14. Christine
— ? —
Christine
Before we left the hospital, I stopped in the gift shop, and Pauline’s face was on every magazine in the rack.
“Benedict’s Wife Drove Him to Me: An Exclusive Tell-All”
The headline screams in bold letters, her photo positioned beside it - soft focus, sympathetic lighting, the carefully constructed image of a woman wronged. She’s wearing white again. Of course she’s wearing white.
I bought three copies.
Not because I wanted to read it - I didn’t, I really didn’t - but because I needed to know exactly what I was dealing with. Know your enemy. That’s what my mother always said. You can’t fight what you don’t understand.
Benedict has taken Isabella back to Clara’s apartment. The doctors discharged her this morning with a clean bill of health and strict instructions about monitoring her breathing. He offered to drive us, and I let him, too exhausted to argue. Then I sent him away before he could follow us inside.
“You should rest,” he said, standing on the doorstep like a man asking to be invited in from the cold. “I can help with-”
“I’ll call you if I need anything.”
“Will you?”
I didn’t answer. Just closed the door.
Now I’m standing in my mother’s kitchen, Isabella asleep in her bassinet, spreading the tabloid across the counter like evidence at a crime scene.
The article is worse than I expected.
“She was cold,” Pauline is quoted as saying. “Distant. Uninterested in his work, in his life. He’d come home to an empty apartment and a wife who resented his success.”
I read that sentence twice, waiting for it to make sense. Waiting for some universe to exist where that version of events is true.
“I never meant for anything to happen. But he needed someone to talk to. Someone who understood the pressures he faced. She couldn’t - or wouldn’t - be that person.”
My hands are shaking.
“He sought comfort because his wife was emotionally unavailable. I was simply there. Is that a crime?”
The word comfort sits on my tongue like poison. The implication is clear: she’s claiming they were together. Not directly - she’s too smart for that, too careful - but the inference is there, planted like a seed in every sympathetic reader’s mind.
Poor Benedict Morgan. Trapped in a loveless marriage with a cold, neglectful wife. Of course he turned to someone who actually appreciated him.
I want to scream. Want to throw the magazine across the room, shred it into pieces, burn the whole building down.
Instead, I keep reading.
“The wife,” Pauline says - not Christine, not Mrs. Morgan, just the wife - “drove him away long before I came along. I was simply the one who was there to catch him.”
The article continues. More quotes, more implications, more carefully crafted lies designed to make me look like the villain in my own marriage.
Photos accompany the text - Benedict looking stressed at a business event, me looking distant at a gala.
All taken out of context, all arranged to support the narrative she’s selling.
And people will believe it.
They’ll read this garbage and nod along and think poor man, trapped with that ice queen and no wonder he found someone else. They’ll take her side because her story is simpler, more palatable, easier to digest than the truth.
The truth is messier. The truth is two people who loved each other, who got lost somewhere along the way, who made mistakes on both sides even if his were larger.
The truth doesn’t sell magazines.
I close the tabloid. Stare at the wall. Wait for the room to stop tilting.
My first instinct is to scream. To call my lawyer, demand a retraction, sue for defamation. To burn Pauline Hartley’s life to the ground the same way she’s trying to burn mine.
My second instinct is worse.
To believe it.
Was I cold? Was I not supportive enough? Did I drive him away by expecting him to be present, to show up, to choose us over the endless parade of emergencies?
The doubt creeps in like smoke under a door. I try to shut it out, but it finds the cracks in my defenses - the places where my confidence used to be, the hollow spaces left by months of feeling invisible in my own home.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I wasn’t enough. Maybe if I’d tried harder, loved better, complained less-
The doorbell rings.
I freeze. The tabloid is still spread across the counter, Pauline’s face staring up at me like an accusation.
The bell rings again. Then again. Insistent.
I don’t want to answer it. I don’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone, exist in a world where that article is real and people are reading it and judging me.
But Isabella is sleeping, and the ringing might wake her, so I drag myself to the door and wrench it open.
Benedict.
He’s breathing hard, like he ran here. His coat is askew. His eyes are wild.
“You can’t be here. The paparazzi-”
“I don’t care.” He doesn’t move. One hand on the doorframe, both feet still on the landing, waiting. “Let them take the picture. I want them to take the picture. I want every person in this city to see exactly where I am.”
I step back without deciding to. It takes me a second to notice I’ve done it, and another to notice that he waited for it before he crossed the threshold.
