6. Bree
— ? —
Bree
The studio lights were hotter than I’d expected.
I sat in the guest chair next to Rafael, my hands folded in my lap, my smile locked in place.
The silver dress had been altered overnight after I’d left the fitting room.
Ramona had finished the hem without asking why I’d disappeared.
Katherine had arranged the car. Everyone had done their jobs, and now here I was, doing mine.
National television, and every household in the country. The morning show that every CEO in America wanted to appear on, and Rafael had finally landed the slot.
My job was to sit here and look supportive.
The makeup artist had spent forty-five minutes on my face this morning. Foundation, concealer, powder, blush. Layers of product designed to make me look natural under lights that washed out everything real. She’d asked me to smile so she could check the color on my teeth.
“Beautiful,” she’d said. “You’ll photograph beautifully.”
I’d nodded. I’d thanked her. I’d sat still while she perfected the illusion.
Now I was here, under lights that made my skin prickle with heat, watching my husband prepare to charm a nation of strangers.
“Thirty seconds,” someone called from behind the cameras.
Rafael straightened his tie. He glanced at me. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“You look great.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t look at him.
“Just smile and follow my lead. It’ll be easy.”
Easy. Sure it would be.
The floor director counted down with his fingers. Five, four, three, two.
The red light on the camera blinked on.
“And we’re back with Rafael Grant, CEO of Grant Foods, and his lovely wife Brianna.
” The anchor, a woman named Sandra Ellison with perfect teeth and a voice calibrated for warmth, turned toward us with the practiced ease of someone who’d done this ten thousand times.
“Now, Rafael, we’ve talked a lot about the business side of things.
The expansion into sustainable sourcing, the new distribution centers, the Zurich acquisition everyone’s buzzing about.
But our viewers want to know about the man behind the empire.
How do you balance running one of the largest food conglomerates in the world with being a husband? ”
I felt Rafael shift beside me. His posture opened up and his shoulders relaxed. This was his element. Cameras and audiences and questions he could spin into gold.
Rafael laughed. The whole-chest laugh I hadn’t earned in over a year, the one that used to make my heart skip, back when I thought anything about us was genuine.
“Well, Sandra, I’ll be honest with you. The balance is a work in progress.”
“I think we can all relate to that.”
“The thing is, Bree here comes from a very different world than I do.” He gestured toward me, casual and easy. “Her family owns one of the biggest agricultural operations in Texas. Cattle, crops, the whole nine yards. She grew up naming chickens and wearing boots to dinner.”
The studio audience chuckled. My smile stayed in place, my hands stayed folded, and my spine stayed straight against the back of the chair.
“So when I met her, I thought, perfect. She understands the industry. She gets it.” Rafael shook his head, grinning.
“What I didn’t realize was that she’d try to bring the farm to Manhattan.
You should see our apartment. She’s got photos of chickens on the refrigerator. Actual chickens. With names.”
More laughter. Louder this time. The studio audience was eating it up. Sandra was nodding along, her expression delighted.
“Take the girl off the farm, folks.” Rafael spread his hands. “You can’t take the farm out of the girl.”
The audience roared.
The laughter washed over me, and the lights burned my face, and every eye in the room turned to look at me, waiting to see how the punchline would react to being the punchline.
Don’t react.
My cheeks ached from smiling and my hands had gone numb from gripping each other. My heart was somewhere in my stomach, being digested by acid and rage.
Sandra was laughing too, wiping her eyes. “That’s wonderful. Brianna, what do you have to say to that?”
Don’t react.
My mother’s voice in my head. The voice that had taught me to smile through anything. Through my father’s disappointments. Through my parents’ cold silences. Through every moment when falling apart would’ve been easier than holding on.
“Well.” My voice came out steady. Practiced. I’d been practicing for days, preparing for exactly this kind of moment. “Someone has to keep him grounded. Chickens help.”
The audience laughed again, warmer this time. On my side, or at least not against me.
“She’s a good sport,” Sandra said.
“The best.” Rafael reached over and took my hand. His grip was warm and firm and completely fake. “I couldn’t do any of this without her.”
