CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AUbrEE
Collette opened her door at eleven thirty at night in pajama pants and a ratty college t-shirt, took one look at my face, and pulled me inside without saying a word.
I collapsed into her arms in the middle of her living room, and the sound that came out of me was something between a scream and a sob.
It tore through my chest like it had claws, ripping apart every wall I'd built to hold myself together over the past eight months.
My knees buckled, and Collette went down with me, both of us crumpling onto her hardwood floor while I wailed into her shoulder like a child who'd lost everything.
Because I had. I had lost everything.
"I've got you," she murmured against my hair, her arms wrapped so tight around me I could barely breathe. "I've got you, honey. Let it out."
So I did. I let it all out. Every humiliation, every betrayal, every moment of feeling invisible in my own marriage.
It poured out of me in great heaving sobs that made my ribs ache and my throat burn.
My makeup smeared across Collette's shirt, mascara and foundation and the expensive primer that was supposed to make me look flawless for the cameras that had captured my destruction instead.
I don't know how long we stayed on that floor. Long enough for my tears to run dry and my voice to go hoarse. Long enough for the shaking to subside into occasional tremors that rippled through my body like aftershocks.
Eventually, Collette helped me to the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. She came back with two glasses of whiskey and pressed one into my trembling hands.
"Drink," she ordered. "Then talk."
The whiskey burned going down, but it was a good burn. A clean burn that cut through the fog in my head and settled warm and steady in my stomach. I took another sip, then another, letting the alcohol do its work before I tried to form words.
"She got up in front of everyone," I finally said, my voice ragged. "Three hundred people. The national press. Every major donor we have. And she told them all that Tristen was her rock. Her comfort. The person who holds her hand through every scary moment."
Collette's jaw tightened. "I saw. It's all over social media."
Of course it was. Of course the worst moment of my life was being dissected and shared and commented on by thousands of strangers who didn't know anything about me except what they could see in photographs.
"What are they saying?"
"It doesn't matter what they're saying."
"Tell me."
Collette hesitated, her blue eyes searching my face. Whatever she saw there must have convinced her I could handle it, because she pulled out her phone and handed it to me without another word.
I scrolled through the posts with numb fingers.
The photos were everywhere, just like I'd known they would be.
Tristen and Oakleigh on the red carpet, his arm around her shoulder while she gazed up at him adoringly.
Tristen and Oakleigh embracing after her speech, her face pressed into his neck like a lover seeking comfort.
Tristen and Oakleigh, Tristen and Oakleigh, Tristen and Oakleigh.
And then there were the comments.
Okay but they actually look like a couple? The wife is giving third wheel energy.
She's so much prettier than the wife. Upgrade tbh.
Imagine being so broken you can't even carry your own baby and then your husband falls for the surrogate. That's some lifetime movie shit.
The wife needs to lose like 50 pounds and maybe he wouldn't be looking elsewhere.
They're definitely fucking. You can't tell me they're not fucking.
Poor Aubree. She thought she was getting a baby and instead she's getting a divorce.
I handed the phone back to Collette and took a long, burning swallow of whiskey.
"I know it doesn't feel like it right now," she said carefully, "but those people don't know anything. They're just bored assholes on the internet looking for entertainment."
"But they're not wrong." The words tasted like poison in my mouth.
"Look at me, Collette. Look at what I've become.
I'm thirty pounds heavier than I was on my wedding day.
My skin is shit from the hormones. I haven't felt sexy or desirable or even remotely attractive in years.
Why wouldn't he want someone like her instead of someone like me? "
"Because he married you. Because he chose you."
"Did he, though? Or did he just get stuck with me after I couldn't give him children?"
The question hung in the air between us, ugly and raw. Collette's face twisted with something that looked like pain.
"Aubree, honey, no. That's not what happened."
"Isn't it?" I set my glass down on the coffee table and pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to stop the fresh tears that were threatening to fall. "I've been thinking about it the whole drive over here. Trying to figure out when things changed. When I stopped being enough for him."
"You've always been enough."
"Then why did he build a whole separate relationship with her? Why did he keep secrets from me for months? Why did he let her get up in front of everyone we know and basically declare herself his emotional partner while I sat there like a fucking idiot?"
Collette didn't have an answer for that. Neither did I.
"Maybe it was the miscarriages," I said quietly.
"Maybe he started to resent me after the third one.
I remember how he looked at me in that hospital room, after they told us the baby was gone.
He said all the right things. Held my hand.
Told me we'd try again. But there was something in his eyes, Collette.
Something that looked like disappointment. "
"He was disappointed in the situation, not in you."
"How do you know? How does anyone know what's really going on inside someone else's head?
" I dropped my hands and stared at the ceiling, exhaustion pressing down on me like a weight I couldn't shift.
"I thought I knew Tristen. I thought I knew him better than anyone in the world.
But the man I married would never have done what he did tonight.
He would never have kept secrets from me.
He would never have let another woman publicly humiliate me while he stood by and did nothing. "
"He didn't do nothing. He looked horrified when she started talking."
"Horrified isn't the same as stopping her. Horrified isn't the same as protecting me."
