3. Bree
— ? —
Bree
The investors’ gala was three weeks after the birthday lunch that wasn’t, and I’d spent every one of those twenty-one days watching my husband with new eyes.
He didn’t notice.
He never did. He moved through the world with the absolute confidence of a man who’d never had to notice things.
Not the way his assistant flinched when he raised his voice on calls, or the way the junior executives scattered when he walked through the office.
Or the way his wife had stopped sleeping in the same position, had started curling toward the edge of the bed, had started holding her breath when he reached for her in the dark.
He reached for me every night. He still reached for me. And I still let him, because some stubborn, pathetic part of me wasn’t ready to stop, wasn’t ready to give up the one place where he’d ever felt like mine.
Eight months, eleven cities. Everyone knows.
I’d seen his calendar. I’d seen her name in every city he’d ever left me for.
And still, God help me, I kept hunting for the version of the story where it wasn’t true.
A calendar wasn’t a confession. Two people on the same trips could be nothing.
I wanted it to be nothing. I wanted, more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life, to be wrong.
So here I was, in another blue dress that photographed well, with another champagne glass I wasn’t drinking from, at another gala where my job was to smile and nod and be decorative.
The big investors’ gala, the wealthiest people in America crammed into a ballroom that cost more per hour than most people made in a year.
Rafael had arrived with me this time. He’d held my hand walking in. He’d posed for photos with his arm around my waist, solid and warm, and smiled at the cameras with the easy confidence of a man who had nothing to hide.
Then he’d spotted someone across the room and said, “I need to take care of one thing. Get yourself a drink. I’ll find you.”
That was forty minutes ago.
I’d made small talk with three board members’ wives.
I’d complimented someone’s necklace. I’d listened to a lengthy explanation of yacht maintenance from a man who kept looking at my chest while he talked.
I’d done all the things a good wife was supposed to do at these events, and I’d done them alone, because my husband had disappeared into the crowd and hadn’t looked back.
What I needed was a refill. Or to look busy. Either way, the bar was calling.
I made my way through the crowd, nodding at faces I recognized, dodging conversations I didn’t want to have.
The bartender knew my order by now. Champagne, barely touched, replaced every twenty minutes so it always looked fresh.
The appearance of drinking without the reality.
Rafael had taught me that trick, back when he still taught me things.
“Thank you,” I said, accepting the fresh glass.
I turned around.
And there he was.
Rafael was standing near the far windows, phone in hand, head bent toward someone. The someone was tall. Blonde. Wearing a red dress that fit her body the way mine never would, all angles and confidence and a beauty that didn’t need to try.
Camille Fairchild.
They were looking at his screen. Their heads were close together. And as I watched, Rafael laughed.
This wasn’t the polite laugh he gave to investors or the distant chuckle he offered at board meetings. This was the real one. The whole-chest laugh that crinkled his eyes and showed his teeth and transformed his face from handsome to devastating.
I hadn’t heard that laugh in over a year.
That laugh, I’d earned once. Four months into the marriage, during the blackout, when I’d made a terrible joke about structural engineering and he’d laughed so hard he’d had to sit down. I’d felt like I’d won the lottery. I’d felt like I’d finally cracked the code to the man I’d married.
I hadn’t heard it since.
And now Camille Fairchild was getting it for free, in public, while a crescent of onlookers pretended not to watch the wife watch her husband.
I saw them. The gossips. Clustered in twos and threes at the edges of my vision, champagne glasses raised to hide their mouths, eyes flicking between me and the window and me again. Waiting. Watching. Wondering what the wife would do.
There were options.
I could turn around. Walk away. Pretend I hadn’t seen. Go back to the bar and get another drink and spend the rest of the night being decorative somewhere else.
I could make a scene. Storm over there and throw my champagne in his face and give everyone the show they were clearly hoping for.
Or I could do what a Salazar does when the wolves are circling.
I smiled.
