Chapter 4
KEEGAN
I walk in prepared to win an argument.
My gear bag hits the entry floor, and I call for Evie before the door finishes closing behind me.
The house gives me the low mechanical hum of air moving through vents.
No answer from the kitchen. No movement overhead.
Not even the sharp click of her tools from the studio she sometimes claims she hates working without.
“Evie?”
The quiet lands wrong. She does silence when she is angry, but Evie's anger has a location. The kitchen stool. Her side of the bed. The far end of the couch with a book she does not turn a page of for twenty minutes. This kind has no body inside it.
I cross the hall fast enough that my shoulder clips the doorway. The kitchen is clean except for the coffee cup from this morning, rinsed and left upside down beside the sink. Her phone is gone. The legal pad she sometimes uses for client calls is gone.
Her ring is not. It sits beside her house keys on the island.
Diamond, platinum, the small private fortune I slid onto her hand five years ago because I wanted the whole world to see she had chosen me.
The stone catches the afternoon light and throws it against the cabinet in one clean white blade.
I stop breathing. “Evie.” Her name comes out lower now, aimed at an empty room.
I pick up the ring. It should be warm because it belongs on her hand, but the metal is cold against my palm. I turn it once with my thumb, finding the slight irregularity beneath the setting where she adjusted the fit herself after refusing to let the jeweler touch it.
My fingers close around it. “No.” The house does not argue.
I take the stairs two at a time. The dressing room doors stand open.
Empty sections cut through her clothes, not a clean sweep, which is somehow worse.
She selected what she needs and left the rest as if she expects lawyers to decide what happens to it.
Four suitcases are missing from the back wall.
The portable tool cases are gone. So is the small safe case she uses for the important work.
The framed photograph from our first apartment lies facedown on her dresser. I flip it over. Cheap floor, bad lighting, her head on my shoulder. I don't remember who took it. I don't remember what made her laugh. I only remember wanting to stay exactly there forever. I put it back upright.
The bed is half-stripped. The duvet hangs crooked from my side, and the sheet has been dragged loose and abandoned on the floor.
Evie makes a bed before she leaves a hotel room.
She once straightened one while the fire alarm screamed because, according to her, panic was no excuse for living like an animal.
She started to make ours. Then she stopped.
I pull out my phone and call her. It rings until her voice tells me to leave a message.
“Evie, call me.” I pace to the bathroom and back. Her narrow drawer is empty. My razor sits beside a pale circle where her face cream used to be. “I'm handling Chloe. She won't come near us. I'm home now, so call me and tell me where you are.”
I end the call before I say please. The word presses against my teeth anyway.
I call again and get voicemail. “This is not how we do this.” My hand tightens around the phone. “You do not leave your ring and disappear. You tell me where you are, and I come get you. We talk. We fix it.”
The message ends with my own breath running too hard in my ear.
I text her. Where are you?
Call me now. The second message shows delivered. Nothing appears beneath it.
I stand in the middle of our bedroom holding the ring until the diamond cuts a hard shape into my palm.
The team kept me for hours after practice.
Meetings, legal warnings, instructions not to speak publicly, questions about alcohol I refused to answer.
I sat through all of it because the machine promised facts.
Pull the image. Trace the source. Contain the story.
Come home with something solid enough to put beneath Evie's feet.
She used those hours to remove herself from the house. Then the front bell sounds.
Relief hits hard enough that my knees nearly unlock. I am down the stairs before the second chime, her ring trapped in my fist.
I open the door to a man in a dark coat holding a document envelope.
“Keegan Mattix?”
“Who are you?” I look past him toward the drive. No car I recognize. No Evie.
“I have legal documents for you.” He checks my face against something on his phone, then offers the envelope.
I do not take it. “From my wife?”
His expression remains professionally blank. “You have been served.”
The envelope touches my chest when he extends it again. I catch it by reflex before it falls. The man steps back, says something about the date and time being recorded, then turns toward the car waiting at the curve of the drive.
“Wait.” My voice cracks across the stone entry. He looks back. “What the hell does this mean?”
“You should read the documents and contact counsel.”
He leaves me standing in the open doorway with cold air moving around my ankles.
I shut the door and tear the envelope along the top. Heavy pages slide into my hand. The first one carries a court heading I do not care about and a title I understand immediately.
PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE. Beneath it: Genevieve Taylere Mattix.
The name is hers and not hers. The woman I married, the family she came from, and the name I gave her at the end like something she is already preparing to cut away.
I read the title again because it cannot keep saying the same thing.
Dissolution.
She wasn't asking for space or separation or a threat made in the middle of a fight so I will finally listen.
I grip the papers hard enough to buckle them. The ring bites deeper into my other hand.
“No.”
My phone is already against my ear. Evie's voicemail answers before the first full ring, either because she turned it off or because she rejected me. I cannot decide which possibility makes the pressure behind my ribs worse.
“You filed for divorce?” The word breaks on the way out. I start toward the kitchen, then turn back as if she might be behind me now that I have said it aloud. “You left while I was at practice and filed for divorce. Evie, pick up the fucking phone.”
The message keeps recording after my demand. I hear her from this morning instead.
Stay.
I had an hour until practice. A room full of men waiting. An organization calling. A story multiplying every time somebody refreshed a screen. She asked me to stay.
I press the phone harder to my ear. “I can prove the picture is wrong. I know I can. Do not do this before I get the chance.” The voicemail cuts me off.
