16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
Wendy
In the apology video, Hunter looked tired enough to be honest. Wendy hated herself a little for thinking it. Nearly a week had passed since she’d watched him work at Vesper Hill without him knowing she was there.
She sat at the desk in the guesthouse studio with one hand over the small rise of her stomach that wasn’t visible yet and watched him on her laptop.
There was no soft light, no stage, and no guitar placed in the frame to remind anyone who he was.
He wore a dark T-shirt, his beard had grown uneven at the edges, and when he set both hands on the table in front of him, she could see scrapes across his knuckles.
Then he said her name.
He said he’d written “Twenty Again” for her, from the life they’d shared when they were twenty. Serena hadn’t inspired it, but Hunter had allowed the world to believe otherwise because the story made him exciting again, and he’d protected that lie after he knew exactly what it was doing to Wendy.
He didn’t say Billy made him do it. He didn’t say the public misunderstood.
He explained that the leaked video had cut away the words before and after his one incriminating sentence. Then he looked straight into the camera and said the missing context wasn’t why she had left. His choices had made the false version easy to believe.
Wendy pressed her palm harder against her abdomen.
Her first impulse was to search for the flaw. The careful phrase, the small door through which he could escape responsibility later. She’d spent years listening for what people couldn’t say, but with Hunter, she’d often used that skill to supply kinder meanings than his actions deserved.
This time, she made herself hear only what he’d chosen to say.
He asked people to leave her and her family alone. He said Wendy owed the public no statement and owed him no forgiveness. The new music wasn’t a request for her to come home. When the video ended, the screen went dark enough to hold her reflection over his frozen face.
Wendy closed the page. She could be moved and still remain silent. She could believe him and still need distance. Those truths didn’t cancel each other.
She stood, crossed to the window, and looked toward the main house through the garden.
No unfamiliar car filled with journalists waited near the road.
The podcast inbox had slowed from a flood of demands to a thin stream.
Hunter’s request hadn’t erased the world’s interest, but it had changed what many people believed they were allowed to take from her.
Earlier in the morning, Lily had forwarded to her the one brief statement Serena’s representatives issued, confirming that Hunter brought the completed composition into their sessions, that Serena’s contribution was to the duet’s arrangement and performance, and that she would make no further comment about anything that had to do with Hunter Trace.
Wendy returned to the desk and opened the release page for the new songs. She chose “Twenty Again” first.
One guitar. One voice. The first verse returned Wendy to the rust-red truck, the rain coming through windows that wouldn’t close, and Hunter laughing beside the raised hood after the fuel gauge had finally told the truth.
She remembered kissing him because they were stranded, and broke, and she’d never been happier to have nowhere else to go.
Now the memory hurt in two directions. It belonged to her again, and it could never belong only to her again.
Anger rose, mixed with grief. Hunter had corrected a public lie, but he’d still chosen the form of that correction without her.
He’d released songs about wounds he’d given her and made their private history public again.
She could believe the lie required a public answer and still resent that he’d decided how to give it.
The final chord carried one wrong string beneath it. Hunter had left the mistake there. Wendy listened until the sound disappeared, then selected “Keep Smiling.”
He sang about seeing the camera turn toward her and hearing someone tell her to keep her face warm while he stood under the stage lights and let her pain prove the lie.
He didn’t sing about how empty the bungalow felt without her.
He didn’t ask her to witness his suffering.
The song stayed with the thing he’d done.
Wendy shut the laptop before the next track began.
“That matters,” she whispered.
The baby remained a quiet secret under her hand. Hunter had done all of this without knowing. He’d chosen the truth before knowing there was a child who might’ve pulled him toward responsibility. Wendy let that fact settle without turning it into a verdict on their marriage.
She lived with the correction through the next day.
She answered two client emails, revised notes for a podcast episode, ate toast before tea, and walked with her mother through the garden.
She didn’t open Hunter’s blocked contact, her mind not made up yet.
Sometimes she thought she needed too much time to process, but then she scolded herself mentally about giving herself an imaginary deadline.
Her mother waited until they were under the oaks before asking, “Did you watch all of it?”
“I watched the public apology,” Wendy said. “And listen to two of the songs.”
“Do you want to tell me what you thought?”
