9. Avery #2
“That isn’t better!” My voice breaks across the room, and I no longer care who hears it through the wall. “Do you understand that? If you had stopped loving me, I could mourn the man I married. You loved me and made me unsafe anyway. You made love useless.”
Declan rises, then catches himself before the chair clears his legs. He sits again. “I know I ruined those words for you. I’m not asking you to believe them.”
“Good, because I don’t.” I remain standing until the nausea passes, then lower myself into the chair and take the water my attorney sets near my hand. Declan watches the bottle rather than me. “I had an STI screen last week.”
His face drains. “Avery.”
“I took off my clothes in another room and told a doctor my husband had been sleeping with someone else. I gave blood. I have to repeat one test later because your last contact with Sasha was the morning I found you. Every result is another day I get to wonder whether the man trying to put a baby inside me brought something home from the woman laughing at my fertility app.”
He starts to say he used condoms every time. I see the defense reach his mouth before he swallows it. His hands close, then open beside the timeline. “That doesn’t change what I put you through. You only have my word for it, and my word is why you’re being tested.”
“You took away my choice.” The words have lived inside me since Dr. Evans asked whether my partner had other partners.
“I agreed to sex without condoms because I believed my husband was sleeping only with me. I agreed to try for a child because I believed the same thing. You knew what I thought I was agreeing to, and you let me keep doing it.”
“Yes.” He leans over the pages, not hiding his face but no longer able to hold himself upright. “I knew. I told myself the condoms with her kept you safe. They didn’t. I took the truth you needed to choose and made the choice for you.”
For the first time today, he understands without making me drag him there. It doesn’t make the damage smaller. It only means he finally named it himself.
I sit again and make him finish. Money first: rent, meals, condoms, cash withdrawals, no gifts beyond the hoodie Sasha took from the floor and the key he gave willingly.
Access next: the safehouse, the office, papers, a visitor code he should never have shared, and the dyslexia he once told only Hutch and me about.
Sasha knew I read contracts for him. She knew our Tuesday routine.
She knew enough to say she could handle all of him while standing in front of me half-dressed.
Declan confirms he canceled our anniversary dinner while sitting on Sasha’s bed.
He admits he laughed when Sasha called me predictable.
He says the laugh died when she mentioned the reservation, but he stayed at the apartment.
He came home with flowers from a grocery store near dawn, found me asleep on the couch, and threw the flowers away before I woke so I would not ask where he bought them.
I remember the sweet, rotten smell in the trash and the receipt he blamed on Trigger.
“Did she sleep with anyone else?” I ask when we reach the final page.
“I don’t know. I never asked her for exclusivity, and she never asked it from me.”
“Were you jealous?”
“Once. A man called while I was at her apartment. I got angry. She laughed and said I had a wife, so I didn’t get to act faithful in her bed.”
The answer is pathetic enough to hurt differently. He wanted to own the parts of Sasha that soothed his pride while coming home to a woman he believed would always belong to him. “Did you threaten him?”
“No. I didn’t know who he was. I told Sasha I would stop paying the rent if she brought another man there.”
“So the apartment was a gift with rules.”
“I was controlling you,” he says. “I paid for access and pretended that made the place useful to the club.”
My attorney marks the answer. Declan’s attorney looks as if he would rather be anywhere else and keeps his pen capped. The recorder’s light remains red. Nobody speaks.
“Is there anything missing from this timeline?” I ask.
Declan looks down every page before answering.
“No sexual contact before April twenty-fifth or after you entered the safehouse on October seventh. No other women during our marriage. No promise to leave you. No declaration of love to Sasha. No unprotected sex with her that I know of, though I understand you can’t trust that.
Every meeting, payment, and place I remember is there.
If I remember anything else, it goes through the attorneys before I have time to turn it into a better story. ”
He slides a separate page across the table but stops before it enters my reach. My attorney takes it first. “My test appointment is tomorrow morning. Full panel, with the repeat schedule the clinic recommended. The provider will send results to my attorney. Where do you want yours delivered?”
“Through counsel.” I close the timeline and clip it together before my hands can begin shaking. “You don’t send them to my clinic portal. You don’t ask Dr. Evans to compare anything.”
“Through counsel,” he repeats, moving the appointment page toward his attorney. “I won’t contact your doctor.”
The meeting ends before I apologize again.
I would have hated him for giving one after making me listen to the dates, and some bitter part of me hates him for understanding that.
He stays seated while I put on my coat. The yellow sock stays in his pocket this time, and I know where it sits.
He will carry it and believe the guilt is changing him. Guilt isn’t repair.
Outside, cold air catches the sweat along my neck.
I stand beneath the office awning with the timeline locked inside my folder and wait while my attorney brings her car around.
A grey sedan idles across the street, half-hidden behind a delivery van.
The driver turns away when I look through the windshield.
I take out my phone and photograph the plate. The sedan pulls from the curb before I can zoom in, passing the office without enough speed to look panicked. I watch it reach the next light and turn right.
My attorney stops beside me and lowers the passenger window. “Is that one of the vehicles from the threat list?”
“No.” I open the door but keep my eyes on the corner where it vanished. Declan signed a paper promising not to follow me. Sasha has my family file. The club has spent a month changing locks while men tell me danger is the reason I should surrender one choice at a time.
I send the photograph to Cruz, Gage, and the private security number they gave me, then add a final message before getting into the car. Anyone who goes near that plate tells me first, and I want the driver’s name before a single man in this club calls it protection.