5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
Wendy
The soup on the kitchen island had gone cold.
Wendy hadn’t tasted it. She sat with the Vesper Hill binder open beside the bowl and her phone facedown near her hand.
Beyond the windows, scattered lights marked the hills around the Trace estate.
The glass reflected a blonde woman in a pale sweater sitting alone in a kitchen built for parties.
Hunter’s place across from her was empty.
Wendy: Are you coming home tonight?
Her message showed as delivered. Nothing more.
She’d sent it after telling herself she wouldn’t chase him.
Then she’d set the phone down, opened the binder to the plans for the workshop barn, and tried to remember the last time she’d asked for something without first preparing to be refused.
The answer wouldn’t come. Neither would Hunter.
He’d always come home eventually. That belief had carried Wendy through delayed flights, sessions that ran past dinner, and nights when his staff knew more about his location than she did.
She’d wake when the mattress dipped, feel his hand find her waist, and accept his quiet kiss as proof that they were still all right.
Tonight, she kept hearing cars beyond the gate. Each low engine made her lift her head. None reached the garage.
She could’ve called his assistant. She could’ve asked security whether Hunter’s car was on the property. The answers would only repeat the problem in a new form. Wendy didn’t want another employee to explain her husband’s life to her.
His staff kept sending updates from his schedule.
An assistant had sent Wendy a revised list of rehearsals, meetings, and sponsor obligations.
In it, the assistant asked whether she planned to attend a campaign dinner and whether the publicity team could describe her as supportive of the new tour. Wendy hadn’t replied.
She traced the edge of a cream tab marked PRIVATE COTTAGES.
Her black notes covered the page. Her friend Lily’s purple writing ran along the bottom, full of bold circles and questions.
Wendy had once spent whole evenings imagining how those cottages might feel to couples who needed quiet more than luxury.
Her phone vibrated against the stone counter. She let it stop. It vibrated again. Then again. Wendy turned it over. The screen was packed with alerts. Missed calls, messages, news notices, tags from accounts she didn’t follow. The number above one social app jumped while she watched.
Lily’s name sat at the top.
Lily: Don’t open anything. Call me.
Below it was a message from her mother.
Mom: Wendy, are you all right?
Her stomach tightened. For one foolish second, she thought something had happened to Hunter. A wreck, a stage collapse, one of the awful accidents her mind had learned to imagine whenever he wasn’t home with her. Then she saw Serena’s name beside his.
BACKSTAGE RECORDING CONFIRMS HUNTER TRACE WANTS SERENA GENE
Wendy’s hand became very still.
An anonymous gossip account had posted the first copy.
According to the caption, the recording came from the Hollywood Bowl, after the concert.
The preview showed a gray concrete wall, the edge of a black equipment case, and Serena’s long blonde hair.
Hunter stood partly out of frame. Wendy knew the shape of his shoulder.
She knew she shouldn’t press play while alone. She knew shock made people seek certainty from the very thing that had hurt them. She knew an anonymous account had no duty to accuracy, kindness, or context. Her thumb touched the screen.
The video jerked into motion. The picture was low and grainy, as though the phone had been held near someone’s hip. Serena faced Hunter in the service corridor. Her words at the beginning were cut off. Hunter’s voice came through more clearly than his face.
“If I weren’t married to Wendy, you’d be the woman beside me.”
The recording stopped. Wendy didn’t move. The kitchen lights shone against the phone screen. Her reflection covered part of the frozen image of her husband and another woman. She pressed play again.
“If I weren’t married to Wendy, you’d be the woman beside me.”
Stop.
Her body reacted before her mind could examine the line. Cold moved down her arms. Her heartbeat became slow and heavy. She didn’t gasp or cry. She sat with one hand next to the untouched soup and the other holding the phone as if calm could keep it from becoming true.
The recording began too late. That was obvious. Hunter spoke as though he was answering something, but Serena’s question was missing. The ending was worse. His voice didn’t lower or trail away. The clip simply cut.
There could be another sentence after that. There could be ten.
