THE VOWS HE LET BURN (Marriage in Crisis #1)

Chapter One

The Reveal

The band was playing our song. That should have told me something right there. Six years married and the only thing that hadn't changed was the song, because Damon still thought it was romantic to keep playing it, even though I hadn't felt romantic about anything in a long time.

"You look beautiful tonight, Mrs. Whitfield." My mother squeezed my arm as we stood near the entrance of the ballroom. Gold lights hung from the ceiling like little frozen stars. Everyone who mattered in this city was here, dressed up, drinking champagne, pretending to care about our anniversary.

"Thank you, Mom." I smiled, because that's what you do. You smile.

"Six years. Can you believe it?"

"No," I said, and I meant it in a way she didn't understand.

She laughed like I was joking.

I found Damon near the bar, laughing with his brother Nikhil, his hand resting on the back of a chair like he owned the whole room. He did own most of it, if you counted the company logo stitched into the napkins.

"There's my wife," he said when he saw me, and pulled me in for a kiss on the cheek. His lips were cold. Or maybe I was the one who'd gone cold. I couldn't tell anymore.

"Happy anniversary," I said.

"Happy anniversary." He looked at me for a second longer than usual, like he wanted to say something else, but then Nikhil pulled him back into whatever story he was telling, something about a deal falling through in Singapore, and Damon laughed again, and that was that.

I went to find Priya.

Priya has been my best friend since we were nine years old and got put in the same reading group because neither of us could sit still.

She knew me before I knew how to be anyone.

She was the one who held my hand at the hospital when my dad had his heart attack.

She was the one who told me not to marry Damon too fast, and then stood beside me at the wedding anyway because that's what best friends do, even when they think you're making a mistake.

I hadn't seen her in three weeks. She said she'd been busy. I believed her, because why wouldn't I.

I looked for her near the dessert table, then by the photo wall where our wedding pictures hung on easels like a museum exhibit of a marriage. I didn't find her there either.

I found her in the hallway that leads to the private study, the one my father in law uses when he wants to escape a party.

The door was cracked open. I almost didn't stop.

I almost kept walking, because why would I think anything of it, my husband's brother's wife's sister was standing in a hallway, so what.

But then I heard her voice. Soft. Too soft for a hallway conversation.

"You can't keep doing this to me, Damon."

I stopped walking.

My feet just stopped, like they knew something my brain hadn't caught up to yet.

I stood there in my green dress, the one Damon said made me look like the woman he fell in love with, and I listened to my husband's voice come through that cracked door, low and careful, the way he talks when he thinks no one else can hear him.

"I know," he said. "I know, Priya. I'm sorry."

Sorry for what.

I didn't move. I told myself I should walk away.

I told myself this was probably nothing, probably some family thing about Priya's late husband, probably about her business, probably about a hundred things that had nothing to do with me standing frozen in a hallway holding my breath like a woman about to drown.

"You keep saying that," Priya said, and her voice cracked a little. "You keep saying sorry and nothing changes."

"It's complicated."

"It's not complicated, Damon. It's just hard. There's a difference."

I put my hand against the wall. The wallpaper was cool under my palm, some kind of silk pattern, gold and cream, probably cost more per square foot than my first apartment.

"I care about you," Damon said. "You know that."

Three words. I care about you. He'd said those exact words to me on our third date, sitting in his car outside my parents' house, too scared to lean in and kiss me even though I wanted him to. I care about you. I remembered how my whole chest had lit up like a match the first time he said it.

Now it just sounded like a knife.

"Then why do you keep pulling away every time things get real?" Priya's voice again, closer to the door now, like she'd stepped toward him.

"Because I'm married," Damon said. "Because there are things at stake that you don't understand."

"I understand plenty."

"Priya."

"Don't Priya me."

I heard the fabric move. A shifting sound, like someone had stepped closer, or maybe stepped back, I couldn't tell which, and that not knowing was its own kind of torture, worse almost than knowing for sure.

"Someone could see us," Damon said, and his voice had that edge to it, that low warning tone he uses in board meetings when things are about to fall apart.

"Nobody's coming down here. It's a party, Damon. Everyone's drunk and dancing."

"Elena could walk by."

Hearing my name in his mouth, right then, in that context, felt like being slapped.

"Elena's busy playing hostess," Priya said, and something in the way she said my name made my stomach fold in on itself. Not cruel exactly. Just tired. Like she'd said it a hundred times before in conversations I never got to hear.

