Chapter 10 Olivia
Olivia
Iwoke up in my bed.
That was the first wrong thing. I hadn't slept in this bed since the night before the funeral. I'd been sleeping on the couch, or on the floor, or not sleeping at all. But here I was, tucked under the comforter, still wearing yesterday's jeans.
The second wrong thing was the light. It was aggressive, slicing through the blinds.
I forced my eyes open and immediately regretted it. My head felt like it had been packed with wet sand. My mouth tasted like copper and stale whiskey.
I pushed myself up, waiting for the room to stop tilting.
How did I get here?
The memories flickered in—the cold kitchen, the bottle on the counter, Ben’s face, the moment the word maybe shattered the last of my resolve. Then, black.
Ben must have carried me.
The realization made my stomach twist, sharper than the nausea. I had fallen apart so completely that he’d had to scoop me up off the floor and put me to bed like a drunk child. I touched the spot on the pillow next to me. It was cold and empty.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. I hadn't drunk that much—two mugs, maybe three—but this was whiskey we were talking about, and I hadn't eaten a real meal in a week. My body was running on fumes, and the whiskey had just burned off the last of the vapor.
I stood up, gripping the nightstand until the vertigo passed. The house was warm. The furnace was humming, a steady, rhythmic thrum that hadn't been there yesterday.
Ben.
I kept moving. The staircase felt steeper than usual, my bare feet silent on the hardwood.
The kitchen was exactly as I'd left it. Except it wasn't.
The mugs were washed and drying in the rack. The whiskey bottle was capped and pushed back against the backsplash. The casserole dishes I’d left rotting in the sink were gone.
And there was a note on the counter, weighted down by the bottle.
Liv,
Didn't want to wake you. Heat is on. Doors are locked.
Call me when you're up. Doesn't matter what time.
— Ben
I stared at the blocky handwriting. It was practical and efficient. He had come into my house, witnessed my humiliation, cleaned up my mess, and locked the door on his way out.
I set the note down. The house felt different in the daylight. Less like a tomb, more like a museum. Everything in its place, all surfaces gleaming.
I walked to the sink and filled a glass with water, drinking it down in one long, desperate gulp. The cold water hit my empty stomach like a stone.
Lucia.
The name was there before the water even settled.
Lucia Vance.
Last night, she’d been nothing more than a ghost. A voice on the phone. Today, she was a name. More than that, she was a woman; one my husband had driven toward on the night he died.
I needed to find her.
The need wasn't rational. It was an itch under my skin. Ben had given me the outline—the affair, the timeline, the maybe—but outlines weren't enough.
I needed to see her face and hear her voice. I needed to know what she had that I didn't.
I turned to the counter, where Ryan's phone still sat. The cracked screen was cold. I unlocked it, my thumb moving automatically over the code, and opened the recent calls.
The unknown number was at the top. There were two missed calls and one voicemail.
I stared at the digits. I could call her. Demand answers. Or maybe I could scream at her.
The phone buzzed in my hand.
I jumped, nearly dropping it.
The screen lit up with an incoming call, the same numbers from before dancing in front of my eyes. My heart hammered against my ribs. She was calling back. She hadn't given up.
I stared at the green icon. The buzzing vibrated through my fingers, up my arm.
Last night, I had hung up, but last night I’d been a coward.
But that was last night. And I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life wondering who was on the other end of this line.
I pressed the icon and brought the phone to my ear.
I didn't say anything. I just breathed, listening to the silence on the other end.
"Ryan?"
The voice was the same. Equal parts soft and terrified.
"He's not here," I said. My voice was raspy, unfamiliar to my own ears.
There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end.
"Who is this?" she asked. Her voice hardened, the fear sharpening into suspicion.
I looked at the clean kitchen, and then at the wedding ring on the counter.
"This is his wife," I said.
The silence on the other end of the line was absolute.