Wendy searched for the full recording, but every account used the same fragment. Some slowed it down, some made Hunter’s voice louder. One added soft music to it, and another placed the words in white letters across Serena’s face.
No one had the beginning. No one had the end. No one named the person who’d recorded it. That should’ve mattered more than it did.
Her alerts kept climbing. She opened one post, then another, and watched strangers build a complete marriage from a broken sentence.
Some pitied her.
“Someone check on Wendy Trace.”
Some defended her.
“Leave his wife alone.”
Others found the cleanest place to cut.
“Imagine taking marriage advice from a woman who couldn’t see this coming.”
“Couples therapist or professional third wheel?”
A stranger pulled a clip from one of Wendy’s old podcast episodes. In it, Wendy spoke about the courage required to name distance before it became permanent. Someone placed Hunter’s corridor sentence after her last word, turning her old advice into a joke. The comments praised the edit.
Another account posted side-by-side photographs of Serena and Wendy.
Serena onstage in silver, hair bright under the lights.
Wendy seated below in silk, hands held together in her lap.
People compared their ages, clothes, bodies, and smiles as if Hunter’s betrayal could be explained by deciding which woman had lost a contest.
Wendy closed that post. A new copy appeared two alerts later.
One account placed the backstage recording next to her Hollywood Bowl reaction. On the left, Hunter said Serena would be beside him if Wendy weren’t his wife. On the right, Wendy sat in her centered VIP seat while Serena sang Wendy’s rain and empty fuel tank back to him.
The edit made her look like the last person to understand her own life.
That was the special cruelty of being married in public.
Wendy couldn’t have one private fear. Millions of people could pause her face, enlarge her wedding ring, judge the angle of her smile, and use her silence as proof for any story they preferred.
Her old profession made the sport better.
A couples therapist should’ve known. A couples therapist should’ve fixed it.
A couples therapist who’d been hurt by her husband must be either a fraud or a fool.
Hunter had spent months telling her she was too smart and secure to mistake performance for truth. Now the public treated the truth as obvious to everyone but her.
Her phone rang. Lily. Wendy stared at the name until the last moment, then answered.
“Hi.”
“Are you alone?” Lily asked.
No greeting, no careful voice. Just the question Wendy needed.
“Yes.”
“Is Hunter coming home?”
Wendy thought about the unanswered message. “I don’t know.”
Lily let out a breath. “Did you watch it?”
“A few times.”
“Okay. Put both feet on the floor for me.”
“Lily…”
“I’m not treating you. I’m trying to keep my best friend from floating out of her own body.”
Wendy looked down. One foot was tucked under the stool she was sitting on at the kitchen counter. She set it next to the other and felt the cool floor through her socks.
“They’re down,” she said.
“Good. What’s around you?”
“The kitchen.”
“Did you eat?”
“No.”
“Drink some water.”
Wendy reached for the glass beside the soup. The water had warmed, but she swallowed anyway.
“I know it’s cut,” she told Lily.
“It’s cut. That is very obvious.”
“The beginning’s missing. The end’s missing. He could’ve been repeating her words. He could’ve denied it right after,” Wendy explained her reasoning to her friend and to herself at the same time.
“He could have,” Lily said.
Wendy closed her eyes. Lily didn’t rush to fill the quiet. It was one of the reasons Wendy trusted her. She didn’t mistake silence for a problem that belonged to her.
“I don’t know what it means,” Wendy said. “What he said to her.”
“You don’t have to decide that tonight.”
“Everyone else already has.”
“Everyone else doesn’t live in your marriage.”
Wendy opened her eyes and looked around the perfect kitchen. “I’m not sure I do either.”
The words broke something her calm had held in place. Her throat closed. She pressed her fingertips against her lips, but one sound escaped, small and hurt.
“Oh, Wendy,” Lily whispered.
“He let me hear the song with them for the first time. He announced the tour with them. I asked him who inspired it, and he wouldn’t answer me.”
“I know.”
“He left. He said we’d finish the conversation, and then he left and hasn’t come back since.”
“I know.”
“What if the video is fake?”
