7. Bree
— ? —
Bree
I didn’t wait to see if he’d answer it.
I walked past him, shoulder catching his arm, and headed straight for the bedroom. My hands were shaking, my whole body was. Two and a half years of swallowed anger, and I’d finally spit it out, and he’d responded by looking at his phone.
Of course he had. Of course.
The hallway stretched in front of me. Fourteen steps to the bedroom door.
I’d counted them once, early in the marriage, when I was trying to map this place that didn’t feel like home.
Now I counted them again, each step a small victory, each step taking me further from the man in the kitchen who couldn’t put down his phone long enough to fight for his marriage.
The bedroom door had a lock. I’d never used it before. I used it now.
The click was satisfying. Small. Final.
“Bree.” His voice, muffled through the wood. “Bree, open the door.”
Instead of answering, I pulled my suitcase from the closet and threw it on the bed and started packing.
The closet was massive. Walk-in. Climate-controlled.
Organized by color and season and occasion, because Katherine had hired someone to organize it and I’d never bothered to undo their work.
My clothes took up maybe a third of the space.
The rest was empty, waiting for a woman who shopped more than I did.
Underwear. Bras. The jeans I never wore in Manhattan because they weren’t appropriate. The boots I’d brought from Texas and hadn’t touched in eighteen months because Rafael said they didn’t match the apartment’s aesthetic.
I grabbed the boots. Held them for a moment. They were scuffed and worn and perfectly broken in, the leather soft from years of use. My father had bought them for me when I turned sixteen. Best boots money can buy, mija. They’ll last you a lifetime.
They had. They would.
“Brianna, let me in.”
I grabbed shirts. Grabbed sweaters. Grabbed the jewelry my mother had given me for my twenty-first birthday, the only pieces in this penthouse that were actually mine.
The jewelry box was small. Wooden. Hand-carved by my grandfather before he died. Inside was a pearl necklace, a pair of gold earrings, and a ring that had belonged to my grandmother. Simple things. Real things. Things that mattered because of who had touched them, not because of what they cost.
“We need to talk about this.”
“I’m done talking.”
I pulled open the dresser drawers. Found the photos I’d hidden in the back, the ones of the farm, of my parents, of the life I’d left behind to come here. I’d tucked them away because Rafael had said they cluttered the bedroom, and I’d been stupid enough to listen.
“You can’t just-” He tried the handle. Found it locked. “Open the door.”
“No.”
“This is ridiculous. You’re acting like a child.”
“Then let me throw my tantrum in peace.”
I heard him exhale through the door. Frustrated. Annoyed. The way he sounded when a deal wasn’t going his way. The way he sounded when the world refused to arrange itself according to his preferences.
I zipped a compartment of the suitcase. Moved to the bathroom.
My toiletries were lined up on the counter in neat rows.
Face wash. Moisturizer. The expensive shampoo Rafael’s stylist had recommended because my regular stuff wasn’t good enough for Manhattan.
I grabbed the face wash and the moisturizer.
Left the shampoo. I’d buy a normal brand when I got wherever I was going.
“Bree, whatever you think is happening here, you’re wrong. Camille is a colleague. The interview was just media training. I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I’m sorry if you felt embarrassed, but this isn’t worth ending our marriage over.”
I stopped. Stood very still. My hands gripped the edge of the bathroom counter.
If you felt embarrassed.
Not I embarrassed you. Not I’m sorry I hurt you. Just if you felt embarrassed, as though my feelings were a malfunction, a processing error, a weather event rather than a thing he’d caused.
In the mirror, my makeup was ruined. Mascara tracks down my cheeks. Lipstick smeared from crying. My hair was coming loose from its careful arrangement, and my eyes were red and swollen.
I looked like a mess.
I looked like myself.
The suitcase was heavier than I’d expected when I zipped it shut. Heavier than it should’ve been, given how little I was actually taking. But the weight felt right. Substantial. Real.
“The marriage was already over,” I said. “I’m just making it official.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?” I grabbed my purse from the dresser.
Checked for my wallet, my ID, my credit cards.
