Chapter 2
KEEGAN
My side of the bed is the only thing occupied when the alarm goes off at seven.
Evie's pillow is smooth. The blanket on her side is still tucked beneath the mattress, undisturbed except for where my arm must have reached across it sometime during the night.
I shut off the alarm and listen. No shower. No drawers opening in her closet. No bare feet crossing the bathroom tile. The fight comes back in pieces: the kitchen, her tools under the lamp, her face when I said Chloe was easier to talk to.
Tell me you would rather talk to me.
I press both hands over my face. A few hours of sleep haven't produced the answer I should've given her in one second.
“Evie?” Nothing.
I drag on practice pants and a T-shirt, then head downstairs. My shoulders are stiff from last night's game. The house smells like coffee I haven't been offered.
She's at the island. Her hair has fallen loose from whatever held it up, and the dark strands make her face look colorless. My phone sits near her elbow. Hers is in her hand.
“Did you sleep down here?” She looks at me, and the question dies before she has to kill it.
I stop on the other side of the island. The velvet mat is gone. So are the bracelet and her tools. In their place is a cup of coffee she hasn't touched.
“Ev.”
“Your phone started ringing before the alarm.” Her voice is flat. “Then mine did.”
I reach for my phone. The lock screen is stacked with missed calls and messages from the team. More arrive while I watch, one banner shoving the next up the screen.
“What happened?”
Evie slides her phone across the quartz. The headline is red and thick enough to be read from three feet away.
HOCKEY'S GOLDEN BOY CAUGHT OFF-ICE. Below it, I'm in a hotel bed.
Naked.
A white sheet covers me from the waist down. One arm is thrown above my head. My mouth hangs slightly open, my face slack with the kind of rest that isn't sleep at all.
Chloe is curled against my side in a satin nightie, her head resting on my bare chest. She's looking straight at the camera. Her mouth is curved like the person taking the picture said something that pleased her.
The phone nearly cracks in my grip. “This is bullshit.” Evie doesn't move.
I enlarge the picture until the pixels blur, then shrink it again. My chest. Her hair across my skin. The hotel lamp burning behind us.
I study the photograph for anything my body might remember, some trace of her weight against my chest or satin dragging over my skin, the mattress beneath me, the smell of her that close. I get nothing.
None of it settles me. My skin tightens everywhere the photograph says she touched me.
I turn the phone facedown. Evie turns it back over.
“I know nothing happened,” I say.
Evie gives a short, disbelieving laugh. “You're saying that like believing you didn’t fuck her is the same as remembering you didn’t.” I go still. The words are crude, but there is nothing crude in her face. She looks devastated.
“That’s not what happened.”
“Then tell me what did.”
The room is familiar. The moment isn't. “I can’t remember.” The admission scrapes my throat raw.
“And that’s what scares me.”
“I didn’t touch her.”
Evie studies my face. “Do you remember that picture being taken?”
I look at Chloe’s head on my chest. “No.”
She swallows. “Then how do you know?”
“Because it couldn't happen like this.” I point at a picture my body refuses to recognize.
Her gaze drops back to the phone. “The photograph happened.”
“A photograph can be staged.”
The words come out before I have time to test it. It feels right. It has to be right.
My mind drives backward into the road night, the last one before we came home, and hits a wall. The bar after the game. A tumbler sweating against my palm. Another one arriving. Somebody laughing when I missed the edge of the table setting it down.
Chloe taking the empty glass from my hand and asking whether I planned to sleep in the bar. Me telling her I could find an elevator without a public escort. The elevator carpet rolling beneath my shoes. My hand slapping empty pockets outside my room.
No key.
“Chloe got me a replacement key card,” I say.
Something in Evie's face closes tighter. “She did?”
“I lost mine. I asked her to get another one because she was going back through the lobby.”
I remember waiting with one shoulder against the wall. Chloe returning with a paper key sleeve between two fingers. Her saying something about me owing her coffee. Me taking the sleeve and telling her to go to bed. The elevator doors closing in front of her.
“How convenient.” Her thumb circles the untouched rim of her cup.
“I went into the room alone,” I say.
“And then?” She doesn't blink.
I open my mouth, but the memory ends with the green light flashing over the lock and my shoulder hitting the door as I force it open.
After that, black. I can't find the part where I undressed, got into bed, or Chloe came into the room.
There is no proof she wasn't there. The thought makes bile press against the back of my throat.
I force it down. Doubt is a crack. Once Evie sees it, the photograph becomes evidence against a night I can't remember.