His thumb traced a circle on my palm. The gesture was intimate. Affectionate. Designed for the cameras, for the audience, for every stranger who would see this moment and think, what a lovely couple.
I wanted to rip my hand away and walk off the set. I wanted to look directly into the camera and say, my husband is a liar and a fraud and he hasn’t touched me with real affection in months.
I didn’t. I squeezed his hand back and smiled at Sandra and played my part.
The rest of the interview blurred past. More questions about the company. More talking points about sustainable sourcing and ethical farming practices. Rafael held my hand the entire time, thumb tracing small circles on my palm, performing intimacy for the cameras.
This is evidence, I told myself. This is good for the divorce. Hold on.
Sandra asked about their five-year plan. Rafael answered with numbers and projections and carefully rehearsed optimism. She asked about the challenges of the food industry. He pivoted to innovation and adaptation and Grant Foods’ commitment to excellence.
“And what about the personal side?” Sandra leaned forward. “Any plans for the future? Kids? More chickens?”
The audience laughed. Rafael laughed. I laughed because I had to, because the camera was on me, because the whole country was watching.
“We’ll see what the future holds,” Rafael said. “Right now, we’re focused on building a future together.”
Together. The word landed in my chest and stayed there, sharp and cold.
“Well, we wish you both all the best.” Sandra turned to the camera. “Rafael Grant, CEO of Grant Foods, and his lovely wife Brianna. When we come back, we’ll be talking to a woman who taught her cat to play the piano. Stay with us.”
The lights went down and the cameras stopped rolling. Sandra shook our hands and told us we were wonderful, and then we were being ushered off the set, through the green room, into the car that was waiting to take us home.
Rafael was on his phone before we hit the street.
I stared out the window and watched Manhattan blur past and didn’t say a word.
The memes started before we reached the apartment.
I saw them on my own phone, scrolling through social media while Rafael typed emails beside me. Someone had already clipped the chicken joke. Someone else had isolated the moment, the exact second when my husband had gestured toward me and said take the girl off the farm.
The video had thousands of shares already. Thousands of comments. Thousands of strangers weighing in on my marriage, my dignity, my life.
The comments were split.
Half of them thought it was hilarious. Relationship goals, one person had written. He clearly adores her.
He’s so funny, another said. And she took it like a champ. They’re perfect together.
I scrolled past those and found the others.
The other half saw what I saw.
Did anyone else catch her face when he said that? She looked like she wanted to die.
Imagine being humiliated on national TV by your own husband.
The way she smiled through it… that’s not a happy woman.
Someone had taken a screenshot of my face at the exact moment Rafael said the punchline. My smile was in place and my posture was perfect. But my eyes were dead. Completely, utterly dead.
That photo had ten thousand shares.
I closed the app and put my phone away, and I stared at the back of the driver’s headrest and thought about the word evidence.
I had plenty of evidence now. The photos and the calendar, the way he’d laughed at Camille’s jokes and forgotten my birthday and just now, in front of the entire country, turned me into a joke.
Six months. I could survive six more months.
We got home. Rafael went straight to his office. I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water and stood at the island where he’d once taken me apart and promised things would be different.
The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. Outside the windows, the city sprawled and glittered, indifferent to everything happening inside this glass box.
Apologies for the disruption.
That’s what the card had said, the morning after the island. Two dozen roses and one typed line, delivered while he was already behind a closed door on a call. Apologies for the disruption. Apologies for the distance. Apologies for everything he was about to keep doing anyway.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. I could hear him on calls through the study door, his voice rising and falling, animated and engaged. This was what mattered to him, the company and its deals and the endless machinery of Grant Foods.
I’d never been part of that machinery.
I finished my water and set the glass in the sink, and then I stood at the island and waited, though I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for.
The study door opened. Rafael walked into the kitchen, phone still in hand, eyes still on the screen.
“Good interview,” he said, not looking at me. “Sandra’s team is already talking about a follow-up segment.”
“Great.”
“The Zurich people were watching. They liked what they saw. The family angle plays well internationally.”
“The family angle.”