Everything was there. Everything I needed to disappear.
“When’s the last time we had dinner together?
When’s the last time you asked me about my day?
When’s the last time you looked at me, really looked at me, without checking your phone in the middle of the conversation? ”
Silence from the other side of the door.
I waited. Five seconds, then ten, then fifteen.
“That’s what I thought.”
I shouldered my purse and grabbed the suitcase handle, and I walked to the door and unlocked it and pulled it open.
Rafael was standing right there. Close enough to touch. His face was pale, his jaw tight, his eyes searching mine with an urgency that bordered on desperation.
He was still holding his phone; he hadn’t even put it down.
He looked at the suitcase. Frowned.
“You’re leaving me.”
It wasn’t a question. The panic finally registered in his voice, in the way his body went rigid, in the way his hands clenched at his sides. The phone dangled from his fingers, forgotten now, too late.
“Yes.”
“Bree-”
“Get out of my way.”
“No.” He stepped closer, not threateningly, but blocking the path. “Talk to me. Whatever’s happening, whatever you think I’ve done, we can work through it.”
“There’s nothing to work through.”
“There’s everything to work through. You’re my wife. I’m not going to let you walk out of here without an explanation.”
The laugh that came out of me was ugly. Bitter. I barely recognized it. It scraped against my throat and tasted like salt and bile.
“An explanation,” I repeated. “You want an explanation. Fine. Here’s your explanation, Rafael.”
I took a breath. The air in this apartment was cold. Climate-controlled. Sterile. I’d never noticed how much I hated breathing it until right now.
“You forgot my birthday. You canceled our dinners. You made me a joke in front of the entire country. You’ve got a COO who gets the laugh you stopped giving me. You’re cheating on me. You can’t even remember what my parents call me half the time.”
I threw it all in together, the cheating just one more line on the list, because that was what it had become. One more way he’d made me small.
His head jerked back. “What - what are you talking about?”
And there it was. The opening. The place where a real wife would plant her feet and make him account for himself, demand the names and the dates and an explanation.
But I wasn’t a real wife. I understood that, finally, standing in that hallway with a suitcase.
I was a clause. A three-year term with an expiration date.
He’d never been my husband, not the way I’d let myself pretend in the dark, and a woman doesn’t get to interrogate a business partner about who he takes to dinner.
I’d known the terms going in. I’d signed them.
And then I’d been stupid enough to fall for the man on the other side of the contract, and that part was on me. Nobody else.
So I didn’t explain. I didn’t name her. It hurt. God, it hurt, a deep and stupid ache I had no right to feel, and I swallowed it, because it was mine to carry.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and I was surprised by how much I meant it.
“Of course it matters-”
“No. It doesn’t.” My voice went quiet. Exhausted.
“Even if I imagined all of it, even if you’ve been a saint this whole time, it changes nothing.
You could’ve been the most faithful husband in Manhattan, Rafael, and I’d still be standing here with a suitcase.
Because faithful was never what I was missing.
You made me invisible. You made me feel like staff.
And faithful isn’t enough. Not anymore.”
He stared at me. I stared back.
The silence stretched between us. The apartment hummed with the sound of expensive machinery doing expensive things, the refrigerator and the climate control and the whole elaborate system designed to keep the illusion of comfort running smoothly.
“Ask me what I want,” I said.
“What?”
“Ask me what I want. What I actually want. Because in two and a half years of marriage, you’ve never once asked that question.”
His jaw worked. I could see him struggling, trying to find the right words, trying to navigate a conversation he’d never prepared for. This wasn’t a board meeting. This wasn’t a negotiation. There was no script for this.
“What do you want, Bree?”
“I want to feel chosen.” The tears were back. I let them fall. “I want a partner who sees me. I want a marriage where I’m not competing with your phone for attention. I want to matter more than quarterly reports and acquisition deals and the woman who runs your company.”
“You do matter-”
“Then prove it.” I dropped the suitcase.
Stepped closer. Close enough to see the flecks of gray in his blue eyes, the tension in the muscles of his neck.
Close enough to smell his cologne, the expensive one he always wore, the one I’d grown to associate with disappointment.