Lily was quiet before she answered. “Would that make the rest fake?”
Wendy looked at Hunter’s empty seat. No.
The video wasn’t the source of her answer.
The answer lay in the concert program she’d clenched in her fist while Serena walked on stage, in the camera light aimed at her face, in Hunter thanking her for her support after giving Serena danger and fun.
In learning about a tour at the same time with the audience.
In his arms around her in their kitchen while he refused one plain truth.
The recording might be dishonest. Hunter’s choices weren’t.
Wendy had spent years waiting for one act serious enough to justify her pain. A kiss, an affair, a confession. Something she could place on a table and point to without having to explain the thousand smaller losses around it.
Maybe that was why she’d reacted so strongly.
With the video, the pain looked like one simple crime.
But she didn’t need one. For years, she’d treated every injury as a separate case.
One canceled dinner wasn’t abandonment, one silenced call wasn’t contempt, one postponed podcast season wasn’t the death of her work, and one suggestive video wasn’t an affair.
Each choice looked small enough when she held it alone.
Together, they formed the life she was sitting in now.
She’d offered Hunter every softer explanation before asking him for accountability.
His fear of becoming his father, the pressure of supporting so many workers, the strain of having strangers judge his every song.
She’d understood him so well that she’d slowly disappeared from her own understanding.
Wendy couldn’t use the video to know whether Hunter wanted Serena. She could see that the world found the idea easy to believe. Hunter had made it easy. He’d protected that belief when Wendy asked him to protect their marriage instead.
Hunter didn’t have to desire Serena for Wendy to know he’d made his wife feel replaceable.
He didn’t have to plan another life with Serena to have sold the public a version in which Wendy stood in the way.
He didn’t have to speak the full sentence as the internet understood it.
He’d already communicated its meaning every time he chose the campaign and asked Wendy to survive the choice quietly.
She still loved him. That remained true too. Love sat inside her mixed with humiliation, anger, and a tiredness so deep she could no longer tell where it ended.
“What do you need?” Lily asked, pulling her from her thoughts.
Not what are you going to do. Not whether she would leave him. Not whether she believed the video.
Wendy looked down at the Vesper Hill binder. At the cottages, studio, and trails from a future she’d postponed until Hunter had room for it.
“I need to get out of this house,” she said.
“Come here,” Lily said. “Jake and I will make space. You can have the guest room, the office, whatever you want.”
Wendy wanted to accept, but Lily lived in the same city as Hunter’s studios, offices, and staff. He could reach her before Wendy had decided whether she wanted to be reached.
“I think I need to go home.”
Lily understood. “Aria Springs.”
“Yes.”
“Call your mom. Then call me back.”
Wendy wiped her cheek. She hadn’t noticed the tears fall. She opened her mom’s contact. Her mother answered before the first full ring.
“Wendy?”
“Mom.”
Her mother’s breath caught, but her voice stayed steady. “I’m here.”
Wendy gripped the edge of the counter. Asking felt harder than it should have. She’d spent too long making herself easy to house.
“Is the guesthouse available?”
“It’s yours.”
No questions. No pause. Wendy bowed her head.
“Do you want me and your dad to come get you?” her mother asked.
“No. I can drive myself.”
“All right. When should we expect you?”
Wendy looked toward the dark hallway leading to the bedroom she shared with Hunter. “Tomorrow.”
“We’ll be ready.”
“I’m coming home for a while. I might… stay.”
“Come for as long as you need.”
After the call ended, Wendy sat until her breathing eased. She didn’t text Hunter. She didn’t contact a lawyer. She didn’t remove her ring.
She carried the Vesper Hill binder upstairs. In the dressing room, gowns chosen for cameras filled one side, and jewelry boxes lined a drawer. Wendy left them closed. She pulled an empty travel bag from a shelf and laid it open on the bench.
She wasn’t packing yet. Not while shock still made every object seem equally important and equally strange. She placed the forest-green binder beside the bag.
For the first time in fifteen years, Wendy made a major decision without consulting Hunter, his calendar, Billy, or anyone at Trace Media.
She was going home.