Chapter 3
Chapter Three
CHLOE
The house is still empty when I wake.
For a second, I don’t know what pulled me out of sleep.
The bedroom is dark except for the thin wash of moonlight over the floor, and my body has that heavy, confused feeling of having dozed off somewhere it never meant to rest. I’m lying on top of the covers in my sweater and soft pants, one hand tucked under my cheek, my hair caught beneath my shoulder.
Then I hear it again: my phone buzzing against the nightstand. Not once. Not the polite little pulse of a single message. It buzzes again, again, and again.
I push myself up slowly. The room tilts, then steadies. For one soft, stupid moment, I reach across the bed before I think. The sheet beside me is cold. Sebastian isn’t home.
The thought comes in without drama at first. It's just a fact, clean and hard. His side of the bed is untouched. His suit jacket isn’t over the chair. There’s no faint sound of water running in the bathroom, and there's no low murmur of him taking a call he promised would be the last one.
I turn my head toward the clock. 2:04 a.m. Something inside me goes quiet. He said before midnight.
My phone buzzes again, skittering a fraction against the nightstand. I pick it up, half afraid the screen will show Sebastian’s name, half afraid it won’t. It doesn’t.
Jessica’s name fills the top of the notifications, stacked over messages from people I haven’t spoken to in months, a few numbers I don’t recognize, and one alert from a gossip account I only follow because it covers park events faster than our own press office.
The most recent message from my sister is in all caps.
Jessica:
I’LL DESTROY HIM. I’LL PUT HIS ASS IN A GARBAGE BAG, AND THEY’LL NEVER FIND HIM.
I stare at it. For one dazed second, my brain tries to make the shape fit somewhere normal.
Jessica has terrible taste in men when she’s bored and spectacular taste when she’s emotionally unavailable, which means her dating life has always had the structural integrity of a pastry tower left in July sun.
This could be about Miles, the architect who said he didn’t believe in labels but did believe in borrowing her car.
Or Roman, who called his mother during dessert.
Or the one who brought his own protein powder to her bakery and asked if she had almond milk.
I almost type, Which one?
Then I see the messages above it.
Jessica:
Chloe, call me.
Do not look at the comments.
Actually don’t look at anything. Call me first.
I mean it. Call me.
I’m coming over if you don’t answer.
Did he come home?
My thumb stops over the screen. Below those, there are links. Too many. Blog names. Entertainment sites. Park fan accounts. A video preview frozen on a grainy night shot of the Starlight Court hotel wing.
My body knows before the rest of me does. It goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with the room. I open the first link and wait for the knife I know is coming, but I do nothing to shrink back from it.
The headline loads in pieces:
STARRY NIGHT FOR AUSTEN PARKS: SEBASTIAN AUSTEN SPOTTED LEAVING KATRINA HAVILAND’S PRIVATE SUITE AFTER MIDNIGHT.
My breathing goes shallow. There’s a photo beneath it. Blurry, taken from a distance, but clear enough.
Sebastian steps out of the hotel wing in the same dark suit he wore tonight. His tie is loosened. His hair is not messy, exactly, but not as controlled as it was under the archway. He’s turned slightly toward the doorway, one hand at his side, the other holding his phone.
Katrina stands just inside the light spilling from the suite corridor. She’s barefoot. That is the detail my brain chooses. Not the hour. Not the headline. Her bare feet against the polished hotel floor, like she belongs there too completely to need shoes.
I scroll before I can stop myself. There’s another photo. Katrina’s hand on his forearm. His head bent toward her. Her face tilted up.
A caption:
Sources say the meeting lasted nearly two hours.
Two hours. I can feel every minute between midnight and now pressing against my skin. My thumb slips, and the video opens. For one blessed second, it’s silent. Then the audio catches, tinny and muffled. Camera noise. A man laughing under his breath. Someone saying, “Is that him? That’s him.”
Sebastian comes through the doorway. He looks tired.
That is the first thing I see, because I know him.
I know the tension in his shoulders after too many hours in public.
I know the way he rubs his thumb against his first two fingers when he’s calculating something.
I know the way exhaustion makes him seem even more composed, as if his body is too disciplined to let the cracks show.