“Answer one question honestly. Just one.”
He nodded. Barely breathing.
“Do you love me?”
The words sat between us, the question I’d never asked because I’d been too afraid of the answer, the one that mattered more than photos or rumors or business trips to eleven cities.
I watched his face. Watched him process the question. Watched him search for an answer, for the right answer, for any answer at all.
The seconds stretched. Three, four, five.
Rafael’s mouth opened. Closed. His eyes were searching mine, desperate and lost.
I waited, and gave him all the time in the world.
“I don’t know what I feel about you,” he said. “I’ve never known.”
The words hit me in the chest. In the stomach. In the place where my heart used to be.
I don’t know. After two and a half years. After every night I’d spent in his arms. After every moment I’d convinced myself mattered. I don’t know.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice was ice. “Thank you for waiting until the last possible moment to tell me you don’t give a shit.”
“That’s not what I said-”
“That’s exactly what you said.” I picked up the suitcase. “You don’t know. After two and a half years. After countless nights in our bed. After every moment I convinced myself mattered to you. You don’t know.”
“Bree-”
“Get out of my way.”
He didn’t move.
“I said get out of my way.”
“No. We’re not done talking.”
The ice in my chest cracked, and underneath it was fire. Nobody in Manhattan had ever seen it from Brianna Grant. It came from being a Salazar, from being my father’s daughter, from growing up in a world where you fought for what you wanted or you lost it.
I stepped closer. Let him see it. Let him see the woman I’d been before I came here, before this city and this marriage and this penthouse had ground me down polished and quiet and small.
“Listen to me very carefully,” I said. “You’re going to step aside. You’re going to let me walk out that door. And when my lawyer sends you the divorce papers, you’re going to sign them without argument.”
“Bree-”
“If you don’t,” I continued, my voice dropping, “if you try to fight me on this, if you make this difficult in any way, I’ll hunt you down.
I’ll make it my personal mission to ensure you never live a quiet day again.
I’ll take everything you’ve built and burn it to the ground, and I’ll do it with a smile on my face. Do you understand me?”
He stared at me. I watched the disbelief cycle through shock, through a grudging flash of respect, through the final resignation of a man who’d just realized he’d lost what he’d never bothered to hold.
“I understand,” he said quietly.
“Good.”
I shouldered my suitcase and walked past him.
He didn’t try to stop me.
I made it to the elevator, then the lobby, then the street, where the doorman hailed me a cab and I climbed into the back seat and gave the driver the address of the train station.
The cab smelled like air freshener and leather. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror, at my ruined makeup and my suitcase and my shaking hands, and had the decency not to ask questions.
Only when the cab pulled away from the curb, only when the penthouse disappeared behind me, did I let myself fall apart.
I cried the whole way to Penn Station. Big, ugly sobs that I couldn’t stop and didn’t try to. The driver turned up the radio, soft and instrumental. I was grateful for the noise.
Once there, I bought a ticket for the first train leaving the city and didn’t care where it was going. The woman at the counter looked at my face and didn’t comment. She just printed the ticket and slid it across the counter and wished me a safe trip.
I sat in a window seat with my suitcase at my feet and watched Manhattan shrink in the distance. The whole glittering mess of a city that had never felt like home.
I’d done it. I’d left.
The marriage had six months left on the contract, and I’d walked away early, and I didn’t care about the settlement or the paperwork or any of the things I was supposed to care about.
I cared about the fact that I’d finally asked the question.
Do you love me?
And he’d answered it honestly.
I’ve never known.
The train carried me south. Where I was going, what came next, I had no idea. I only knew I was done being invisible and done waiting for a man who couldn’t even figure out if he loved me.
I pressed my forehead against the cold window glass. Watched the world blur past. Fields and trees and small towns, ordinary places full of ordinary people living ordinary lives.
That’s what I wanted. Ordinary and real.
I’d find it, or I’d build it, a life that didn’t depend on Rafael Grant or his penthouse or his company or his cold, confused answers to the only question that mattered.
I was Brianna Salazar.
The rest I’d figure out.