Chapter 5
Chapter Five
CHLOE
Jessica catches me before I make it all the way through the door.
For one second, I’m upright. My bag is slipping off my shoulder, my bare left hand is curled into my coat, and I have enough pride left to say, “Hi,” as if I’m stopping by for coffee and not arriving at my sister’s house at two-thirty in the morning with my marriage bleeding out behind me. Then her arms come around me.
The sound that comes out of me doesn’t feel human.
It feels pulled from somewhere below language, from the place in my body that still believes if I cry hard enough, I might wake up before I see the photos.
Before I see Sebastian’s smile. Before I remember my ring sitting on the dresser beside his watch tray.
Jessica holds on. She doesn’t tell me to breathe.
She doesn’t ask if I’m okay, because my sister is many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.
She just holds me in the open doorway, barefoot in pajama pants, one hand cupping the back of my head like I’m six years old again and I’ve skinned both knees.
“I’ve got you,” she says. “I’ve got you, Chlo.”
That breaks whatever is left. I fold into her.
She gets me inside somehow, locks the door, takes my bag, and guides me to the couch. I only know this because pieces of it register through the haze: the soft drag of her blanket over my shoulders, the lamp she leaves low, and the smell of vanilla sugar and coffee that always clings to her house.
She sits beside me and pulls my feet into her lap.
“I’m going to destroy him,” she says calmly. “Not tonight, because I’m busy keeping you alive, but first thing tomorrow I’m creating a plan.”
I press both hands over my face. My left hand feels wrong. Too light. Too exposed.
“Jess.”
“I’m serious. I have knives. They’re technically cake knives, but I feel like intent matters more than category.”
A cracked sound leaves me. It is almost a laugh, except it hurts too much.
Jessica’s face changes. The anger doesn’t leave, but it shifts. “Oh, honey.”
“I don’t know what happened,” I whisper.
“I know enough.”
“No.” I wipe at my face, but there’s no point. “I mean before the photos. I don’t know what happened in the suite. I don’t know if there was a meeting. I don’t know if it was staged. I don’t know if he?—”
The word won’t come.
Jessica goes very still.
“If he cheated?” she asks quietly.
My throat closes. I nod.
For a moment, she doesn’t answer. That’s how I know she’s really angry. Jessica at normal angry talks. Jessica at true angry becomes careful.
“I don’t know either,” she says. “But I know this didn’t come out of nowhere.”
I look at her.
She holds my gaze, gentle and unflinching. “Chloe, you have been circling this pain for months.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No. It’s not. But the photos are not the first time you felt pushed out of your own marriage.”
My first instinct is to defend him. It rises automatically, loyal and exhausted.
“He’s been under so much pressure.”
“I know.”
“The launch matters. Starlight Court is the first big thing that’s fully his, and everybody’s watching to see if he can carry what his father left him.”
“I know that too.”
“He’s trying to prove he earned it.”
Jessica’s mouth tightens. “And who has been trying to prove she’s allowed to stand beside him while he does?”
I flinch.
She softens immediately, but she doesn’t take it back.
I look down at my empty finger. There’s a faint indentation where the ring sat for years, a pale memory pressed into skin. My hand looks like it belongs to someone else.
“He loves me,” I say.
“I know he does.”
“He does, Jess.”
“I believe you.”
Her answer should comfort me. It doesn’t.
Because the problem has never been whether Sebastian loves me in the rooms where no one can see us.
The problem is that love can still leave you alone under bright lights.
It can kiss your knuckles in private and then step back into the frame with someone else.
My chest caves around the thought.
Jessica squeezes my ankle. “Come here.”
I go because I have no bones left. She pulls me against her side, and I cry until my body gives up trying to make sound. At some point, she brings me water. At some point, she takes my phone from my shaking hand and sets it facedown on the coffee table.
It keeps lighting up anyway. Again. Again. Again.
Sebastian.
I don’t answer.
Sleep comes in pieces, mean little scraps that leave me worse each time I wake.
Morning is gray against Jessica’s curtains. I’m in her guest room wearing one of her old sweatshirts, curled on my side with a pillow pressed to my stomach. My phone is on the nightstand because at some point I must have taken it back. Or Jessica gave it back. I don’t remember.
There are twenty-three missed calls from Sebastian..
Texts stack beneath them.
Sebastian:
Please answer.
Chloe, I need to know you’re safe.
I’m at the house. Your ring is here.
I swear to you, it is not what it looks like.
Please let me explain.
