Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
CHLOE
Sebastian says my name like he can still make it mean home. I don’t stop.
The hallway stretches in front of me, too long and too bright, every polished surface throwing pieces of me back at myself.
“Chloe.” His voice is closer this time. I walk faster.
Not because I'm strong. Not because I know what I’m doing. Because if I stop moving, I'll turn around. If I turn around, I'll look at him. If I look at him, I'll remember the man who climbed into a hospital bed beside me while my whole body shook and whispered, I’m here, sweetheart. I’ve got you.
And then I'll hear him again.
Do you think that I wanted to have to hold my wife through three fucking miscarriages?
The words don’t echo. Echoes soften. They lose their edges as they bounce away. These words stay sharp.
I reach the front door with my breath coming wrong.
My fingers slip on the lock once, twice, before I manage to twist it open.
Cold air hits my face, and for one second I almost gasp with relief.
Outside is dark and wet-looking under the porch lights, the driveway shining from an earlier rain.
Jessica’s car sits where I left it, small and familiar and not mine. Nothing feels mine right now.
Behind me, Katrina says something too softly for me to catch. I catch her face, though.
I shouldn’t look. I know better, but pain makes me stupid, or maybe it makes me precise.
I glance back once as I step onto the porch, and there she is in my sitting room, framed by the warm lamp I chose on a Sunday afternoon when Sebastian told me the shade was ugly and then carried it to the car anyway because I loved it.
Katrina’s hand is near her throat. Her eyes are wide, her mouth slightly parted, all delicate shock for the man in front of her.
But behind Sebastian’s shoulder, where he can’t see her, the corner of her mouth lifts.
Not enough for a smile anyone could accuse her of wearing. Just enough.
Triumph.
The sight clears something in me. Not the hurt. Nothing clears that. But the fog around it thins, and I see her standing in my house like she has studied where the lamps are, like she knows which sofa is softest, like the room has already made space for her.
How many times has she been here? The thought tears through me before I can stop it.
How many times did she walk through rooms where I set flowers in spring and folded blankets in winter and cried into Sebastian’s shirt when the third doctor said there was nothing more they could do?
How many times did she sit on that sofa and look around at the life I thought was ours, measuring it for herself?
“Chloe, wait.” Sebastian reaches me on the top step. His hand closes around my wrist.
Not hard. Never hard. Sebastian has always been careful with my body, even when he wasn’t careful with my heart. His palm is warm, familiar in a way that makes my stomach turn over. Some traitorous part of me recognizes him before it remembers why I’m leaving. I jerk away.
“Don’t touch me.”
He goes still. The porch light falls over his face. He looks awful. His shirt is wrinkled, his hair a mess from his own hands, his eyes red in a way I've only seen after funerals and hospital rooms.
I hate that I notice. I hate that I care.
“Please,” he says. “Please, just let me explain.”
I let out a laugh, but it breaks before it becomes anything useful. “Explain?”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
The sentence hits me so hard I have to grip the railing.
Of course. Of course that's where he starts.
Not with why Katrina Haviland is standing inside our house after midnight like she belongs there.
Not with how she got in. Not with why my private grief is being shouted at another woman in the sitting room where I used to fall asleep with my feet in his lap.
That wasn’t what I meant.
I turn fully toward him. “Leave me alone.”
His face tightens. “Chloe?—”
“Don’t follow me.”
“I can’t let you leave like this.”
Something inside me flares, weak but hot. “You don’t get to let me do anything.”
He flinches.
“I came here,” I say, and my voice is quieter than I expect. “I came here because you brought my ring back. Because you stood on my sister’s porch and sounded like the man I married. I came here because I thought maybe if I heard you say it to my face, I could survive whatever came next.”
His throat moves. “You can. We can. Chloe, I swear to God, nothing happened with her.”
Katrina shifts in the doorway behind him. I see it. He doesn’t. She looks small there, pretty and pale, one hand resting on the frame as if the house has invited her to lean.
I look at Sebastian. “She looks comfortable.”
His brow draws together. “What?”
“In our house.” My voice shakes now. I hate it. “She looks very comfortable in our house.”
