Wyatt #2
I remembered pride. Remembered what it felt like to stand beside someone and mean it when you said those words. Remembered believing that actions matched intentions, that people meant what they said. Remembered the exact moment I learned otherwise.
The heater finally kicked in, warm air blasting my face.
I stared at his comment. Four words. Public performance. Another brick in the wall he'd built around his perfect life.
I closed Instagram. Set the phone down.
Friday, she'd walk into that masquerade wearing whatever expensive dress her mother picked out, clinging to her father's arm like he hung the moon.
And I'd be there. Watching.
The memory came fast and unbidden. The night I came home early from Calgary, snow had been falling for hours. Thick, wet flakes that turned the windshield wipers into metronomes counting down to disaster.
I'd caught a red-eye after our game got postponed. Equipment failure. Faulty boards. The kind of mundane detail that should've been forgettable but instead became the marker I used to divide my life into before and after.
My house sat dark when I pulled into the driveway. Just after eleven. Late enough that most lights should've been off, but the bedroom window glowed warm against the black winter sky.
I didn't think about it. Just grabbed my bag from the trunk and headed inside.
The front door was unlocked.
That should've been the first warning. Barbara always locked the door. Always. Obsessive about it, checking twice before bed, testing the handle even after she'd heard the bolt click.
I dropped my bag in the entryway. Kicked off my boots. The house held that particular silence that meant someone was home but pretending not to be—breath held, movement frozen, waiting for the danger to pass.
"Barbara?"
No answer.
Laughter drifted down from upstairs. Not her usual laugh—that controlled, measured sound she used at charity functions and investor dinners. This was different. Higher. Breathless.
I took the stairs two at a time.
The bedroom door stood half-open. Light spilled into the hallway, cutting a triangle across the hardwood.
I pushed it wider.
He stood by the bed. Shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, tie discarded on the floor beside his shoes. His wedding ring caught the lamplight—gold band, expensive, probably custom-made to match the one his wife wore at family dinners.
Barbara sat on the edge of our bed. Her robe hung loose. Her hair—always perfect, always styled—fell messy around her shoulders.
They both turned.
Thomas Harrington looked at me the way someone looks at an interruption. Mild annoyance. Nothing more.
Barbara's expression cycled through three stages in the space of a breath: confusion, then panic, then something calculated and cold.
"Wyatt." She stood, tightening the robe. "You're home early."
I couldn't speak. Couldn't move. Just stood there like an idiot while my brain tried to reconcile what my eyes were showing me with what I'd believed about my life five minutes ago.
Thomas reached for his shirt, buttoning it with the same casual precision he probably used to sign contracts. "This isn't what it looks like."
That broke the paralysis. "Get out."
My voice came out quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that preceded violence.
Barbara moved between us. "Wyatt, let me explain—"
"Get. Out."
Thomas finished with his buttons. Collected his tie. Slipped into his shoes like he was leaving a business meeting that had run long.
"We'll talk when you've calmed down," he said.
He walked past me. Brushed my shoulder. His cologne—expensive, subtle—lingered in his wake.
I turned to follow him, but Barbara grabbed my arm. "Don't." Her nails dug into my bicep. "You'll make this worse."
"Worse?"
The word tasted like ashes.
She pulled her hand back, and I saw it then—the shift. The performance clicking into place. Tears welled in her eyes, perfectly timed, perfectly calibrated.
"You're always gone," she whispered. "You're never here. What did you expect?"
What came after blurred together into a nightmare I couldn't wake from.
Lawyers. Depositions. Media vultures circling for scraps.
Barbara's narrative: Wyatt's jealousy. Wyatt's paranoia. Wyatt's anger issues. He couldn't handle my success. He became controlling. Unstable.
Thomas backed every word. Testified as a character witness. Said he'd been counseling Barbara through a difficult marriage, that I'd threatened him, that he feared for her safety.
The league launched an investigation. My sponsors dropped me one by one—first the sports drink company, then the equipment deal, then the charity I'd worked with for six years.
Barbara walked away with the house, half my assets, and public sympathy.
Thomas remained untouched. His reputation intact. His marriage solid. His daughter still smiling in family photos posted to social media.
And I became the cautionary tale: the volatile athlete who couldn't keep his temper, his career, or his wife.
He destroyed everything. Then smiled in public like nothing happened. Like he hadn't burned my life down and walked away without a single scar.
I stood, shaking off the memory like water from a coat.
The parking lot stretched empty under those sickly yellow lights. My boots crunched against salt-scattered pavement as I walked toward the exit, keys jangling in my pocket.
The cold bit through my jacket. December in Detroit—brutal, honest, exactly what it promised to be.
Unlike people.
You don't destroy a man by attacking him directly. That's what amateurs did. What hotheads and idiots with more rage than strategy did.
No.
You take what he values.
You make him watch it slip away, piece by piece, until he's standing in the rubble of everything he thought was untouchable.
I finally put the car into gear slowly, like I was remembering how to do it.
I didn't hate her.
That was the truth I kept circling back to, testing like a loose tooth. Chastity Harrington with her big eyes and her volunteer work and her stupid Instagram captions about family meaning everything.
She didn't know. Wasn't complicit. Just existed in the protective bubble her father had built around her, insulated from every ugly truth he'd buried to maintain his empire.
Collateral.
That was the word that fit.
She was collateral in a war she didn't know was being fought.
I told myself that made it acceptable. Made it necessary.
I pulled the second phone from my glove compartment—burner, untraceable, bought with cash at a gas station three towns over. The screen glowed pale in the darkness.
I scrolled through my contacts. Found the name I needed.
Marcus worked freelance. Sold to the highest bidder. Paparazzi with just enough desperation to take jobs that skirted ethical lines without quite crossing into illegal.
We'd worked together before. He knew not to ask questions.
My thumbs moved across the screen.
Garden entrance. Midnight.
Masked couple.
You'll know what you're looking for.
I read it twice. Hit send.
The message went through with a soft whoosh.
No names. No details. Nothing that could trace back if this went sideways.
But it wouldn't.
They'd show. Thomas and his business partner, sneaking away from the fundraiser like teenagers, thinking their masks and the darkness made them invisible. Thinking they were untouchable.
I set the phone on the passenger seat., watching my breath fog the windshield.
Friday couldn't come fast enough.