7. Skye
— ? —
Skye
Ellen’s apartment is the opposite of everything I’ve known for the past eight years.
Small - a one-bedroom in a pre-war building with creaky floors and a kitchen the size of a closet.
The furniture is secondhand but loved, each piece carrying the weight of actual living rather than the sterile perfection of a designer’s vision.
Books everywhere, stacked on shelves and tables and windowsills, evidence of a life that hasn’t been curated for Instagram.
The couch sags beneath me. My knees are pulled to my chest, and I’m still wearing the emerald Valentino, now wrinkled beyond repair.
My suitcase - one suitcase, for a marriage that was supposed to last forever - is propped against the wall near the door.
The clothes inside were grabbed in a blur while Jayden was still at the gala, still managing the crisis, still treating my destruction like a PR problem to be solved rather than an injustice to be fought.
“How are you doing?” Ellen sets a cup of tea in front of me. The mug is chipped at the rim - a souvenir from some vacation I vaguely remember her taking years ago - and the tea smells like chamomile and honey. Comfort in ceramic form.
My eyes stay fixed on the steam rising from the surface. “I’m fantastic. Living the dream. The American dream where your husband doesn’t believe you when someone frames you for fraud.”
Ellen’s phone buzzes on the coffee table. She flips it over quickly, but not before I catch the notification preview.
“Let me guess. Another article about what a terrible person I am?”
“You don’t need to see this.”
“I’ve already seen it.” My own phone appears in my hand - when did I pick it up?
- and I’m scrolling through headlines with mechanical detachment.
“CHARITY THIEF. HOLLYWOOD WIFE ACCUSED OF EMBEZZLING FROM CHILDREN. THE FALL OF SKY ROWLAND.” A laugh escapes, hollow and bitter.
“They spelled my name wrong in that last one. You’d think if they were going to destroy my life, they could at least spell my name correctly. ”
Ellen sits down beside me. The couch dips under her weight. “Skye-”
“No, no, it’s funny. It’s funny, Ellen. I spent eight years making sure every penny went to actual children, and now I’m a thief. I’m the villain in my own life. That’s hilarious.”
The laughter transforms into something else. Something unrecognizable. A sound that tears its way out of my chest like an animal dying, raw and ugly and impossible to stop.
Ellen’s arms come around me. She holds me while I fall apart, her hand stroking my hair the way my mother used to when I was small, when my problems were things like scraped knees and mean girls and not knowing if anyone would ever love me.
“I loved him,” I gasp between sobs. “I loved him so much. I gave up everything for him - my dreams, my career, my whole identity. I became Mrs. Rowland because I thought that’s what he wanted. And he couldn’t even-” The words dissolve into incoherence.
“I know.” Ellen’s voice is steady. Anchoring. “I know.”
“He didn’t believe me. Everyone watching, and he didn’t believe me. He asked me to explain. Like I was already guilty. Like I just needed to confess so he could figure out how to spin it.”
“He’s an idiot.”
“He’s my husband. He was supposed to be on my side.”
“And he should have been. But he wasn’t. And that’s on him, Skye. That’s his failure, not yours.”
The crying continues until there’s nothing left.
Until my throat is raw and my eyes are swollen shut and my body feels hollow, scraped clean of everything that used to fill it.
The emerald dress is ruined now - tear-stained and crumpled, forty thousand dollars of fabric reduced to a costume from the worst night of my life.
Ellen doesn’t let go. She holds me through all of it, steady and patient, the way she’s held me through every crisis since we were roommates at UCLA. The bad breakups. The failed auditions. The slow death of my screenwriting dreams. She’s seen me at my worst a hundred times.
This is worse than all of those combined.
Eventually the sobs subside into hiccups, then silence. My head rests against Ellen’s shoulder. The tea has gone cold on the coffee table. Outside the window, the city glitters with indifferent light.
“Someone did this to me,” I say finally. My voice is hoarse, barely recognizable. “Someone forged those documents. Someone leaked them to the press. Someone planned this.”