He turns his head, and Katrina’s expression transforms in an instant. Gone is the sharp little satisfaction. In its place is wounded concern.
“I should go,” she says.
I laugh again, and this time it's uglier. “Oh, should you?”
I step down one stair. Sebastian moves with me.
“Don’t,” I warn.
He stops, but only for a second. “Please, Chloe, that’s not what I meant. You have to know?—”
“I don’t have to know anything.” The words come out clean.
It surprises both of us. I see it in his face, the sudden stillness.
Sebastian's used to me wanting to understand.
I've made a marriage out of understanding. I understood late nights and missed dinners and his mother’s sharp little corrections.
I understood the pressure, the board, the launch, the legacy pressing down on his shoulders like something holy.
I understood until there was almost nothing left of me but his need.
I'm done understanding tonight.
“You said you’d be home before midnight,” I say. “Instead, you were with her.”
“I was called to her suite for a meeting. It was staged. I see that now, but I didn’t?—”
“You were with her,” I repeat, because the details are a maze and I can't walk into it. Not now. “You turned off your phone. You left me in that house staring at pictures of you coming out of her room like you didn’t have a wife waiting for you.”
“I made a mistake.”
“A mistake is forgetting milk. A mistake is putting Jessica’s birthday in your calendar on the wrong Friday and having to overnight a gift because she’ll pretend not to care and then bring it up every Thanksgiving until one of us dies.”
His mouth trembles, just once. The almost-familiar rhythm of my own voice hurts so badly I have to stop. I swallow. It feels like glass.
“You didn’t make a mistake, Sebastian. You made a series of choices that all ended with me standing in a doorway, listening to you tell another woman how much you hated holding me through the worst days of my life.”
“No.” His voice cracks. “No, Chloe. I hated that it happened. I hated that you were in pain. I hated that I couldn’t fix it. I never hated holding you. Never.”
I want to believe him. That's the most humiliating thing in the world.
Some part of me, stupid and bruised and still his, reaches for the explanation.
It wants to take the words from his hands and press them over the wound.
It wants to remember the way he shook the first time, how he turned his face into my hair in the hospital and cried so quietly I pretended not to hear because I couldn't bear his pain on top of mine.
It wants to believe that love can be mistranslated under pressure.
Then I see Katrina behind him. Watching. Waiting.
And I remember that he didn’t say those words to me.
He said them to her. He gave our dead babies to her anger.
He gave my grief-stricken body to her argument.
He let her stand in the middle of my home and speak about my ability to give him a child like I was a defective investment. My stomach turns.
“Go back to her,” I say.
Sebastian looks like I’ve slapped him. “What?”
“Go back to her.”
“No.”
“Maybe she can give you what it is that you so desperately crave.”
The words are bitter, and they taste like blood. I hate myself for saying them. I hate him for making them feel possible.
His face drains of color. “Chloe, don’t.”
“Maybe you won’t have to hold her through pain.” My voice cracks on the last word.
There it is. The thing I was trying to keep upright inside me collapses. Not loudly. Not dramatically. It just folds, exhausted.
Sebastian takes one step down. “Sweetheart?—”
“Don’t call me that.”
He stops. I grip the railing until my fingers ache. “Don’t follow me. Don’t call me. Don’t come to Jessica’s. I don’t ever want you to have to hold me through anything devastating again, Sebastian. Not now that I know how much you hated doing it.”
His eyes fill. For one terrible second, I think he might cry. Sebastian Austen, who can face reporters and board members and his mother without blinking, stands on the front steps of our house with his hands loose at his sides, looking ruined.
I feel nothing.
No. That isn’t true. I feel everything, but it's happening somewhere far away from me, in another room, to another woman. A woman with a wedding ring on an antique table. A woman who thought love was still reachable if she was brave enough to drive back.
I turn and walk to Jessica’s car.
Every step feels borrowed. The keys shake in my hand so badly that I hit the lock button first, and the car chirps into the quiet. The sound is obscene. Too normal. Too small.
“Chloe,” Sebastian says from the steps.
I open the door. He doesn’t come after me.
That should make me feel better. He's doing what I asked. For once, he's listening. Instead, it cracks another piece loose. I get into the car and shut the door.