Then Katrina follows. She says something I can’t hear. Her hand closes around his arm, not gripping, not stopping him. It's tender and familiar. It's the kind of touch people use when they have permission.
Sebastian turns back to her and smiles. Not wide.
Not dramatic. It's not the photograph smile he gives donors. It’s small and tired, and somehow that's worse.
It looks private. It looks like relief. It looks like he is looking down at her in the middle of the night and there is nowhere else he would rather be.
The video ends. My phone drops into my lap. I don’t move.
The house settles around me, expensive and silent. The clock on the nightstand changes to 2:05. Somewhere downstairs, the refrigerator hums. Nothing else happens. Nothing breaks in the room to match what is breaking in me.
I pick up the phone again because I can’t seem to stop touching the blade.
There are more links, more angles. It's the same moment repeated by strangers who found it interesting, profitable, romantic, and scandalous. Sebastian leaving Katrina’s suite.
Katrina touching him. Sebastian smiling down at her.
It's a whole ugly little film festival of my marriage becoming public entertainment.
My hand shakes when I back out of the links and open my text thread with him. The last message from Sebastian sits there, bright and intact.
Sebastian:
Before midnight. I promise.
We’ll talk then. I love you
The heart is red. I stare at it until my eyes blur. Before midnight. I promise. I love you. The words don’t disappear. They don’t change shape into something kinder. They just sit there, proof of a version of the night that never happened.
I think of him standing behind the column at Starlight Court, his fingers around mine, telling me this was for show. Katrina was the face of the campaign. The press wanted sparkle. It didn’t mean anything.
I believed him because believing him has been the framework of my life.
I need to tell myself that immediately, with a force that almost hurts.
I'm not stupid. I know how the world looks at Sebastian.
I know how women look at him. I knew it when I married him.
I knew what the Austen name meant, what his face meant, what his money and power and impossible restraint did to people who wanted to be chosen by proximity.
But I knew him, too. Or I thought I did.
The room blurs and sharpens in turns. My chest feels too tight, like I’ve been wearing a dress with boning dug into my ribs for years and only now realized I couldn't breathe in it.
All the late nights arrange themselves in a new order.
Sebastian coming home after midnight, kissing my temple in the dark, whispering that he didn’t want to wake me.
His phone lighting up at breakfast with Katrina’s name, his eyes flicking to it before he set it face down.
Private meetings that ran long because Katrina’s team was difficult.
Strategy sessions that somehow required his direct attention.
Janine saying Katrina understood the scale of the project.
Sebastian saying celebrity contracts were complicated.
Me nodding because wives of busy men nod.
Me making excuses because the alternative felt too humiliating to let into the house.
I remember the first time I saw Katrina touch his sleeve in a meeting.
I had brought coffee to the upstairs conference room because Sebastian had been working since dawn, and I knew he’d forget to eat until he got cranky.
Katrina had laughed at something he said and touched the cuff of his shirt, just a brush of fingers. I noticed. Then I told myself not to.
That has been my specialty lately. Not noticing. Not asking. Not needing too much.
I look around the bedroom. Our bedroom.
The low cream chairs near the window. The stack of books on my side of the bed, three of them half read because I keep starting stories and losing the thread.
Sebastian’s watch tray on the dresser. My perfume bottle beside it.
A framed photograph from our first anniversary in the Keys, when he’d gotten sunburned across the bridge of his nose.
I loved him so much that weekend it had scared me.
It wasn't the bright, new kind of love from the beginning, but the deeper thing. It was the choice that settled into bone. He had reached for me in the water and pulled me against him, laughing when I squealed about a fish touching my leg. Later, he’d kissed the inside of my wrist and told me he wanted a life full of ordinary mornings with me.
Ordinary mornings. We were so good in private. That is the thought that opens me.
A sound leaves me before I can catch it, small and scraped raw. I press my hand to my mouth, but another one follows, and then I am bent forward over the phone, trying to breathe around a hurt too large for my body.
I don’t know what happened in that suite.
That should matter. Maybe it was an emergency.
Maybe there were ten people in the room until two minutes before the camera caught them.
Maybe Katrina touched his arm, and he smiled because he is polite, because he is trained, and because he didn’t want another scene in front of another lens.