I turn the phone facedown. For several minutes, I stare at the wall and try to feel nothing. It doesn’t work.
Instead, I remember a hospital room. Not the first one.
Not the second. The last. The one where the nurse had a voice like warm milk and the lights buzzed overhead no matter how many times Sebastian asked if someone could dim them.
I remember the thin blanket over my legs, the blood, and the apology in the doctor’s eyes before she even said the words.
I remember Sebastian climbing into the bed beside me. He wasn’t supposed to. There were rules. But he took off his jacket, kicked off his shoes, and slid in behind me like there was no world outside that narrow mattress.
I had been shaking so hard my teeth clicked. He wrapped himself around me and held my hand against my own stomach.
“Listen to me,” he said into my hair. His voice was ruined. “This is not your fault.”
I cried harder.
“It’s not,” he said. “Chloe, look at me.”
I couldn’t.
He kissed the side of my face, my temple, anywhere he could reach. “I love you. I love you more than any dream we had about this. More than any version of a future. Do you hear me?”
I heard him. I didn’t believe him, not fully, not then. Grief makes every true thing sound temporary.
But he stayed. He stayed through the doctor returning, and through me saying I was sorry so many times my voice stopped working. He held me until the worst of it passed, and when I woke later, his shirt was damp with my tears and his eyes were open in the dim room, staring at nothing.
Even in the devastation of that moment, his love got me through. Not all the way. Nothing gets you all the way through losing a baby you never got to hold. But enough to keep breathing. Enough to let the next minute come.
I press my fist to my mouth.
That man loves me. That man also left another woman’s hotel suite after midnight with his tie loose and her hand on his arm. Both facts sit in the room with me. I don’t know which one is heavier.
The phone buzzes again.
Sebastian.
I close my eyes.
Maybe he didn’t cheat. Maybe there is an explanation that makes the photos less poisonous.
Maybe Katrina called him there for a launch emergency, and the cameras found the ugliest possible angle.
Maybe he will tell me every word, every minute, every reason he turned off his phone while I was waiting for him.
But even if all of that is true, what then?
I'm still the wife who was moved behind flowers. Still the wife who waited. Still the wife who learned about her husband’s night from strangers with cameras.
My stomach twists, and a thought slides in so quietly I almost miss it. Maybe he got tired.
I hate myself for thinking it. I hate the small, cruel nature of it. But once it’s there, I can’t make it leave.
Maybe he got tired of the losses. Of hospital rooms. Of holding me while I bled and cried and apologized for a body that kept failing both of us. Maybe some part of him looked at Katrina Haviland, twenty-two and bright and untouched by all our grief, and felt relief.
Someone young. Someone promising. Someone whose body hasn’t become a place where hope keeps dying.
I sit up too fast and almost gag.
“No,” I say aloud.
The room doesn’t answer.
My phone buzzes again. I turn it off.
Jessica checks on me every hour with the careful expression of someone trying not to hover and hovering anyway. She brings toast I don’t eat, coffee I take two sips of, and a glass of water she points at until I drink half.
Around noon, she stands in the doorway with her arms crossed. She looks like she could say a thousand things and says none of them. Finally, she comes in and sits on the edge of the bed. “He keeps calling me too.”
My heart trips hard enough to hurt. “What did you say?”
“Nothing. I haven’t answered.”
I nod, but the motion feels loose.
“He left voicemails,” she says. “I didn’t listen.”
“Good.”
She studies me. “Do you want me to?”
“No.” Then, a second later, “I don’t know.”
Jessica reaches over and smooths my hair back from my face. “You don’t have to decide anything today.”
“What if he really didn’t do anything?”
Her hand stills.
I look at her. “What if there’s a reason?”
“Then he can explain it when you’re ready to hear it.”
“And if I’m never ready?”
“Then he can live with that.”
I close my eyes. “I don’t want to be cruel.”
“Chloe.” Her voice lowers. “Refusing to make your pain convenient is not cruelty.”
For the rest of the afternoon, I drift. Sleep, wake, stare, sleep again.
By evening, the light changes. The house settles into that quiet domestic hour when ordinary people make dinner, feed pets, help children with homework, pour wine, and argue about dishwasher loading methods.
Lives continue everywhere, offensively intact.
Jessica heats soup. I sit at her kitchen island wrapped in a blanket, because apparently I’ve become someone’s Victorian ward.
“You need protein,” she says.
I manage three spoonfuls before my stomach rebels. Jessica pretends not to notice.
Then someone knocks on the front door.