Chapter 4 #2
“It was marketing copy. They asked if I had a client profile they could use, and I gave them language based on a text you sent me. No one knew it was you.”
“And yet,” Annie said. “It’s here.” She gestured to the screen.
Brooke looked at her.
Nathan flinched, but he did not argue.
Annie took back her phone. Her hands were cold. “How long have you been planning our divorce, Brooke?”
“I have not been planning anything.”
“You contacted a separation consultancy two years ago.”
“For advice.”
“You sent me to your cousin for therapy.”
“For support.”
“You coached Nathan to disengage when I reacted.”
“To protect him.”
“You came to my office and told me he was exhausted.”
“Because he is.”
“You came here after he asked for distance.”
“Because you are isolating him.”
Annie laughed, and this time it broke a little. “Every single thing you do has a noble explanation.”
Brooke’s eyes hardened. “Because some of us are capable of caring about him without making it about ourselves.”
The sentence landed, but not the way Brooke intended.
Nathan looked at her as if he had never seen her clearly until that moment. “You think Annie’s pain is selfish.”
Brooke turned to him. “I think her pain has consumed you.”
“My wife is allowed to need me.”
“So was I.”
The foyer went silent.
Brooke seemed to hear herself a second too late.
Annie looked between them. Nathan had gone very still.
“So was I,” he repeated.
Brooke’s face tightened. She looked younger suddenly. Not innocent. Exposed.
“I didn’t mean?—”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “You did.”
Brooke’s hands curled at her sides. “You have no idea what it was like watching you disappear into this marriage.”
Annie felt the words like a hand around her throat.
Nathan’s voice was quiet. “Disappear?”
“You stopped calling. You stopped asking me before making decisions. You bought this house with her. You changed holiday plans for her. Every emergency, every win, every bad day, everything that used to come through me went to her first.”
“She’s my wife.”
“And I was there when you had nothing.”
The room seemed to tremble with the force of everything Brooke had never said so plainly.
Nathan looked sick.
“I know,” he said.
“No, you don’t. You say it like a line in a speech.
I was there. I ate ramen with you in that disgusting apartment.
I loaned you money when your account was overdrawn.
I talked you down when your father called you useless.
I sat in emergency rooms with your mother.
I helped you name the company. I found your first investor.
I watched you become someone, and then Annie got the finished version and expected me to clap from the cheap seats. ”
Annie stood motionless. There it was. Not love, exactly. Not only jealousy. Ownership, aged into grievance. Brooke believed she had invested in Nathan before he became valuable, and marriage had converted her stake into nothing.
Nathan looked at Brooke for a long time. “You never told me you felt that way.”
Brooke’s laugh was wet and bitter. “Would it have mattered?”
“Yes.”
“No. You would have hugged me, told me I was family, and gone upstairs to her.”
Annie’s chest ached at the cruelty of hearing the truth said with such contempt.
Because some of it was true. Nathan had given Brooke closeness without naming its limits.
He had accepted her devotion because it made his life easier.
He had let Annie bear the discomfort of enforcing boundaries he should have enforced himself.
Nathan seemed to know it. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Brooke’s eyes filled again, but this time the tears looked real. “Don’t.”
“I am.”
“Don’t apologize to me like this is over.”
“It is,” Nathan said.
Brooke stared at him.
Nathan took one step back, placing himself beside Annie instead of between them. “Whatever this has been, it ends now.”
Brooke’s face went blank.
Annie felt Nathan’s arm brush hers. He did not reach for her. He did not claim an intimacy he had not yet earned. He simply stood beside her.
Brooke looked at the two of them, and something ugly moved beneath her composure.
“You think standing next to her fixes it?” she asked. “You think she’ll forgive you because you finally noticed the fire after I pointed out the smoke?”
“You didn’t point out smoke,” Annie said. “You poured gasoline and called it an act of God.”
Brooke’s eyes snapped to hers. “You don’t deserve him.”
Nathan’s voice cut across hers. “Do not.”
Brooke ignored him. “You never did. You loved what he became. The money. The status. I loved him when loving him cost something.”
Annie stepped forward before Nathan could answer.
“No,” she said. “You loved being necessary. If you loved him, you would want him to be happy.”
Brooke’s hand struck Annie across the face so fast the sound seemed to arrive before the pain.
For one stunned second, no one moved.
Then Nathan grabbed Brooke’s wrist and pulled her back.
“Get out,” he said.
Brooke stared at her own hand as if it belonged to someone else.
Annie’s cheek burned. She lifted her fingers to it slowly. The skin was hot beneath her touch.
Brooke looked at Nathan. “Nate?—”
“Get out of my house.”
The words were low and final.
Brooke’s mouth trembled. “After everything?”
“After everything,” he said.
She snatched her handbag from the bench. At the door, she turned back one last time. The tears were gone. Whatever grief had broken through had hardened into something colder.
“You’re going to need me,” she said to Nathan. “Both of you will.” Then she left, the door slamming behind her. The house fell quiet.
Nathan stood with his hand still half-raised, as if his body had not caught up to Brooke’s absence. Annie lowered herself onto the bench by the stairs before her knees could fail. Nathan turned toward her. “Annie.”
“Don’t touch me.”
He stopped at once.
She appreciated that. Hated that she had to.
“I’m calling the police,” he said.
“No.”
“She hit you.”
“And if we call the police tonight, Brooke becomes the shattered best friend who made one terrible mistake after being cruelly cut off. She’ll use it.”
Nathan’s jaw worked. “Then what?”
Annie looked up at him. Her cheek throbbed. Her marriage sat around them in ruins, not because Brooke had destroyed it alone, but because Nathan had opened doors and called them harmless.
“Now,” Annie said, “you tell me everything.”
He went very still.
“Every conversation. Every time you talked to her about leaving me. Every time she suggested a therapist, a separation, a weekend apart, a lawyer, a consultant. Every time you let her speak about me like I was an illness you needed treatment for.”
Pain crossed his face.
“Annie—”
“No. You don’t get to be tired now. You don’t get to be overwhelmed. I have been drowning in this for months while you stood on the dock taking advice from the person holding my head under.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, something in him had changed. “You’re right,” he said.
The words did not soothe her. They only made her sadder.
Nathan sat on the bottom stair, several feet away. He looked toward the front door, then down at his hands. “Two years ago,” he began, “after the first IVF cycle failed, I told Brooke I didn’t know how to help you.”