Collette was quiet for a long moment. Then she moved closer on the couch and took my hand, lacing her fingers through mine the way she used to when we were kids and I'd had a nightmare.
"What do you want to do?" she asked softly.
"I don't know." The admission felt like failure. "I don't know anything anymore. I don't know if my marriage is over. I don't know if I even want it to survive. I don't know how I'm supposed to co-parent a child with a man I can't trust."
"You don't have to figure all of that out tonight."
"But I have to figure it out eventually, don't I?
The baby is coming in three months. Oakleigh is still living in my house.
The whole world thinks my husband is in love with another woman.
" I pulled my hand free and wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly cold despite the warmth of the apartment.
"God, how did everything get so fucked up?
All I wanted was to be a mother. That's it.
That's all I've ever wanted. And somehow that simple desire has destroyed everything. "
"It hasn't destroyed everything."
"Hasn't it?" I turned to look at her, really look at her, and I saw my own devastation reflected in her eyes.
"My body couldn't carry a baby. My husband had to watch me fail over and over again for four years.
He had to hold me while I bled out three pregnancies that were supposed to be our future.
Of course he resents me. Of course he found someone else to give him what I couldn't."
"Aubree, stop." Collette's voice was sharp now, cutting through my spiral.
"Stop doing this to yourself. Tristen made choices.
Bad choices. Cowardly choices. That's on him, not on you.
Your infertility didn't make him keep secrets.
Your miscarriages didn't make him build an emotional relationship with another woman. He did that all on his own."
"But I made it easy for him," I whispered.
"I was so focused on getting pregnant, on finally becoming a mother, that I didn't notice my marriage falling apart.
I didn't notice him pulling away. I didn't notice her pulling him closer.
I was so busy trying to fix my broken body that I forgot to pay attention to anything else. "
"That's not fair to yourself and you know it."
Maybe she was right. Maybe I was being too hard on myself, taking on blame that didn't belong to me. But sitting there in my sister's living room, still wearing the champagne silk dress that was supposed to make me feel beautiful, I couldn't find any other explanation for what had happened.
I had failed. At pregnancy, at motherhood, at marriage. At everything that was supposed to define a woman's worth.
And now the whole world knew it.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. Then again. And again. A steady stream of notifications that I knew without looking were either from Tristen or about Tristen or people asking if I was okay when the answer was so obviously no.
"Turn it off," Collette said. "You don't need to deal with any of that tonight."
I picked up the phone and saw seventeen missed calls from Tristen. Forty-three text messages. A voicemail notification that I couldn't bring myself to play.
I turned the phone off and set it face-down on the table.
"I need to sleep," I said, my voice hollow. "I feel like I haven't slept in months."
Collette helped me to my feet and guided me to her guest room. She found me some pajamas, an old t-shirt and shorts that smelled like her lavender detergent, and left me alone to change. When she came back, she was carrying a glass of water and a bottle of ibuprofen.
"You're going to have a headache tomorrow from all the crying," she explained. "Take these now, drink the whole glass, and try to get some rest."
"Collette?" I caught her hand before she could leave. "Thank you. For not judging me. For not telling me I'm overreacting."
"You're not overreacting." She squeezed my fingers gently. "What happened tonight was awful. What's been happening for months is awful. You have every right to feel exactly what you're feeling."
"I just wish I knew what to do next."
"You don't have to know tonight. Tonight, you just have to survive. Everything else can wait until morning."
She kissed my forehead like our mother used to do when we were small, and then she was gone, closing the door softly behind her.
I lay in the unfamiliar bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of my sister's apartment settling around me.
The whiskey had dulled the sharpest edges of my pain, but underneath the numbness, I could feel something darker waiting.
A grief so profound I wasn't sure I would survive it.
My marriage might be over.
The thought kept circling through my head, no matter how hard I tried to push it away.
Eight years of building a life together.
Eight years of loving him more than I'd ever loved anyone.
Eight years of believing that we were partners, that we would face everything together, that nothing could break the bond we shared.
And now I was lying in my sister's guest room, alone, while my husband's face was plastered across the internet next to another woman's.
Did he ever really love me? Or was I just convenient, a suitable wife for the rising CEO who needed someone to stand beside him at events and smile for the cameras?
Did he start to hate me after the miscarriages? Did he blame me for the broken pregnancies, the empty nursery, the future that kept slipping through our fingers?
Did he look at Oakleigh, young and beautiful and effortlessly fertile, and wonder what his life would be like if he'd chosen someone like her instead of someone like me?
The questions had no answers. Or maybe they did, and I was just too afraid to face them.
I closed my eyes and let the exhaustion pull me under, knowing that tomorrow would bring more pain, more decisions, more impossible choices.
But tonight, I just wanted to disappear.
Tonight, I just wanted to stop feeling like my heart had been ripped out of my chest and stomped on in front of everyone I knew.
Tonight, I just wanted to pretend that the last eight months had been a nightmare I would wake up from any second now, finding myself back in my husband's arms, back in the life I thought we were building together.
But deep down, I knew that life was gone.
And I had no idea what would be left when the sun came up.