Not the small polite smile I gave to strangers. The big one, the Texas pageant smile my mother had made me practice in the mirror when I was twelve, the one that said everything is perfect and I’m in complete control and I dare you to suggest otherwise.
I crossed the room.
Rafael looked up when I approached. His expression went through a complicated shuffle. Surprise, maybe. Or the performance of surprise.
“Bree.” He straightened, slipping his phone into his pocket. “There you are. I was just showing Camille some numbers.”
“Hi, Camille.” I kept the smile in place. “Love the dress.”
“Thank you.” Camille’s smile was smaller than mine. More contained. Her smile said she had nothing to prove. “Rafael was just telling me about your farms. It sounds so charming. All those little animals.”
Little animals. Like we were running a petting zoo instead of one of the largest agricultural operations in Texas.
“It’s a living,” I said. “Speaking of which, I need to borrow my husband for a minute. Investor question. You know how it is.”
I took Rafael’s hand. His fingers were warm. They closed around mine automatically, the muscle memory of a thousand public events.
“Of course.” Camille’s eyes flickered to our joined hands and back to my face. “I’ll be here when you’re done.”
I pulled Rafael away from the window, away from the watching eyes, toward a quiet corner near the service entrance. He followed without resisting, though I could feel the tension in his arm.
“What investor question?” he asked, low.
“There is no investor question.” I dropped his hand. “What the hell are you doing?”
His brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Out there. With her. In front of everyone.”
“We were looking at the numbers. There’s a meeting Monday, and there are some projections that need adjusting before the presentation.”
Numbers. It was always numbers. I couldn’t tell anymore whether he rehearsed the excuses or whether they just came that easily now.
“You were laughing.”
“Am I not allowed to laugh?”
“Not with her.” The words snapped out before I could soften them. “Not in public. Not while your wife is standing across the room watching you act like a teenager with a crush.”
His jaw tightened. Annoyance, maybe. Or the beginnings of real anger.
“Bree, you’re being ridiculous. Camille runs the company with me. We work together. Sometimes that involves conversation.”
“Conversation doesn’t require standing that close.” My voice stayed low, which cost me. “Conversation doesn’t require the laugh you haven’t given me in a year.”
“I wasn’t aware my laughs were being audited.”
“They’re now.”
We stared at each other. His jaw was tight. My hands were shaking. I shoved them behind my back where he couldn’t see.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately,” he said. “But I don’t have time for jealousy. The Zurich deal is at a knife’s edge. Everyone is breathing down my neck. I need Camille focused and functional, and I need my wife to not make scenes at public events.”
“I’m not making a scene. I’m asking you to have some basic awareness of how things look.”
“How things look isn’t my primary concern right now.”
“Clearly.”
His phone buzzed. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen. His expression shifted toward what was almost relief.
“I have to take this,” he said.
“Of course you do.”
“We’ll finish this conversation at home.”
“Will we?”
He was already walking away. Already lifting the phone to his ear. Already forgetting I existed.
I stood there in the quiet corner and watched him disappear into the crowd, and I thought about following him. I thought about grabbing his arm and forcing him to look at me, to really look at me, to see the woman he’d married instead of the problem he needed to manage.
I didn’t.
Instead, I walked back to the bar. I got another champagne glass and positioned myself near a group of board members’ wives and pretended to listen to their conversation about summer homes.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. I tracked Rafael’s movements through the room. He talked to the CFO, shook hands with an investor, and posed for a photo with the board chairman.
And then he circled back to Camille.
They were by the windows again. Different window, same posture. Heads together. Voices low. Whatever they were discussing, it was intense. Camille’s hand was on his arm.
I watched him lean in closer.
I watched her laugh at whatever he’d said.
My marriage was becoming a spectator sport, and I felt the last thread of hope I’d been clutching start to fray.
I set down my champagne glass and gathered my smile, and I crossed the room one more time, because I was Brianna Salazar and I didn’t run away from fights.
“Rafael.”
He looked up. Camille’s hand dropped from his arm.
“I need to speak with you,” I said. “Now.”
“Bree, I’m in the middle of-”
“Now.”
