4. Chantal
— ? —
Chantal
The barbecue is at Tom and Melissa’s place, the kind of casual Sunday gathering where kids run through sprinklers and adults drink too much rosé and pretend their lives are simpler than they actually are.
“There she is!” Melissa waves me over with her tongs. “How are you feeling? You look amazing. Doesn’t she look amazing, Tom?”
“She looks like she wants a burger and for you to stop asking her how she feels,” Tom says, flipping one onto a plate for me.
“I like Tom best,” I announce.
Across the yard, Cedrick is holding court by the cooler - laughing too loud at something, one hand wrapped around a beer, performing relaxed husband for an audience of neighbors. The performance of normalcy. Three weeks in, we’ve both gotten good at it.
I’m standing at the drink station, pouring myself a sparkling water, when Isaac materializes beside me.
“You okay? You seem different lately.”
I don’t look at him. Can’t, actually, because something about his presence today feels charged in a way it hasn’t before.
He’s wearing a gray henley with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and I’m noticing his forearms - tanned, corded with muscle, a thin scar running along the left one that I’ve never asked about.
Why am I noticing his forearms?
“Pregnancy hormones,” I manage.
“Bullshit.”
The word is low, almost gentle, and it cuts through every wall I’ve built in the past month like they’re made of tissue paper.
My skin prickles with sudden awareness - of him, of how close he’s standing, of the fact that my cheating husband is forty feet away and I’m cataloging the exact shade of brown in Isaac Wren’s eyes.
Stop it. Stop it right now.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” He picks up a cup, fills it, doesn’t drink it. Busy hands. “A month ago you could barely look at him across a dinner table. Now you’re refilling his beer and laughing at his golf jokes. His golf jokes, Chantal. Nobody laughs at those. He’s not funny.”
“Maybe I’ve decided to appreciate my husband.”
“Maybe.” His jaw tightens - there’s a muscle there that flexes when he’s holding something back, and apparently I know that now, apparently I’ve been keeping records. “Walk with me.”
“Isaac-”
“Two minutes. Then I’ll leave you alone.”
I should say no. I should stay right here, in view of everyone, maintaining the perfect-wife performance I’ve spent a month perfecting. Being alone with Isaac Wren feels dangerous in ways I can’t name.
I follow him around the side of the house to the kitchen door, where the noise of the party fades to a distant hum.
He hands me the sparkling water I abandoned by the drink station. His fingers brush mine during the exchange, and I feel the contact everywhere - a spark that travels up my arm and settles somewhere behind my ribs.
What is wrong with me?
“I know about Hazel.”
The words hit like a physical blow. I grip the edge of the counter, and for a moment the strange electricity between us takes a back seat to cold, creeping dread.
“I don’t know what you’re-”
“Don’t.” He says it quietly. “Please don’t do the voice with me. You do it with everyone else and it works on everyone else, but don’t do it with me.”
I stop doing the voice.
“I saw them a year ago,” he continues, flat and factual, though I can see the tension riding his shoulders. “At a hotel downtown. I told Cedrick to end it or I’d tell you myself. He swore it was over.”
A year. He’s known for a year.
Which means my number is wrong. Which means the number I’ve been carrying around like a stone for a month - the number I built a dinner party on - is the small one.
“Was that you last night?” I ask. “The photos?”
His head comes up.
“Two women at a corner table,” I say. “Somebody’s cousin’s boyfriend works there.
It was in a group chat by midnight and in my hands by one, because that’s the thing about this town - everybody forwards.
She threw a whiskey at him, Isaac. There’s a picture of my husband with his eyes closed and his collar soaked, and a woman leaving the frame in a red dress I have watched her put on in my own bedroom. ”
He’s very still. “Chantal-”
“It’s in the folder.” I say it flat, the way you’d say it’s in the fridge. “Three copies. Two email addresses and a cloud I pay for.”
“You’ve had that since last night.”
“I’ve had it since last night, and I made him eggs this morning.”
Something moves across his face that I don’t have a name for.
“You believed him?” I ask.
“I shouldn’t have.” That muscle in his jaw jumps again.
“I convinced myself it was true because I didn’t want to be the one to hurt you.
I’d run it in my head a hundred times - knocking on your door, saying the words, watching your face break - and I couldn’t do it. That was selfish, and I’m sorry.”
“Why tell me now?”
“Because you already know.” He finally looks at me straight on. “You’ve known for weeks. I watched you wave at her across that ballroom like a queen pardoning a prisoner, and I thought - oh. Oh, she knows. God help them both.”
I stare at him. This man who has been part of my life for five years, and I realize I’ve never really seen him before.
Not like this. Not standing in a stranger’s kitchen with afternoon light catching the gold flecks in his eyes, telling me he chose me over fifteen years of friendship without ever once saying so.
Stop noticing the gold flecks. Stop it.
“I found out a month ago,” I say. “Hazel texted me by accident. A screenshot meant for Cedrick.”
Something in his posture releases - a tension I didn’t notice until it left. His shoulders drop half an inch.
