12. Anika
— ? —
Anika
I woke up to my phone exploding.
At first, I thought it was the alarm. Then I realized the sound was notifications. Dozens of them. No, hundreds. A relentless cascade of buzzes and chimes that made my phone vibrate across the nightstand like it was possessed.
I grabbed it and squinted at the screen. The first thing I saw was my name.
Trending.
My stomach dropped.
I opened Instagram, then TikTok. Then closed both and opened them again, like maybe I’d misread something, like maybe this was all a terrible dream.
It wasn’t.
Karina’s face filled my screen. She was crying. Beautiful, photogenic tears streaming down her perfectly contoured cheeks, her hair artfully tousled, her lighting immaculate. She looked like a wounded angel. She looked like she’d rehearsed this for hours.
“I just want people to know the truth,” she was saying, her voice trembling. “About what really happened. About what kind of person Anika Franco really is.”
I scrolled down.
The posts were everywhere. Screenshots and shares and comments multiplying like a virus. Karina calling me dramatic and unstable. A gold-digger despite my own money, because apparently having a successful career didn’t matter when your husband was a billionaire.
“She’s always been jealous of any woman who got close to Neil. She’s controlling and paranoid and honestly? I feel sorry for her.”
The comments section was a war zone. Some people defending me, most people not. Strangers dissecting my marriage like it was entertainment. Like my pain was content.
And then I saw the kill shot.
Photos, three of them. Clear and damning and unmistakably real.
Neil’s diary.
His handwriting sprawled across pages I’d never seen.
The photos showed the parts about not being compatible. Parts that made me sound like a burden he was trying to escape.
Karina’s caption: He told me everything. For years. Ask his wife how that feels.
The implication was clear. The lie wrapped around a kernel of truth, sharp enough to cut.
I threw my phone across the room.
It hit the wall and clattered to the floor, screen cracked but still buzzing. Still blowing up with notifications from people who didn’t know me commenting on a life they’d never understand.
Anwesha appeared in the doorway. She was holding two cups of coffee and wearing an expression I’d never seen before. Fury, barely contained.
“I saw,” she said. “I’ve already called my lawyer.”
“What good will that do? It’s already everywhere.”
“We can make her take it down. Sue for defamation…”
“She told a version of the truth designed to make me look crazy.” I laughed, and it came out broken. “She didn’t lie about the diary. She just photographed the worst parts and let people draw their own conclusions.”
The buzzer rang.
I checked the time. 8:55 a.m.
“Don’t let him in yet,” I said.
I went to my door. Opened it just a crack.
He was standing in the hallway, holding the notebook from yesterday. The one with all his careful notes about April third and my birthday and every failure he was planning to fix.
I grabbed it from his hands and threw it at his head.
He ducked, barely.
“Anika, I…”
“She has your diary.”
“I saw.”
“The diary I gave you.” My voice was shaking. Rage and hurt and humiliation tangled together into something ugly. “She used it to destroy us.”
“I never gave her those pages.” He stepped toward the door, his hands raised. “I swear on everything, Anika. I never showed her the diary. I never showed anyone.”
“Then explain the photographs.”
“I don’t know. Not yet but I’ll figure it out.”
“Yet isn’t good enough.”
“Give me twenty-four hours.”
“You have twelve.” The words came out cold. “Or your fourteen days are gone. You sign the papers. I sign too.”
He flinched like I’d slapped him.
“Twelve hours,” he repeated.
“The clock starts now.”
I slammed the door in his face.
Through the peephole, I watched him stand there for a long moment. Then he turned and walked down the hallway, his shoulders set, his stride purposeful.
He was going to war. I just didn’t know yet if he’d win.
The hours crawled by.
I tried to paint but I couldn’t focus. The canvas blurred in front of me, my hands shaking every time I picked up a brush.
Anwesha brought me food I didn’t eat. Coffee I didn’t drink. Updates on the social media firestorm I didn’t want to hear but couldn’t stop asking about.
“It’s getting worse,” she said around noon. “Some tabloid picked it up. They’re calling it ‘The Franco Marriage Meltdown.’”
