Chapter 10 Matt
Icalled in sick for the first time in six years.
Told Sergeant Donovan I had a stomach bug, maybe food poisoning. He said feel better, get some rest, see you tomorrow. I said thanks and hung up and sat there with the phone in my hand, staring at nothing.
I wasn't going in tomorrow either. I knew that already. Maybe not even the day after that. Maybe not ever again. How could I walk into that station, look those guys in the eye, pretend to be the man they thought I was?
The house was quiet.
Every small sound stood out, pressing in on me from every side. The refrigerator cycling on, the clock in the hallway, the sound of my own breathing. All of it too loud in the emptiness.
Elena's absence was everywhere.
I could see it in the empty hook by the door, the ceramic bowl she made in that crooked pottery class sitting without her keys. The coffee maker was still set for two cups, the way it had been every morning of our marriage, but there was only one of me now.
Her reading glasses sat on the side table. The book she'd been halfway through, some thriller with a red cover, was splayed open, spine cracked, waiting for her to come back and finish it.
Except she wasn't coming back.
I’d texted her twelve more times since last night and called twice. I listened to the phone ring and ring until it finally dropped to voicemail—her voice asking me to leave a message so familiar it made my chest ache.
There was no answer. Had she silenced her phone? Or she was watching my name flash across the screen and letting it ring? I couldn't blame her for any of it. What would I even say if she picked up?
I stopped trying around noon.
She was at her dad's, I was sure. Three hours away in Millbrook, in that farmhouse where she'd grown up, where she'd learned to ride horses and birth calves and turn into the woman I'd married. She'd be safe and loved there. Her father would take care of her the way he always had.
I'd give her a day or two, let her breathe. Then maybe I'd drive out there, stand on that porch, and try to talk to her in person. And then…
Then what? What would I say?
I'm sorry? I didn't mean it? It was a mistake?
She'd taken apart every one of those excuses last night, dismantled them like a surgeon removing tumors. She'd stood in this kitchen and made me see myself clearly for the first time in months. I wasn’t a good guy, and I sure as hell wasn’t a hero.
I was just a selfish piece of shit who wanted to feel needed and didn't care what it cost.
I poured a whisky and didn’t drink it. Just stared at it long enough for the sun to hit the glass and drag up a memory I wasn’t ready for: Elena sitting in that same light on slow mornings, hair catching fire in it.
I set the glass down and walked to the bedroom. Better to move than stand there drowning in ghosts.
My dress uniform hung on the back of the door, still covered in the thin plastic from the dry cleaner.
Elena had picked it up last week because I was supposed to wear it at a departmental ceremony next Thursday.
Some retirements, a couple commendations.
She’d hung it there so I wouldn’t forget.
That was Elena. Made sure the buttons were polished, the insignia straight, the seams sharp.
She knew what it represented, and she believed in the man who wore it.
Standing there now, looking at that perfect uniform waiting for a man I no longer recognized, made my stomach twist. I stood in the doorway and looked at it.
Service. Honor. Duty.
All those words they drill into you at the academy until you start believing them.
I did, anyway. I didn’t join for the badge or the gun or the hero bullshit some guys practically get off on.
I wanted to be the one who showed up when things went bad.
The one who steadied the room, who made things safer instead of worse.
Someone decent and useful. That was the man I thought I was supposed to be.
I looked at that uniform, pressed and perfect, waiting for me to put it on and become the man it represented… and a cold twist of dread went through me.
I wasn't any of those things.
I was a man who’d fucked his wife’s boss.
Who’d walked into that clinic with condoms in his pocket because he already knew what he was going to do.
I’d gone home afterward, crawled into bed with Elena, held her like I hadn’t just broken something sacred, told her I loved her while my skin still smelled like someone else.
Who'd sent heart emojis about ovulation tests while he was planning his next fuck.
The uniform hung there, and I couldn't stand to look at it. I reached out, closed the bedroom door, and let it disappear. Out of sight.
It was still there, though. Waiting, judging.
I went back to the kitchen and thought about Angela.
About Bryan.
About the ticking clock Elena had set.
When was the deadline? Tonight? I couldn't remember exactly what Elena had said to Angela.
I'd only heard Angela's version, hysterical and fragmented, begging for more time.
But there was no mistaking it… There was a deadline and, knowing Elena, it was a real one.
A line in the sand. Tell Bryan the truth, or Elena would do it for her.