I should have opened that door. I know that now. I should have pushed it wide and stood there and made them both look at me and explain themselves right then, in that hallway, under those gold lights.

But I didn't. My legs wouldn't do it. My hand stayed flat against that stupid expensive wallpaper and I just stood there, breathing through my mouth so they wouldn't hear me, listening to my husband tell my best friend that he cared about her in a voice I hadn't heard him use with me in over a year.

"We should go back," Damon said finally. "Before people notice we're both gone."

"Fine," Priya said. Just that. Fine. Like she was so used to disappointment that one more didn't even register anymore.

I turned and walked fast, faster than I should have in heels, back down the hallway and around the corner just as I heard the study door creak open behind me.

I didn't look back. I found the ladies' room and locked myself in a stall and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet with my dress bunched around me and I just breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

My phone buzzed in my little clutch. A text from my mother. Where are you, they're about to do the toast.

I looked at myself in the mirror after I came out of the stall.

My makeup was still perfect. My hair was still perfect.

I looked exactly like a woman celebrating six years of marriage, and nothing on my face gave away the fact that something inside my chest had just cracked straight down the middle.

"You okay?" A woman I barely knew, one of Damon's cousins, was reapplying lipstick at the sink next to me.

"Fine," I said. "Just needed a minute."

"Big night, huh?"

"Big night," I agreed.

I walked back into the ballroom like nothing had happened.

I found my seat at the head table. I watched Damon walk in a few minutes later from a different direction, laughing at something, shaking hands with a business associate, playing the role of adoring husband so well that if I hadn't heard what I'd heard, I would have believed it too.

Priya came in not long after, from the other side of the room, and caught my eye across the crowd. She smiled at me. A real smile, or close enough to one that I couldn't tell the difference, and lifted her champagne glass in a little toast.

I lifted mine back.

That's the part that still gets me, even now, thinking back on it. I lifted my glass to her. I smiled back. I let her think I hadn't heard a single word.

Damon sat down beside me a few minutes later, sliding his hand over mine on the white tablecloth. "You good?" he asked. "You look a little pale."

"I'm great," I said.

"Six years," he said, and squeezed my hand like it meant something. "Can you believe it?"

I thought about the hallway. I thought about his voice, low and careful, telling her he was sorry. I thought about the way he'd said "Elena could walk by" like I was an obstacle to manage rather than the woman he'd married in front of two hundred people and God and his own mother.

"No," I said, echoing what I'd told my own mother an hour earlier. "I can't believe it at all."

He smiled, thinking I meant it the sweet way.

The band started up again. Someone tapped a microphone and the emcee began his little speech about love and commitment and how rare it is to find a marriage that lasts. People clapped. Somebody cried, one of the aunts probably, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.

I clapped too. I smiled too. I let Damon put his arm around my shoulders and pull me close for the photo everyone wanted, the one that would end up printed and framed and hung somewhere in this house we shared, proof of a happy anniversary, proof of six good years.

But under the table, my hand was shaking, just a little, just enough that only I could feel it.

Priya danced with her cousin two songs later.

I watched her laugh at something he said, watched her toss her head back the way she always does when something's actually funny and not just polite laughter.

She looked happy. She looked like my best friend, the same one who used to sleep over at my house in high school and eat cereal straight from the box at midnight while we talked about boys who didn't matter.

Damon watched her too. Just for a second. Just long enough that I caught it, the way his eyes tracked her across the dance floor before he remembered himself and turned back to the man he'd been talking to.

Just long enough.

I didn't say anything that night. Not in the car on the way home, not when he helped me out of my dress and hung it carefully in the closet like he always does, not when he kissed my forehead and told me he loved me before turning off the lamp.

I lay there in the dark next to him, listening to him breathe, and I thought about that hallway.

I thought about his voice saying I'm sorry, Priya, and I thought about how easy it had been for him to lie to my face two minutes later with his hand on mine and six years, can you believe it, like the whole night had been nothing but a party, like nothing underneath it had cracked at all.

I didn't sleep much that night.

But I did decide something, lying there in the dark, staring at the ceiling while my husband slept peacefully beside me like a man with nothing to hide.

I decided I was going to find out exactly what I'd walked in on. All of it. Every piece.

And then I was going to decide, for the first time in six years, what I wanted to do about it.