“Creative.”
“There’s also a conspiracy theory that you’re actually the one who leaked the diary pages to make yourself look sympathetic.”
“Of course there is.”
At eight-thirty, I started to wonder if he’d given up.
Then ten minutes later, I heard footsteps in the hallway.
I looked through the peephole.
Neil stood in the hallway, and he looked like he’d been through a war. His shirt was wrinkled, his hair disheveled, his eyes wild with something between exhaustion and triumph.
He was holding a laptop.
I opened the door a crack. Just wide enough to see him but not wide enough to let him in.
“Building security footage,” he said, holding up the laptop so I could see the screen. “The night she stayed in our guest room.”
He hit play.
The footage was grainy but clear enough. The hallway outside our bedroom.
A figure emerged from the guest room. Dark hair and familiar silhouette.
Karina.
She checked the hallway in both directions. Paused outside our bedroom door, listening. Then moved silently toward Neil’s study.
She opened the door and disappeared inside.
The timestamp ticked forward.
Then she emerged. Her phone was in her hand, the screen glowing.
She walked back to the guest room and closed the door.
“Twenty minutes,” Neil said quietly. “She was in my study for twenty minutes. Long enough to photograph every page. She photographed the diary while I was asleep. Then ate breakfast with us like nothing happened.”
I thought about that morning. Karina in her silk chemise, nipples visible through the fabric, her hand on Neil’s arm. Laughing about the painting class. Acting like she belonged there.
She’d already stolen what she needed. She was just enjoying herself.
I watched the footage again.
“She planned this from the beginning.”
“Yes.”
“She came to work for you specifically to destroy our marriage.”
“I don’t know if that was her original plan. But she saw an opportunity, and she took it.”
“And you invited her into our home.”
He met my eyes through the crack in the door. Didn’t flinch.
“Yes.”
He wasn’t making excuses. Wasn’t trying to minimize. Just standing there, taking it.
“You’re really an idiot. What took you so long to find this?” I said.
“I was distracted watching the other footage of you being alone in the penthouse all day. I… I didn’t even stop to think you’d be that lonely on the night of our anniversary.”
I didn’t expect that from him. Didn’t expect him to learn something from looking for evidence.
“This doesn’t fix what she did. My name is still everywhere. People still think I’m crazy and unstable and whatever else she called me.”
His jaw tightened, and that cold, hard look settled into his eyes. The one I’d seen in boardrooms. The one that made competitors back down and lawyers flinch.
“I’m going to make sure no one ever believes a word she says again.”
This was the man who ended careers. The man who crushed competition without breaking a sweat. I’d seen glimpses of him over the years, the ruthless core underneath the charm and the smile, but I’d never had it directed at someone who’d hurt me.
It was terrifying.
It was also, I realized with some surprise, exactly what I wanted.
“No,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“Don’t destroy her yet. She’ll be back. A woman like her won’t stay put. And when she does that, I’ll humble her.”
Something crossed his face. Surprise, and then, slowly, something like pride.
“You’re terrifying,” he said.
“I learned from watching you.”
The silence stretched between us. The laptop still showed the frozen image of Karina emerging from his study, phone in hand, thinking she’d gotten away with it.
“Twelve hours,” I said. “You made it with twenty minutes to spare.”
“I would have made it with twenty seconds.”
“Yeah.” I studied his face through the crack in the door. The exhaustion. The desperate hope he was trying not to show. “That’s why I’m letting you in.”
I opened the door.
He stepped through like a man who’d just been granted a reprieve from execution.
“Day three,” I said. “Eleven more to go.”
“I’ll earn every single one of them.”
“You’d better.” I walked toward the kitchen. “I’m making tea. You look like you need something stronger, but tea is what I have.”
“Tea is perfect.”
He sat down at Anwesha’s kitchen table, in the chair I pointed to, and he didn’t reach for his phone. It was still in the mailbox downstairs, where he’d dropped it that morning.
He just sat there, watching me fill the kettle, waiting for whatever came next.
Day three of fourteen.
He’d proven he could fight for me. Now he had to prove he could stay.