Wendy brushed a fallen leaf from the low garden wall. “He told the truth.”
Her mother didn’t rush to fill the silence after that.
“I kept waiting for him to ask for something,” Wendy said. “He didn’t.”
“How does that feel?”
“Like relief.” Wendy looked toward the road beyond the trees. “And hope. Which makes me angry because hope has made me stupid before.”
“Hope didn’t make you stupid,” her mother said. “Trusting your husband wasn’t a character flaw.”
“I explained too much for him.”
“Yes.” Her mother’s answer was soft, not harmless. “You did. But that isn’t the same as causing the choices he made.”
Wendy placed both hands over the baby. “I don’t know what any of it means yet.”
“Then it doesn’t have to mean more today.”
That permission was another kind of care. Wendy carried it back to the guesthouse and made dinner without thinking about anything else. He put Hunter out of her mind. For now.
The first cramp came while she was rinsing a mug after dinner. Wendy stopped with her hands in the water. A hard pressure closed low in her abdomen, sharp enough to steal her next breath. She turned off the faucet and leaned against the counter until it eased.
She’d read that cramping could happen. Bodies stretched, and bodies changed. Fear didn’t get to name every sensation as danger. Then pain cut through her again, stronger and deeper, and ran into her lower back.
“No,” Wendy said.
She reached the bathroom before the third cramp. Her underwear was wet with blood. For one blank second, she stared. Bright red. Too much to explain away. More came when she sat down, and the sight broke something open in her chest.
“No. No, sweetheart, stay.”
Her hands shook so badly she nearly dropped her phone. She called her mother without thinking about the hour or what words she would use.
“Wendy?” her mom answered. “What is it?”
“I’m bleeding.” Her voice didn’t sound like hers. “Mom, I’m bleeding, and it hurts.”
“I’m coming. Unlock the patio door.”
“What if–”
“Unlock the door, honey. Your father and I are coming.”
Wendy ran out of the bathroom, unlocked the door, then made it as far as the sitting-room sofa. Her mother came through the patio door with one shoe not fastened and her hair loose around her face. Her father followed with his car keys in hand, his fear contained in the tight line of his mouth.
Her mother crouched in front of her. “How much blood?”
“More than spotting.” Wendy clutched her lower stomach. “It keeps cramping.”
Her father was already holding out a clean towel from the bathroom. “We’re going to Santa Lucia.”
“Maybe if I lie down–”
“We’re going now,” he said, quiet and firm. “You can lie down in the car.”
Wendy looked at her mother. “The baby could still be okay.”
Her mother’s eyes shone, but she didn’t offer a promise she couldn’t keep. “They’ll check. We’ll be with you the whole time.”
Her father drove fast enough to shorten the road, and carefully enough that Wendy never had to brace. Her mother sat beside her in the back seat, one arm around her shoulders and the other hand locked with hers. Each cramp tightened through Wendy’s body. Between them, she bargained.
Let there still be a heartbeat.
She would tell Hunter. She would tell him that night. She would let him come to the hospital, let him cry, let him press his palm to the place she’d kept secret.
Let there still be a heartbeat, and she’d never complain about being sick again.
She would stop working. She would stay in bed. She would eat every careful meal and follow every rule and want nothing except this.
Names she and Hunter had once tested as jokes came to her. A child running between the vines at Vesper Hill. Hunter on the floor with a baby asleep on his chest. The small sound from the first ultrasound.
Her mother squeezed her hand. “Breathe with me.”
Wendy tried. The breath broke halfway in.
At Santa Lucia, her father took the clipboard when Wendy couldn’t make the letters stay still. He gave the nurse her information, found her identification in her bag, and answered what he knew. Her mother stayed with Wendy through blood work, questions, and the long move down a bright corridor.
In the ultrasound room, the lights were lowered. Wendy lay back with her mother beside her and stared at the screen.
The technician moved carefully and said very little. That silence frightened Wendy more than the pain.
“Can you turn the sound on?” Wendy asked.
The technician’s expression didn’t change. “The doctor will speak with you as soon as the images are complete.”
“We heard it before.” Wendy searched the dark shapes on the screen as if knowledge could force them into meaning. “It was strong. The doctor turned it up.”