My voice must’ve reached him. He glanced at Camille, then back at me, and nodded.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t wait for her response. I walked toward the service entrance, and he followed, and this time I didn’t stop until we were in the hallway, alone, with the muffled sound of the party behind us.
“This is getting out of hand,” I said.
“Bree-”
“No. Listen to me. I’ve tried to be patient.
I’ve tried to be understanding. I’ve tried to tell myself that you’re busy, that the company is demanding, that I’m imagining things.
But I’m not imagining the way you look at her.
I’m not imagining the way you laugh at her jokes while you’ve forgotten how to laugh at mine.
And I’m not imagining the fact that every single person in that room is watching your wife watch you choose someone else, and you don’t even care. ”
He stared at me. His expression was unreadable.
“I’m not choosing anyone,” he said. “Camille is a colleague. A valuable one. And I need her focused on Zurich, not worried about my wife’s unfounded jealousy.”
“Unfounded.”
“Yes. Unfounded. I’ve never been inappropriate with Camille. I’ve never touched her. I’ve never looked at her the way you’re implying. And frankly, the fact that you think I would-”
A crash from the ballroom. Someone screamed.
Rafael’s head snapped toward the door. He was moving before I could process what was happening, back through the service entrance, into the crowd, pushing toward the commotion.
I followed. Of course I followed.
The crowd had parted to reveal Camille on the ground, one hand clutching her chest, the other reaching up toward nothing. Her face was pale, her breathing shallow. Someone was calling for a doctor.
“Camille.” Rafael dropped to his knees beside her. “Camille, what happened?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was thin. Frightened. “I felt dizzy, and then my chest… Rafael, I can’t breathe.”
His hands found hers. He was cradling her wrist, checking her pulse, doing all the things a concerned friend would do when someone collapsed at a party.
“Someone call an ambulance,” he said. “She needs medical attention.”
I stood at the edge of the circle and watched my husband hold another woman’s hand in front of the whole ballroom.
His words from thirty seconds ago echoed in my head. I’ve never touched her. I’ve never looked at her the way you’re implying.
He was looking at her now. The way you look at someone you care about. The way you look at someone who matters.
He’d never looked at me that way. Not once in the whole marriage.
Camille’s eyes fluttered open. They found mine over Rafael’s shoulder. And for just a second, one fraction of a heartbeat, her expression changed.
The fear and the pain disappeared, and a cold, satisfied look flickered in their place.
Then her eyes rolled back, and she was gasping again, and Rafael was barking orders at the crowd, and the moment was gone.
But I’d seen it.
The paramedics arrived. They loaded Camille onto a stretcher. Rafael announced he’d follow her to the hospital, to make sure she was all right, and no one questioned it, because why would they? He was her boss, a good man who cared about his employees.
He left without looking at me.
He left without saying goodbye.
He left with his hand still reaching toward her stretcher, and the crowd watched him go with the sympathy reserved for worried friends, and no one noticed the wife standing alone in the middle of the ballroom with her champagne glass empty and her heart emptying out the same way.
I found the car service and gave them my address, and then I sat in the back seat with my hands folded in my lap and my face perfectly composed, because there were still cameras, there were always cameras, and Brianna Grant didn’t fall apart in public.
The penthouse was dark when I got home. I didn’t turn on the lights.
My heels came off in the hallway and went neatly by the door. In the bedroom I unzipped the blue dress that photographed well and let it fall to the floor.
I stood in front of the window in my underwear and looked out at the city and thought about the expression on Camille’s face. That flicker of satisfaction. That tiny triumphant smile before the mask slammed back down.
She’d faked it.
I knew it the way I knew my own name. She’d faked the whole thing. The dizziness, the chest pain, the gasping collapse. She’d manufactured a crisis at the exact moment I was confronting my husband, and he’d fallen for it completely.
He’d left his wife mid-sentence to catch her.
He’d chosen her, in front of everyone, without a second thought.
And he hadn’t even looked back to see if I was still there.