“Benedict-”
“I know what it says.” He’s pacing now, too much energy for the tiny apartment. “I know what she’s claiming. And you’re not going to hear it from a headline - you’re going to hear it from me, in this room, with my face in front of you.”
He stops. Turns. Faces me.
“I was never with her. Never touched her. Never wanted her. I was obsessed with work and neglected you, and that is MY failure. Mine. Not yours.”
His voice is ragged. Destroyed.
“You were not cold - I was gone. You were not unavailable - I made myself unreachable. She is lying because I destroyed her career and she wants to destroy me back. But the only thing I care about destroying is the distance between us.”
My breath catches in my chest.
“She has texts-”
“She has nothing she didn’t manufacture.
” He drags a hand down his face. “The investigation is finished, Christine. It was finished before I fired her. My assistant’s message log.
The corridor footage. The timestamps on that photograph.
I’ll have every page of it sent to your lawyer tonight, so you never have to take my word for any of it. ”
He steps closer. Close enough that I can see the exhaustion carved into his face, the desperation in his eyes.
“I would never. You have to know I would never.”
The words hang between us. A plea. A promise. A prayer.
“And if the file says what you think it says?” I ask.
“Then you’ll finally know.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
He goes very still. “Then I’ll still be standing right here.”
I search his face for the lie. For the angle, the manipulation, the careful calculation I’ve learned to expect from him. All I see is a man who looks like he hasn’t slept in days, like he’s been running on terror and guilt and something that might be hope.
“When I told you I didn’t care what you did with her,” I say slowly, “I was lying.”
“I know.”
“I’ve wondered every night since.”
“I know.” He doesn’t flinch from it. “I knew when you said it.”
“Then why didn’t you-”
“Because you didn’t owe me the benefit of the doubt. I’d already spent all of it.”
The honesty of that lands somewhere deep. Somewhere I’ve been protecting.
“I don’t know what I know anymore.”
“Then let me prove it.” He takes another step. Close now. Close enough to touch, though he doesn’t. “Give me the chance to prove it. Please.”
The word hangs in the air. Not a demand. A request. And for the first time, I hear it without automatically listening for the demand underneath.
I don’t answer.
I don’t know how.
***
The file arrives the next morning.
Messenger. Brown envelope. No return address, but I know who it’s from.
I open it at the kitchen counter with shaking hands, spreading the contents across the surface like puzzle pieces.
Phone records. Call logs. An assistant’s message thread.
A note clipped to the first page says every timestamp in the file has been converted to New York time, so I don’t have to do the arithmetic with my hands shaking.
It’s all there.
Every call I made that never reached him. His assistant’s message to Pauline at 1:10 in the morning: Mrs. Morgan is in labor, she’s asking for him. Pauline’s reply at 1:21: Understood. I’ll tell him.
Corridor footage from the Budapest hotel at 2:14. Pauline walks down the hall to his door with his phone in her hand. She stands there. She doesn’t knock.
Nineteen seconds. Then she turns around and goes back the way she came.
Nineteen seconds is how long it took her to decide.
At 3:02 a message goes out from his number to his own assistant. Tell Mrs. Morgan I’m aware and I’ll call when I can. Ask her to rest.
He never wrote it. He says so, and I believe him, and the file cannot tell me whose thumb was on that screen. What it can tell me is that the phone had been in her possession since nine the previous evening, and that the man it belonged to was asleep behind a door she had just walked away from.
Then, at 1:52 in the afternoon, the assistant again: She’s delivered. A girl. She’s asking whether he’s been told.
At 2:11, Pauline posts the photograph.
It wasn’t taken the night Isabella was born. It was taken the evening before, at a dinner that had already happened, and it sat in her camera roll for twenty hours until somebody told her the exact moment it would cut deepest.
It doesn’t prove everything. A folder can’t tell me what a man felt in a room I wasn’t standing in. But it proves the lie she built, brick by brick, and for the first time in weeks believing him doesn’t feel like ignoring what’s in front of me.
I stare at the papers for hours. Read them until my eyes blur, until the timestamps run together, until I’ve memorized every piece of evidence that proves what I desperately wanted to believe.
He wasn’t with her.
He was just… absent. Distracted. Too trusting of the wrong person.
Is that better?
Is it worse?
I don’t know anymore.
But I know this: the woman who tried to destroy my marriage is going to answer for it. And she’s not going to see me coming.