“And you haven’t confronted them.”
“No.”
“Why?”
I meet his eyes. In the light slanting through the window, they’re not quite brown, not quite gold. Somewhere in between, like whiskey held up to sunlight.
Stop noticing things about him.
“Because I’m planning something. And I need him comfortable.”
For a long moment, he just looks at me. Then, slowly, a smile curves the corner of his mouth - not a polite smile, not a friendly smile. Something sharper. Something that makes my stomach flip in ways that have nothing to do with pregnancy.
“That’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Good.”
“What do you need from me?”
The question catches me completely off guard. I expected judgment. A lecture about the high road, about how revenge never makes anyone feel better.
Not this. Not what do you need.
Not that low, serious voice and those whiskey-gold eyes fixed on mine like nothing else in the yard, the town, the world currently exists.
“Just like that?” I ask. “You don’t want to talk me out of it?”
“Would it work?”
“No.”
“Then I’d just be wasting time you clearly intend to use.” He sets down his untouched cup. “Besides. I’ve spent a year watching him lie to your face at dinner parties. I’m not exactly neutral, Chantal.”
“He’s your best friend.”
“He was my best friend.” Quiet. Final. “Somewhere in the last year he became a guy I know. I haven’t figured out exactly when. I just know the funeral already happened and nobody sent flowers.”
The grief in it is real, and it does something to my chest I don’t have room for today.
“I need you to keep pretending you don’t know,” I say finally. “Don’t treat him differently. Don’t tip him off. Just - be his friend. The way you’ve always been.”
“Fake it.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing.”
“For a month.” He shakes his head slowly. “Through breakfast. Through a gala. Through-” He stops himself, and I watch him decide not to finish that sentence, and I am suddenly, hotly aware of exactly which part of my performance he decided not to name.
“Whatever you need,” he says instead.
He turns to leave, and as he passes me, his hand brushes mine.
The contact is accidental - has to be - but it sends a jolt through my entire body. Not just my arm this time. Everywhere. My breath catches. My skin feels too tight for my body.
His fingers are warm. Callused. Real in a way that nothing in my life has felt real for a very long time.
Neither of us pulls away.
For one suspended moment, we stand there in Melissa’s kitchen, not quite touching, not quite not-touching. I can feel the heat coming off his body. I can smell him - sawdust and cedar and something darker underneath. I can see his pulse hammering in his throat.
This is wrong. He’s Cedrick’s best friend. You’re still married. You’re pregnant with another man’s child.
Pull away. Pull away right now.
I don’t pull away.
Neither does he.
“Chantal.” My name comes out of him rough, half warning, half prayer.
“I know,” I whisper.
Then someone laughs loudly outside the window, and we both jerk backward like we’ve been burned.
“I should-” He clears his throat. “I should get back out there.”
“Right. Yes. Me too.”
He walks out the back door without looking at me, and I’m left standing alone in Melissa’s kitchen, pressing my palm against my racing heart, trying to convince myself that what just happened was nothing.
That the warmth of his skin on mine means nothing.
That I didn’t just spend five minutes noticing the way Isaac Wren’s forearms flex when he grips a counter, or the way his eyes darken when he’s angry, or the way he smells like something I want to bury my face in and never come up for air.
You’re pregnant. Your marriage is ending. You are not allowed to want your husband’s best friend.
But my body isn’t listening to logic.
My body is still feeling his touch like a brand.
That night, I finalize the guest list for the dinner party.
Cedrick is beside me on the couch, scrolling through his phone.
“Both families,” I tell him, “plus a few close friends. Tom and Melissa. The Clarks.”
“Whatever you want, babe. You’re doing all the work.”
“I thought we could make it special. A celebration before the baby comes.”
He looks up then, something soft in his eyes. “That sounds perfect. Really.”
“Hazel’s coming, of course.”
The softness flickers. “Of course.”
“And Isaac.”
“Isaac.” His thumb stops on the screen. “Since when do you invite Isaac to things?”
“Since he’s your best friend of fifteen years?” I raise an eyebrow. “You invited him to our wedding, Cedrick. I think he can survive a dinner party.”
“Right. No. Obviously.” He laughs, too quick. “Fine. Isaac.”
I lean against his shoulder and close my eyes, feeling the beat of his heart against my shoulder blade, cataloging its guilty little stumble.
Eight days, I think. Eight days until the dinner party.
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect. The variable I hadn’t accounted for.
When I close my eyes now, I’m not running the seating chart. I’m not rehearsing the recording, the speech, the exit.
I’m thinking about Isaac Wren’s hand brushing mine in a stranger’s kitchen.
I’m thinking about that’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard and the way he smiled when he said it, like he was proud of me. Like the scorched-earth version of me - the one I’ve been hiding under casseroles and silk robes - was the best thing he’d seen all year.
I’m thinking about calloused fingers and warm skin and something that feels dangerous and impossible and completely wrong.
You can’t want him. You don’t get to want him.
But the wanting doesn’t care about rules.
The wanting just is.
And I don’t know what to do with any of it.