Angela had been falling apart last night. Drunk, desperate, trying to kiss me on that couch like sex could fix what we'd broken. She wasn't going to tell Bryan. I knew that. She'd find another excuse, another reason to delay, another way to avoid the hard thing.
That was Angela. She didn't do hard things. She drank and deflected and hoped problems would dissolve on their own. She'd probably spent today on that couch with another bottle, waiting for a miracle that wasn't coming.
Which meant Elena was going to send the footage.
She'd said she would, and Elena didn't bluff. I knew it in my bones, the same way I knew the sun would rise tomorrow and the world would keep spinning and nothing I did would undo what I'd done.
She was going to send it, and Bryan was going to see it, and then—
What?
What would Bryan do? He wasn't a violent guy. We weren’t best friends, but we were close enough for football nights and borrowed tools. The kind of easy, steady familiarity you build without noticing. He was a good, decent man. A person I should never have hurt.
I had no idea what he'd do. And that scared me more than if I'd known for sure.
What a fucking shitstorm.
I sat on the couch and waited. For what, I didn't know. Maybe a call or a text, some sign that the bomb had finally dropped.
The light shifted as afternoon slid toward evening. I must’ve opened and closed the same cabinet three times without knowing why, moved a glass from one side of the counter to the other, straightened a stack of mail I wasn’t reading. Just small, stupid motions to keep from thinking.
Then the doorbell rang.
My heart lurched.
Elena. It had to be Elena. She'd come back, she wanted to talk, she was ready to—
I crossed to the door and opened it.
Bryan stood on my porch.
The evening light was behind him, casting his face in shadow, but I could see enough. The set of his jaw. The tension in his shoulders. He held himself tight and controlled, every muscle pulled taut like he was holding something back.
And his eyes.
Flat, hard, and full of something that went beyond anger and into territory I'd never seen from him before.
He knew.
The thought landed like a stone in my gut. Elena had sent the footage, or Angela had finally told him… it really didn't matter which. Bryan knew, and now he was here, standing on my porch and looking at me like I was something he'd scraped off his shoe.
"Bryan," I said. "Listen—"
His fist connected with my face before I could finish.
The pain exploded across my cheekbone, white-hot and immediate. I staggered backward into the doorframe, my hand coming up too late to block, stars bursting across my vision.
There was blood in my mouth, the taste of copper and salt.
He hit me again.
He hit my jaw this time. My head snapped to the side and I went down, knees cracking against the hardwood floor. The pain was everywhere now. Face, knees, hands bracing against the floor, everything ringing and throbbing and wrong.
I didn't raise my fists, nor did I try to defend myself. I didn't do anything but kneel there on my own floor and take it.
I deserved this. Every bit of it.
Bryan stood over me, breathing hard. His hands were clenched at his sides, knuckles already swelling and split from the impact. He was shaking, but not with fear or weakness. With the effort of holding himself back from doing worse.
"You were my friend."
His voice was low, barely controlled.
"You were in my house. You sat at my table. You drank my beer and watched the game on my couch and I—" He stopped, swallowed. "I lent you my fucking drill last month. You came over and borrowed it and I said sure, keep it as long as you need, because that's what friends do."
I looked up at him from the floor. Blood dripped from my lip onto the hardwood, and I could feel my eye already starting to swell.
"And while you had my drill in your garage," Bryan said, "you were fucking my wife."
The words hung there between us. Simple and devastating and absolutely true.
I had nothing.
No excuse, no explanation. No way to make this right, no combination of words that could undo what I'd done or fix what I'd broken.
"I'm sorry," I said.
The words came out thick and slurred. Blood in my mouth, swelling in my jaw. Pathetic.
Bryan just laughed., his voice hollow. No humor in it at all, just disgust.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "You are."
He looked at me for a long moment, at my pathetic bleeding shape, then he turned and walked off the porch. He didn't look back once.
I heard his engine start, and the headlights swept across the front of the house. Then he was gone, taillights disappearing down the street, and I was alone.
I didn't get up.
I just lay there in the doorway of my own house, cheek pressed to the floor, blood spreading warm under my face. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the quiet. The boiler clicked on in the hallway, steady and indifferent, like the rest of the world was already moving on without me.
I thought about the man I used to be. The man who pressed his uniform and showed up early and believed he was one of the good ones.
I had no idea where he'd gone.
Maybe he'd been gone a long time, and I was only now catching up.