“You know what I mean.” He opened the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of sparkling water. “The married-couple thing. Stability. Roots.”
He poured the water and checked his phone again, thumb scrolling through messages, treating me exactly the way he always treated me, and a crack opened in me.
“You told me once that you thought my farm life was cute.”
He looked up, distracted. “What?”
“Early on. In the first few months. You said you liked hearing about the farms. You said it was cute.”
He’d said it in bed. After. When his guard was down and his voice was soft and I’d made the mistake of reading meaning into it. I’d been telling him about the new irrigation system, about the way the water caught the sunrise, about the smell of fresh-turned earth in the morning.
“I love hearing you talk about this,” he’d said. “It’s cute.”
Cute. The word had felt warm then. Affectionate.
Now it was a knife.
“Did I?” He shrugged, turning back to his phone. “I guess it gets old after a while.”
The crack widened.
“Gets old.”
“Bree, I have forty emails to answer before the conference call. Can we do this later?”
“Do what later? Have a conversation? Acknowledge that you just humiliated me in front of the entire country?”
He finally looked at me. Really looked. His brow furrowed.
“Humiliated you? It was a joke. Sandra loved it. The audience loved it.”
He said it the way he said everything lately, evenly, patiently, already reaching for the reasonable tone that closed an argument before it could start.
“I didn’t love it.”
“It wasn’t about you. It was about playing to the room. Making the segment memorable. You know how these things work.”
“I know that my husband made fun of me in front of the whole country. I know that right now, half the internet is sharing clips of my face while you laughed at my expense.”
My voice stayed level. I’d learned not to give him volume; volume was the thing he got to call dramatic.
“You’re being dramatic.”
“I’m being honest.”
His phone buzzed. He glanced down at the screen.
And the last thread in me snapped.
“Don’t you dare,” I said.
“Bree-”
“Don’t you dare look at that phone right now. For once in your goddamn life, look at me.”
He looked at me. His expression was wary. Confused. His furniture, apparently, had started talking back.
“I’ve given you two and a half years,” I said.
“Two and a half years of smiling at parties and sitting through interviews and pretending that this marriage is anything other than what it is. I’ve watched you forget my birthday.
I’ve watched you cancel dinners. I’ve watched you treat me like staff, like decoration, like a box you checked on your way to the corner office.
And today, today, you stood on national television and made me a joke. ”
“It was one comment-”
“It was everything.” My voice was rising.
I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want to stop it.
“It was every comment. Every dismissal. Every time you’ve made me feel like nothing.
Your stupid jokes about chickens and boots and taking the girl off the farm.
Your stupid COO who looks at you the way I used to look at you, back when I was stupid enough to think you might look back. ”
“Camille is a colleague-”
“She’s more than that, and we both know it.”
Silence.
Rafael stared at me. His face cycled through expressions too fast for me to read. Confusion. Denial. Guilt, maybe, if he was capable of it, which I was no longer sure he was.
“What exactly are you accusing me of?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m telling you that I’m done.”
“Done with what?”
“This.” I gestured between us. “Us, this marriage, this performance. I wanted to be your partner, Rafael. I wanted to build a real life. And you couldn’t even manage to treat me like a person.”
“Bree, you’re overreacting-”
“I’m done,” I said again. “I’m done making excuses for you. I’m done convincing myself that the good moments outweigh the bad. I’m done waiting for you to become the man you pretended to be in that one blackout that apparently meant nothing to you.”
His jaw tightened. “That’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair. Fair would be a husband who remembers his wife’s birthday.
Fair would be a partner who doesn’t humiliate her on camera.
Fair would be a marriage where I feel like more than a line item in your quarterly report.
” I was crying now, hot tears I couldn’t stop.
They streaked down my cheeks, ruining the forty-five minutes of professional makeup.
“Your life isn’t good enough for me, Rafael.
Your stupid comments and your stupid company and your stupid COO and all of it.
I deserve better than this. And I’m going to find it. ”
He opened his mouth to respond.
His phone rang.
And Rafael Grant, my husband, the man I’d married and almost loved and definitely hated, looked down at the screen.