9. Chapter Nine
~Gabriel~
I didn’t sleep at all that night. While I tossed and turned in the comfortable hotel bed, my mind veered from memory to memory, looking for an answer to how my life got so completely out of control.
Did Celine ever love me at all? As I sifted back through all the memories of our life together, I thought she must have. Nobody could be that good an actress for that many years. When did love turn to indifference, and ultimately to dislike? She must have disliked me by that point, because I couldn’t imagine treating anyone I cared about the way she’d treated me over the last few months.
Mixed in with those thoughts and memories were thoughts of Jen and what it would be like to be with someone like her instead. Someone who genuinely had my best interests at heart, someone who listened and cared. Someone like the person I thought I found in Celine, until I had someone to compare her to.
A rush of guilt accompanied each thought of Jen, knowing that I kissed her. What the hell had I been thinking? It had been a stupid, stupid thing to do.
Worst of all, I enjoyed it.
I wanted to do it again.
But that couldn’t happen so long as things remained up in the air with Celine, so long as each moment with Jen was tied up with Celine.
I needed to do this right. Before I could do anything else with Jen, before I could even talk to her about what happened, I needed to speak to my wife.
So, first thing in the morning, before the sun rose, I packed up, checked out, and got in the rental car to head back to San Francisco.
Dozens of different scenarios about how our confrontation might play out ran through my mind as I sped along the empty early-morning highway. Maybe Isaac would still be at my house. In my bed. Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe Celine wouldn’t be there either, and I’d need to go track her down. Maybe she’d confess or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d be angry or she’d be sad.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
The word drummed in time with the beating of my heart, drowning out everything else as I pulled into our street and parked the rental car outside my house. The driveway sat empty with no sign of Isaac’s car that had been parked there in the photos that the private investigator sent. With the garage door closed, I couldn’t tell if Celine’s car, our car, was inside or not. I would have to go into the house and see if she was home.
Silence greeted me as I opened the front door, but that didn’t mean much. Even with the drive from Napa, it hadn’t hit eight o’clock yet. Celine never got up before nine if she could help it.
Sure enough, I found her fast asleep in our bed, the other side looking undisturbed, as if she’d been there alone all night. While I had the time to myself, I looked around the rest of the house, looking for any sign of Isaac being there, but nothing looked out of place. Little slivers of doubt began to work their way beneath the certainty I’d felt when I saw the photos in the first place, but it didn’t really matter, I reminded myself. Whether they slept together or not wasn’t the issue, or at least not the only issue. I came there to end things, and I intended to follow through.
“Celine.” Standing in the doorway, I called her name to wake her up, not wanting to put it off any longer .
She stirred slowly, her tan, toned arms stretching out lazily as she let out a low hum, a sound that used to drive me crazy.
That morning, it didn’t affect me at all.
“Gabe?” She blinked over at me through her bleary, barely-open eyelids. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
The way she said that, or maybe just the fact that those words were the first thing out of her mouth, struck me as odd. Almost as if she did expect it, but why she would have, I couldn’t guess. “I thought you were staying at Allie’s all weekend.”
“Brad came home early.” She pulled herself up in the bed, the covers falling back to reveal her pale orange nightie, my favourite one. That felt deliberate too, though I couldn’t say why. “I’m glad you’re here, though. We need to talk.”
We certainly did, and I wanted to say my piece before she had a chance to spin things to suit herself. “I’ll go first, and I’m going to be blunt. This isn’t working anymore. You’re obviously unhappy, and I am too. Taking some time away this weekend really helped me to see things clearly.”
Her lips twisted into something close to a sneer. “I bet it did.”
What did that mean? Her statement threw me for a second, but convincing myself she just wanted to get under my skin, I kept going. “I know that you had Isaac here this weekend.”
Surprise flashed in her eyes, but only for a second. As quickly as possible, she covered it back up with disdain.
“I don’t know how long you’ve been seeing each other, and frankly, I don’t care. I don’t see the point of either of us being unhappy. If you wanted to work on this, to fight for it, that would be one thing, but you seem to have given up on us a long time ago.”
“What are you saying?” she asked, getting to her feet and crossing her arms beneath her breasts, pushing them together in a calculated gesture I’d seen her do a hundred times before. Usually, I fell for it, but not that time. My eyes remained fixed on her face and the unattractive sneer that curled her lips and wrinkled her nose. “You want a divorce? ”
The word made me wince, even though I did want it. I never thought I’d be the kind of guy who ended up divorced, but half the population seemed to. Turned out I fell into that half.
With that in mind, I forced the words out. “Yeah. I think we should get a divorce.”
The moment of truth had arrived, and out of all the reactions I’d imagined on the long drive home, I never anticipated what actually happened. Her eyes brightened and the sneer on her face transitioned into a smile instead. She looked almost happy for the first time in weeks. “Fine. As long as you give me what I’m owed, I’ll make this easy for you.”
Blinking in surprise, I tried to reconcile her response with what I’d concluded with Jen the night before. If Celine had married me for my inheritance and stayed with me for the same reason, why would she give in so easily at this stage? What had I missed?
