12. Jayden
— ? —
Jayden
The whiskey is expensive. The insomnia is free.
I’m sitting in my study surrounded by the detritus of a man unraveling.
Documents spread across the mahogany desk in chaotic piles.
Security footage paused on my laptop, frozen on an image I’ve studied so many times I could draw it from memory.
A glass that’s been refilled three times and shows no signs of slowing down.
I haven’t slept in days. Not really. An hour here, two hours there, always jolting awake with my wife’s face burned into my retinas. The way she looked at me in that service hallway. The way her voice cracked when she asked if I believed her.
Do you believe me?
I hadn’t answered. Not really. I’d talked about lawyers and investigations and letting the process play out. I’d given her bureaucracy when she needed faith.
And now she’s gone.
The divorce papers are still on my desk. Unsigned. I’ve been staring at them for days, reading the same words over and over like they might rearrange themselves into something less devastating.
Petition for Dissolution of Marriage. Rowland v. Rowland.
Such clinical language for the end of everything.
I pour another drink and turn back to my investigation. If sleep won’t come, I might as well be productive. I might as well try to understand how everything went so wrong so fast.
I’ve been doing my own digging for days now. Pulling security footage from every camera in the building. Reviewing Adriana’s access logs. Comparing Skye’s real signatures to the ones on the leaked documents.
The signatures are spread across my desk now - a sad museum of my marriage.
Anniversary cards she wrote me in the early years, when we were still giddy with the newness of each other.
Handwritten notes she’d leave on my pillow: Miss you.
Come to bed. Checks she’d signed for the Foundation, her careful penmanship turning charity into something beautiful.
A birthday card from a couple years back that says I love you more than coffee, and you know how I feel about coffee.
I read that one again. And again.
Then I compare her handwriting to the documents the board received. The ones that started everything.
At first glance, they look identical. The same flowing script. The same distinctive S that sweeps upward before curving down.
But the more I look, the more I see.
The loop on the S is different. Just slightly - so slightly that no one would notice unless they were looking for it. Skye’s natural hand curves inward at the bottom, a quirk I’ve watched develop over two decades of watching her write. The forged version curves outward.
And the way she crosses her Y - she does it with a sharp upward stroke, like she’s underlining her own name. The forgeries use a horizontal line, steady and deliberate.
Little things. Tiny things. Things no one would notice unless they’d spent twenty years reading her handwriting.
Unless they loved her.
“I should have seen this,” I mutter to the empty room. My voice sounds strange in the silence - too loud, too raw. “I should have known.”
But I hadn’t been paying attention. Not to the signatures, not to the documents, not to my wife. I’d been so consumed with quarterly reports and investor meetings and the endless machinery of running an empire that I’d stopped looking at the woman I built it with.
When did that happen? When did she go from being the center of my universe to background noise?
I open Instagram on my phone. My account has twenty million followers - industry types, fans, investors who like to pretend we’re friends. I almost never look at it myself; my social media team handles everything, posting carefully curated images of a life I barely recognize.
But tonight I scroll through my own feed. Photo after photo after photo. Red carpets where I’m smiling for cameras. Premieres where I’m shaking hands with directors. Award shows where I’m accepting trophies for films I barely remember making.
Skye is in most of them. Standing beside me, always slightly behind. Smiling that practiced smile that I never questioned because I never looked closely enough to see what was underneath it.
I zoom in on a photo from an awards show after-party. She’s wearing a silver dress that cost more than most people’s cars. Her hair is perfect. Her makeup is flawless.
And her eyes are dead.
I was looking at the camera. I hadn’t noticed.
I scroll further back. Earlier photos. Happier photos. A picture from our honeymoon - both of us laughing at something off-camera, her head thrown back, my arm around her waist like I’d never let go.
Her smile in that photo is different. Real. Reaching her eyes.
When did she stop smiling like that?
When did I stop giving her reasons to?
The whiskey burns going down, but it doesn’t touch the hollow feeling in my chest.
My phone buzzes. I snatch it up, heart pounding, hoping-
Harrison. Legal.
I answer on the first ring. “What is it?”