I lower the phone and stare at the petition. Anger arrives because terror has no useful instructions. She did not wait. She did not let me come home. She signed papers while I was trying to keep the team, the playoffs, and our lives from becoming public wreckage.
She has made a legal decision based on a photograph I cannot remember.
Chloe can explain the photograph. My first call goes unanswered. On the second, she picks up before the ring finishes.
“Keegan.” Relief softens my name, intimate and immediate. “I've been trying to reach you.”
“How did you get into my room?”
The pause on her end is brief enough that another man might miss it. I have spent six months listening to her fill gaps for me. This one is deliberate.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“Answer me.” I throw the petition onto the island. It skids into Evie's keys and knocks them apart. “How did you get into my room, and who took that picture?”
“You shouldn't be alone right now.” Chloe lowers her voice into the register she uses after a brutal loss, the one that used to feel like a room where I could put down whatever I did not want to carry home. “The team is panicking. People are saying things they can't take back.”
“You put out a statement.”
“I was getting destroyed online.” The answer comes fast now.
“Did you write it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you say we have a deep emotional bond?” My own words sound absurd in the empty kitchen.
Chloe exhales. “We do.”
The certainty in her voice stops me more effectively than a denial would have.
“No, we don't.”
“Keegan, come on.” Familiar frustration edges into her tone, as if I am failing to understand a system we built together. “You talk to me. You trust me. You come looking for me when things get bad. You tell me what you can't tell anyone else.”
My gaze catches on Evie's ring in my palm. “I talked to you.”
“Exactly.”
“That is not a relationship.”
“I didn't call it a relationship.” Her correction is too careful. “I called it a bond. Don't let them make you lie about what was real because the picture got out.”
The photograph flashes behind my eyes. Satin against my chest. My mouth slack. Chloe looking at the camera like she knew it was there.
“Who took it?”
“I can't do this over the phone.”
“You can, and you will.” I plant both hands on the island, trapping the ring beneath one palm. “Were you in my room when I was awake?”
“You were drinking.”
“That isn't an answer.”
“You don't remember enough for any answer to feel right.” Her voice softens again. “Let me come over. I can explain in person.”
“You are not coming into my house.”
The line goes quiet. My house. Evie's keys lie between my wrists. Chloe speaks carefully. “Is she there?”
“Stay away from my wife.”
“Keegan, I have never done anything except listen to you.” Hurt moves into her voice, polished enough that I cannot tell where the performance ends. “If you're angry because she left, don't rewrite six months and put it all on me.”
My hand curls around the edge of the island. She left. Chloe knows it from my voice, or because she always hears the part I do not say.
“You don't call me. You don't text me. You do not come near me unless the team requires it.”
“You don't mean that,” she says, but her certainty has thinned.
“Try me.” I end the call and immediately dial the front office. The PR director answers with my name and an instruction to say nothing to anyone.
“Pull Chloe from all travel and direct player contact.”
“We are conducting an internal review.” Papers shift on the other end. “You cannot make staffing decisions.”
“Then consider it a safety problem. She does not come near me, my wife, or my room.”
“Keegan, we need you back here with counsel before you make any allegation.”
I look at the petition on the island. “I am not coming back today.”
“We play again in two nights. This cannot wait.”
“It already did.”
I hang up before the voice on the other end can give me another order. The phone rings immediately. I mute it and call Evie again, but voicemail gives me nowhere to put the things I still do not know how to say.
The bar cart stands in the corner of the dining room, stocked for men who come here after games and donors who prefer labels older than some rookies. Evie hates the cart. She says displaying liquor like art is something men do when they want applause for having expensive problems.
I take the highest-proof bottle I own. No ice. No glass.
The seal resists my thumb. I dig a nail beneath it, strip the foil away, and pull the cork.
The first swallow burns hard enough to give the pain a location.
The second settles beneath it. By the third, my hands stop shaking.
I carry the bottle back to the kitchen, drag the petition off the island, and sit on the floor with my shoulder against the cabinets.
The island rises over me, wide and polished, built for a house that assumes nobody ever has to leave in a hurry.
Evie's ring waits above my head beside the keys she will not use tonight. I drink and read the first page again.
Petitioner seeks dissolution of the marriage.
“Denied,” I tell the paper. My laugh comes out broken, and I drink again.
The petition lists dates, property language, requests I cannot hold still long enough to understand.
It turns my wife into Petitioner and me into Respondent.
It takes the bed upstairs, the five years behind us, her mouth against mine, her bare feet tucked beneath my thigh on the couch, and compresses them into numbered paragraphs.
I throw the packet across the floor. The pages fan against the base of the island without coming apart.
My phone lights again. Not Evie. The front office. Then Chloe. Then a number I do not recognize. I let it ring beside me and drink until the screen goes dark.
The room loses its straight lines. When I stand, the floor moves before my feet do. I catch the island with one hand and knock Evie's coffee cup from beside the sink. It breaks against the hardwood, white ceramic splitting into sharp pieces.
I stare at the pieces and think of her saying pressure applied at the wrong point ruins good work.
The bottle slips from my hand and rolls beneath the table, nearly empty. The smell climbs into my throat. I make it to the sink before I vomit, one hand braced against the counter. My knees buckle before I am done. Bitter liquid splashes the cabinet and the front of my shirt.
When there is nothing left, I slide down the cabinets. Sweat chills beneath my shirt. My cheek hits the hardwood. Somewhere close, my phone begins ringing again. I try to say Evie's name, but my mouth cannot shape it.
Across the kitchen, the petition rests against the island, its title still upright while the room tilts around it.