“I went to sleep.”
Evie's fingers wrap around her coffee cup. “That isn't what I asked.”
“There is no then. I was alone.”
“You were too drunk to remember taking your clothes off.”
“That doesn't mean I fucked her.”
“It means you don't know.”
My jaw tightens. “I would know.”
Her eyes hold mine. “How?”
“Because I would.”
My certainty sounds stronger in my head than it does in the kitchen. Evie hears the gap. Her eyes lower to the image, and something in my rib cage turns violent.
I shove the phone away from both of us. “Look at me.” She does, but I almost wish she hadn’t.
“I have never wanted Chloe.”
Her gaze drops to the photograph between us. “She looks comfortable for a woman you never wanted.”
“I was unconscious.”
Evie looks back at me. “You hope you were.”
“I know myself.”
Her laugh is quiet and ruined. “You don’t know how you got naked.”
Heat crawls up my neck. She’s right about that much, and I hate giving her even that.
“I take off my own clothes every night, Evie.” I hear the desperation beneath my own logic.
“Do you usually wake up with your PR assistant on your chest?”
“No.” The word scrapes out of me.
Evie glances at the photograph again. “Then perhaps that night wasn't a useful sample.”
The denial comes out harder than I mean it to. “Nothing happened.”
I need her to believe it. More than the team. More than every person whose calls keep lighting my phone. Five years should weigh more than one picture.
Evie pulls the phone back, unlocks the screen, and taps the link beneath the photograph. “Read it.”
“I don't need to read garbage.”
Her fingers tighten around the edge of the phone before she pushes it toward me. “Read it.”
The deep, calm register of her voice puts my hand back on the phone.
The statement is short. Chloe won't discuss private details. She asks for compassion during a difficult time. Then the sentence designed to cut through my marriage and bleed all over the public.
Keegan and I share a deep emotional bond that has developed over many months.
I read it twice. The second time doesn't make it any less insane.
“She's lying.”
Evie watches me. “Which part?”
“All of it.” My phone rings in my hand, and Chloe's name fills the screen.
My thumb shifts toward the answer button on instinct. Evie's gaze follows the movement. I stop before I touch it, but stopping doesn't erase where my hand went first.
“Don't,” she says.
“I need to ask her what the hell this is.”
“So she gets you first again?”
For a second, I don’t understand what she means. Then I do. “It's not like that.”
Evie’s gaze falls to the counter. “No. I'm just the wife who gets whatever's left after Chloe.”
The call drops into silence. Chloe immediately calls again. I decline it this time and place the phone facedown, but Evie has already seen enough.
“You told me last night she understands you.”
The word understands gets under my skin. “That isn't a romantic bond.”
“You told her about our fights.”
I look away for half a second. “That doesn't make this true.”
“You drank with her without me. You answered her in our bed. You discussed our marriage with her.”
“I didn't tell her I loved her.”
Evie's eyes lift to mine. “Is that the standard now?”
“I'm telling you there was no relationship.” I brace my palms against the island.
“There was a relationship. You just didn't call it one because that would've required you to notice what it was doing to ours.” She keeps her voice quiet.
“We talked,” I say.
“At midnight.” Her eyes stay on mine.
“Sometimes.” The word is too small for the hours she's measuring.
Her eyes narrow. “You had drinks.”
“With other people around.” I hold her gaze until the memory begins to shift beneath me.
She watches me for a second too long. “Always?”
The answer catches behind my teeth. Once after a brutal loss, Chloe and I stayed after the others left. I talked until the staff stacked chairs around us. I told Evie it was a team thing because it had started as one.
“Nothing happened,” I say.
“You hid it.”
“I didn't hide anything.” The defense arrives before I can examine whether it is true.
Evie’s eyebrows lift. “Did you tell me?”
Both hands flat on the island. “I knew how you'd take it.”
Her mouth twists. “Accurately?” My palm hits the island, and the coffee jumps in her cup.
I flatten my hand against the quartz and keep it there. “I am not having an affair.”
“There is a picture of you naked in bed with her.” She pushes the phone an inch toward me.
“And I am telling you I didn't touch her.” I push it back.
“How the fuck would you even know if you touched her, Keegan?” Her hand remains beside the photograph, and her voice doesn't rise.
That makes every word land harder. “You were blackout drunk.
You can't remember getting undressed. You can't remember getting into that bed.
And don't play stupid with me, we both know no amount of alcohol has ever kept your dick from working.”