“Jayden. Sorry to call so late.” Harrison’s voice is careful, measured - the voice of a lawyer delivering news he’s not sure how to frame. “But you need to see this.”
“What?”
“Your wife just sent us evidence. Extensive evidence. Miranda Costello has confessed to helping Adriana Stuart fabricate the documents. The metadata confirms the files were created on a company computer - not Mrs. Rowland’s.” Harrison pauses. “Your wife is innocent, Jayden. She was set up.”
I close my eyes.
Of course she was. Of course she was innocent.
I’d known it in my gut from the beginning - had felt it in every cell of my body when she looked at me in that hallway and asked me to believe her.
And I’d let doubt win anyway. I’d let the evidence and the board and my own cowardice convince me not to trust the woman I’d loved for two decades.
“There’s more,” Harrison continues. “The blocked phone number that sent Mrs. Rowland those threatening texts? Ms. Costello confirmed Adriana was using a burner phone. Same number that sent the fake hotel reservation.”
“The hotel reservation was fake?”
“According to Ms. Costello, yes. She explained Adriana’s strategy - apparently Adriana was quite proud of it.
The fake texts weren’t meant to be believed long-term.
They were meant to make Mrs. Rowland seem paranoid and accusatory.
If your wife had confronted you about an affair before the gala, you would have thought she was unstable, jealous, irrational. ”
I think about the weeks before the gala.
The way Skye had looked at me sometimes - suspicious, wounded, like she was waiting for me to confirm her worst fears.
I’d noticed it. I’d wondered about it. But I’d been too busy, too distracted, too goddamn self-absorbed to ask what was wrong.
She did confront me. Right there in our living room.
And I called her paranoid. The night before the gala, I handed Adriana exactly the husband she needed me to be.
“It was all designed to prime you to doubt her when the real accusations dropped,” Harrison says. “And frankly, sir… it worked.”
The words hit like a punch to the gut.
I’d been manipulated. Expertly, surgically manipulated. And worse - it had worked because I’d already stopped paying attention to my wife. The seeds of doubt had been planted in soil I’d fertilized myself through years of neglect.
“Start a full investigation into Adriana Stuart,” I say, and my voice is cold.
Controlled. Nothing like the storm raging inside me.
“I want her access revoked immediately. Every system, every building, every server. And I want this handled publicly. Skye deserves to have her name cleared with a full apology from the company.”
“Understood. I’ll coordinate a formal termination with Legal in the next few days - by the book, with witnesses, so she can’t walk on a procedural error.”
“Good. But revoke her system access tonight. Every server, every login, every key card. I don’t want her touching one more file before Legal makes it official.”
“Consider it done.”
I end the call and sit in the silence.
My wife solved this without me. She gathered the evidence. She got the confession. She sent it to the board herself, wrapped up with a bow, a complete demolition of every accusation leveled against her.
She didn’t need me to save her.
That should make me proud. Instead, it fills me with shame so acute it’s almost physical. She shouldn’t have had to fight alone. She shouldn’t have had to prove her own innocence to a husband who should have believed her from the start.
I look at the divorce papers again. Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.
My signature line is still empty.
I pick up the pen. Hold it over the page. Watch my hand tremble.
I can’t sign.
Not because I think I deserve another chance. Not because I think she owes me anything. But because signing these papers would mean accepting that it’s over. That I failed so completely, so catastrophically, that there’s nothing left to save.
I’m not ready to accept that. Not yet.
I set the pen down and stand. The sun is starting to rise over the Pacific, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink through my study window. Beautiful. Empty.
My lawyer will tell me tomorrow that I have thirty days to respond formally. That I can contest, request mediation, buy time. I don’t know yet what I’ll ask him to file. I only know I can’t sign these papers today. Not while there’s still a chance she might let me try.
I can’t reach Skye. She won’t take my calls, won’t answer my texts, won’t give me five minutes to explain. But I can destroy the woman who did this to her. And I can give her back her reputation - publicly, loudly, in front of everyone who watched her be humiliated.
It won’t be enough. It won’t fix my marriage. But it’s something.
I grab my keys and head for the door.
Adriana Stuart’s world is about to burn. And after that, I’ll figure out how to earn back the only thing that ever really mattered.