turned to look at him.
He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, and his face had changed.
The grief was gone. The tears were gone.
What was left was cold and hard and belonged to a stranger.
“You were drunk. You were hysterical. You’ve been unwell for years, Blythe. Everyone knows that.”
“I wasn’t drunk.”
“Three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach.” He shook his head, almost pitying. “You started a fight about nothing. You came at me with your nails, and when I tried to calm you down, you stumbled. The deck was wet. It was an accident.”
“You pushed me.”
“You fell.”
“You watched me drown and told the captain to leave.”
“I panicked.” His voice cracked, just a little, and I watched him do it, watched him manufacture the emotion, watched him slide it onto his face like a mask.
“I wasn’t thinking straight. I made a terrible mistake, and I will never forgive myself for it.
But I didn’t push you, Blythe. I would never hurt you. ”
He was good. He was so good. Seven years of marriage and I’d never seen him lie like this: so smooth, so practiced, so completely convinced of his own version of events.
Or maybe I had seen it. Maybe I’d just never been on the receiving end before.
“The fertility business has been hard on her,” Sandrine said, and my head snapped toward her. “Everyone knows that. Seven years of trying, seven years of disappointment. It takes a toll.”
“The fertility-” I couldn’t breathe. “What does that have to do with-”
“You’ve been struggling.” Her voice was gentle now, almost kind. “We’ve all seen it. The mood swings. The depression. The way you’ve thrown yourself into Stan’s work because you can’t give him the one thing he really wants.”
“I saved his company.”
“You inserted yourself where you weren’t wanted.” Sandrine set down her teacup with a click. “You embarrassed him in front of his colleagues, his friends, everyone who matters. And when he finally tried to tell you - gently, kindly, on that boat - that he needed some space, you had a breakdown.”
I stared at her. I stared at Stan. I stared at Ivy, still filming, her face lit with quiet pleasure.
They had a story. They had a whole story, fully assembled, with a beginning and a middle and an end that made me the villain. And I understood, with a sick lurch in my stomach, that Stan hadn’t come up with this on the drive back. This had been planned. Maybe for weeks. Maybe for months.
Maybe from the moment Birdie told him she was pregnant.
“Blythe.”
My mother’s voice. I turned, and there they were in the kitchen doorway.
Hollis and Priscilla Montrose, ninety minutes after my mother had hung up on me at the police station.
Ninety minutes in which they’d clearly had time to coordinate with the Chadwicks, to get their story straight, to figure out exactly how to handle me.
My mother was wearing her good pearls. My father wouldn’t look at me.
“Thank God you’re all right,” Priscilla said, crossing to Sandrine and taking her hands. “We came as soon as we heard. I’m so sorry for all of this. I can’t imagine what you’ve been going through.”
She was apologizing. To the Chadwicks. For me.
“Mom.” My voice came out thin, cracked. “Mom, he tried to kill me.”
Priscilla didn’t even look at me. She was still holding Sandrine’s hands, still making sympathetic noises, still playing the role of the concerned mother dealing with her difficult daughter.
“She’s been having episodes,” she said quietly. “For months now. I should have said something sooner, but I didn’t want to worry anyone. You know how she gets.”
“I don’t get any way.” I took a step toward her, and she finally turned. Her face was perfectly composed, not a flicker of fear, not a shadow of doubt. “I don’t have episodes. I’m not crazy. Your son-in-law pushed me off a boat and left me to drown.”
“Blythe.” My father’s voice, quiet and tired. He still wouldn’t look at me. “That’s enough.”
“It’s not enough. It’s not-” I was crying now. Tears streaming down my face, mixing with the blood from my split lip. “Daddy, please. Please look at me. He tried to kill me. You have to believe me.”
Hollis Montrose looked at the floor. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at his own hands, folded in front of him like he was praying.
He didn’t look at me.
“We brought paperwork,” he said.
“Paperwork?”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folder, cream-colored, expensive, with a law firm’s name embossed on the front. He set it on the counter between us.
“Divorce papers, sweetheart.” His voice was gentle, almost apologetic. “Sign them.”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I just stood there staring at the folder while my father, my father, who’d taught me to ride a bike and walked me down the aisle and cried at my wedding, slid divorce papers across the counter like he was passing the salt.
“It’s for the best,” Priscilla said. She’d moved to stand next to my father, her hand on his arm, her face set to maternal concern. “A clean break. You can start fresh somewhere else, and Stan can move on with his life.”
“Move on with-” I looked at Stan. He was watching me with that same cold expression, arms still crossed, not a flicker of guilt in his eyes. “Move on with who? With Birdie?”
Silence.
And then my mother did something I will never forget. She turned to Stan, in front of me, in my own kitchen, and she smiled.
“Birdie’s already pregnant with your child,” she said. “Marry her. She’ll give you what Blythe never could.”
My ears stopped working.
I could see my mother’s mouth moving, could see Stan nodding, could see Sandrine’s lips curve, not quite a smile. Colder than that. But I couldn’t hear any of it. There was just a high, thin ringing, like a glass about to shatter.
Already. Birdie’s already pregnant.
Priscilla knew. She knew about the affair. She knew about the baby. She knew, and she hadn’t told me, and somewhere in the last eight months she’d looked at both her daughters and decided which one was worth keeping.
I looked around the kitchen. I looked at every face, one by one, and I read the truth in each of them.
Sandrine knew. Her expression was calm, unsurprised, the expression of a woman watching a plan unfold exactly as intended.
Ivy knew, and she was enjoying it. Her phone was steady, her smile was bright, and her eyes were lit with the particular pleasure of someone watching a car crash in slow motion.
Hollis knew. He still wouldn’t look at me, but his jaw was tight and his hands were clenched and I understood that he’d known for months, maybe longer, and he’d looked at the floor about it because that was easier than looking at me.
My mother knew. My mother had known from the beginning.
My mother had helped plan this: the timing, the divorce papers, the smooth transition from one daughter to another.
My mother had watched me save the Chadwick company and decided I was still worth less than a pregnant twenty-four-year-old who’d spent the last year fucking my husband.
I was the only person in my own family who’d found out last night on a boat.
“Sign the papers, Blythe.” Sandrine’s voice, cutting through the ringing in my ears. “It’s over. Accept it gracefully.”
I picked up the pen. I don’t remember deciding to do it, my hand just moved, like it belonged to someone else. The papers blurred in front of me. I was crying again, tears dripping onto the expensive cream paper.
I couldn’t hold the pen properly. My hand was shaking too hard, my fingers wouldn’t close right, and my signature came out jagged and wrong. I signed each page where they told me to sign, and nobody came near me, and Ivy filmed the whole thing.
The pen left the paper. I set it down on the counter and stepped back, and I felt something inside me go quiet and cold.
“Good,” Sandrine said. “Now-”
Hollis reached into his jacket again.
He pulled out a second folder, same cream color, same embossed law firm logo, and set it on top of the divorce papers.
I stared at it. The folder sat there on the counter, innocuous and devastating.
“What is that?” My voice came from somewhere far away. “What - I already signed. What else could you possibly-”
“Open it,” my mother said. “And we’ll explain.”