"What?" Her voice had changed. The fear had curdled into something sharp and defensive. "I’m just—"
"He's dead," I said flatly. "A week ago. Car accident on Route 9."
I heard a small, wet sound, like air being punched out of a lung.
"You're lying," she whispered.
"I'm not."
"No. He would have... someone would have told me. He wouldn't just—" Her voice fractured, climbing an octave. "You're lying to me."
"I buried him." My hand was shaking, but my voice was iron. "Ridgewood Cemetery. Plot 247, Section C. You can go check the dirt if you want. It’s still fresh."
Another silence, but it was longer this time. I heard movement on her end—a chair scraping, a rustle of fabric—like she had sat down hard.
"How?" The word was barely a breath.
"Black ice. Just past the reservoir. Friday night, around seven." I gripped the phone tighter. "Where was he going, Lucia?"
I heard her breath hitch at the sound of her name.
"You know who I am," she said.
"I know your name, and that you're a real estate developer. I know my husband was sleeping with you." My voice hardened, vibrating in the quiet kitchen. "What I don't know is why he was driving toward the middle of nowhere on the night he died."
"I don't..." She hesitated. "We were supposed to meet. He said we needed to talk."
"About what?"
"I don't know," she cried. "He wouldn't tell me. He just said it was important. That he couldn't do it over the phone."
"What did you think he wanted to talk about?"
Silence. Then: "I don't know."
"You have to have thought of something."
"I thought..." Her voice wavered. "I thought maybe he was finally going to—" She stopped again.
"Finally going to what? Leave me?"
"I didn't—I don't know what I thought, okay?" The defensiveness was sharp now.
"He was married," I said, the words like acid. "He had a wife at home who didn't know you existed."
She let out a sound—half laugh, half sob. "You think I didn't know that? You think I didn't feel that every single day?"
I waited, my heart drumming hard.
"How long?" I asked.
"Does it matter?"
"Yes."
She was quiet for a long moment. "A year. Maybe longer. Things got... blurry."
A year.
Ben had said May. Eight months. But Lucia said a year.
Last Christmas, then. The diamond earrings. The New Year's toast. Our anniversary dinner in March where he'd held my hand across the table and told me he'd marry me all over again.
All of it—lies. Or worse: true in the moment and still not enough.
The timeline in my head reordered itself, tainting memories I hadn't even thought to question yet.
"Did he love you?"
The question came out before I could stop it. It was the only question that actually mattered.
I heard her breathing on the other end. The sound was jagged and wet.
"I thought..." Her voice broke. "I don't know. I thought so. He said—he said—" She couldn't finish. "But now he's—"
In the background, I heard a sound that chilled me. A raw, guttural sob. Lucia was crying, mourning him. She was grieving my husband with a force that rivaled my own.
Then, a click.
The line went dead.
I stood there in my kitchen, holding the phone, staring at the blank screen.
Lucia Vance was real and she was grieving. And she had hung up before I could ask where to find her.
Ben's words came back to me, quiet and certain: a second phone. Ryan would have had a second phone. Except I'd torn this house apart. Every drawer, every pocket, every place a man might hide something. And I'd found nothing because there was nothing to find.
It had never been here.
I went to my bag and found the folder from the police station. The vehicle recovery report. I hadn't opened it that day in the parking lot because I hadn't wanted to think about the car, the road, any of it. I opened it now.
Near the bottom, under Items Recovered from Vehicle: Device, mobile, unrecoverable.
I stared at those words. It had been crushed beyond anything useful, or waterlogged from the cold and the mud, or both.
Ryan'’s second phone was gone… as was every call, every photo, every piece of evidence of the life he'd been living while I made dinner and filed paperwork and trusted him.
Gone. Destroyed by the same patch of ice that took him.
There was nothing left to find.
But I had a name. I knew what she did for a living. And I had Google.
I walked to the island, opened Ryan's laptop, and typed Lucia Vance Real Estate into the search bar.