“Who?”
“Adriana.” The name tastes like poison. “I saw her face, Ellen. When the story broke. Everyone else was shocked, horrified - but she wasn’t. For just a second, before she put her mask back on, she looked… satisfied. Triumphant.”
“You think she framed you?”
“I think she orchestrated the whole thing. The anonymous texts. The hotel reservations. All of it designed to make me paranoid, to make me look unstable, so that when the accusations dropped, everyone would believe them.”
Ellen is quiet for a moment. “That’s a lot of planning. A lot of risk. Why would she do that?”
“Because she wants him.” The truth crystallizes as I say it. “She wants Jayden. And I’m in the way.”
The words hang in the air between us. Outside, a car alarm starts wailing, then cuts off abruptly. The building settles around us with small creaks and groans.
“What are you going to do?” Ellen asks.
“I don’t know.” My eyes drop to the pale band of skin on my left hand, where the ring used to be. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
Sleep should come. Exhaustion weighs down every limb, every thought, every breath. But when Ellen finally goes to bed - an early start waiting, a whole life that keeps running while mine sits in pieces - the ceiling becomes my companion instead.
The couch is too short. My feet hang off the end, and there’s a spring digging into my lower back, and none of it matters because I wouldn’t be able to sleep on a cloud right now. My mind won’t stop replaying the gala. The whispers. The cameras. Jayden’s face when he asked what I’d done.
I believe that we need to let Legal sort this out before we make any definitive statements.
Not: I believe you.
Not: I know you didn’t do this.
Not: I love you and I’ll fight for you.
Just: let Legal sort it out. As if our marriage was a contract dispute. As if eight years of loving him could be reduced to liability exposure and damage control.
My phone sits face-down on the coffee table. The screen is dark, but I can feel it there, pulsing with notifications I don’t want to see. More articles. More accusations. More strangers on the internet dissecting my life, my marriage, my supposed crimes.
The temptation to check is almost physical. A pull in my chest, a twitch in my fingers. Maybe someone is defending me. Maybe the tide is turning. Maybe Jayden has released a statement supporting his wife.
Don’t, I tell myself. Nothing good comes from looking.
I look anyway.
The first thing I see is a photo.
Adriana Stuart walking into the Malibu house. My house. The timestamp is from earlier tonight - after the gala. After the accusations. After I packed my suitcase and left my wedding ring on the counter and fled like a thief in the night.
The headline: “Moving On Already? Mystery Woman Spotted at Rowland Mansion Hours After Wife Moves Out.”
My hands go numb. The phone nearly slips from my fingers.
She’s there. In my house. Walking through my front door with the confidence of someone who belongs there.
The thoughts come unbidden, unwanted. Jayden’s body.
The way he used to hold me when we were sleeping, his arm draped over my waist, his breath warm against my neck.
The way he used to make love to me - slow and deliberate, like I was something precious.
Like my pleasure mattered. Like we had all the time in the world.
Those memories feel contaminated now. Every touch, every whisper, every moment I thought was sacred - all of it shadowed by the image of Adriana walking into our home while I cry on my best friend’s couch.
Is he with her now? In our bed, in our sheets, while I’m here wearing yesterday’s clothes and breathing through the wreckage of everything I thought I knew?
The thought should make me angry. It does make me angry.
But beneath the anger is something worse - something that feels like grief for a loss I haven’t fully processed yet.
The loss of certainty. The loss of trust. The loss of the man I married, who used to look at me like I was the only woman in the world.
My eyes stay open until dawn paints the ceiling pink. The phone stays dark in my hand.
Somewhere across the city, in a house that used to be mine, my husband is waking up. Maybe alone. Maybe not.
The photo of Adriana at our house burns in my mind, the image seared there permanently now - her confident stride, her red dress, her possession of everything I’d built. The questions multiply in the darkness: How she got there so fast. Whether he called her. Whether this was always the plan.
Sleep never comes. I lie awake until dawn, replaying every moment, wondering how I got here.
Wondering if I ever really knew him at all.