“It’s in both our interests to keep this civil and simple,” I pointed out cautiously.
“Of course. You give me half of everything, including your grandparent’s estate, and you’ll never have to see me again.”
Again, she took me completely by surprise. She knew the terms of my inheritance as well as I did, and those terms clearly stated that we had to be married for three years before she became entitled to any of it. “The estate isn’t part of our assets.”
“Except for the clause about what happens if you cheat on me,” she amended, her tone turning sugary sweet on the surface, with a poisonous undertone beneath. “And if you want to talk about people we spent the weekend with, Gabe, maybe we should start with you .”
My heart began to pound even harder than it had anytime that morning as the memory of Jen’s soft, sweet lips against mine flashed through my head. Celine didn’t know about that, though. She couldn’t , and even if she did, a kiss didn’t count as adultery in a court of law.
“What are you getting at?” I asked. Before I said anything she could twist, I needed to know what she already knew .
Still with that too-sunny smile, she turned around to grab her phone off the bedside table. “Let’s see if this sounds familiar to you: ‘I know you’re feeling guilty about what happened. I won’t tell you that you shouldn’t, but we still need to talk about Celine. If you feel up to it, when you feel up to it, please come back to my room. I’ll be here.’”
Word-for-word, she read Jen’s last text to me, the one she sent the night before that I hadn’t responded to yet, and all the warmth seemed to drain from my body, replaced with an icy chill that froze my heart in my chest.
“How… how do you have that?” I managed to whisper.
“Oh, I have them all,” she said, showing me the screen as she scrolled through pages of text messages between me and Jen. “I had my suspicions before but I could never find anything. You must have deleted the messages off your phone whenever you met up with women on your overseas trips.”
“What?” It had begun to feel like I’d stumbled into a house of mirrors. Everything seemed distorted, nothing where it should be. I had no idea what she meant.
Celine didn’t answer my question, but she kept talking. “So, I found this woman online. I hired her to hit on you.”
She turned the phone back around to open another app before showing it to me again. An Instagram profile stared back at me with Jen’s face on it, but not the profile she’d messaged me from.
Loyalty tests, the biography at the top read. Get the proof you need.
All the air left me and my throat closed up, making it almost impossible to breathe. “You… hired… her?”
That couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be.
And yet…
Flashes came back to me, things that Jen had said about how she helped women deal with cheating partners. Did she mean this? Had she been telling me the truth while doing the same thing with me?
Could she really have been playing me the entire time?
My heart cried ‘no’ .
My mind didn’t know what to think.
“That’s right. She sent me copies of every message you exchanged. Put it all together and it’s pretty damning, Gabe. Like this one, for example. ‘You don’t have to try so hard to get my attention, Jen. You’ve got it, believe me.’ This whole thing, plus the testimony of the hotel staff confirming you were both at the same hotel all weekend should be convincing enough for a judge, I’d wager.”
Hearing my own words in the context of Celine’s narrative sent a wave of nausea through me. “I didn’t… we didn’t sleep together.”
Celine merely smiled. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter if you did or not. It looks like you did, and that’s enough. We could spend a lot of money taking this to court, and I will fight you for every penny I can, or you could simply hand over half of everything to me now and we can both walk away with a clean start.”
“You mean you can walk away with Isaac?” I asked, trying to regain any control over the conversation. While I may have hidden Jen from her, she wasn’t blameless.
It didn’t work. Celine didn’t even flinch that time. “Legally, the only thing that matters is your fidelity, or lack of it. That’s the clause that counts, and all of this makes for pretty compelling reading.”
She held up her phone again, taunting me with Jen’s face smiling at me from her profile, and if I thought I felt stupid before for letting Celine use me, it hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of dumb I felt now.
~Jennifer~
The text I sent to Gabe after finding his hotel room empty that morning went unanswered.
Where are you? Are you okay?
Despite checking my phone every five minutes, no reply came. He didn’t even read it.
The private investigator’s latest update didn’t add much to what we already knew. She said Isaac left Gabe’s house just after midnight, alone, and satisfied that Celine had gone to bed, Sarah also headed home to get some much-needed sleep. I told her to take the day off and I’d let her know if Gabe wanted anything else from her once I had a chance to connect with him.
After a while, I checked at the hotel reception to see if Gabe had left a message for me there, but he hadn’t. He simply vanished, and a hot, heavy lump of anxiety sat in my stomach as I tried to figure out what it all meant. Did he really feel so guilty about kissing me that he would completely cut me off? It didn’t seem in character for him to ghost anyone, especially after the connection we both felt, but I couldn’t come up with any other reason for his radio silence unless something truly awful had happened to him. After Matt, I refused to let my mind go too far down that road.
Eventually, I had to check out and begin the long drive back to Pasadena.
Though I tried to work on the drive home, my heart wasn’t in it, and I fumbled a test that should have been a sure thing. The guy turned suspicious when I accidentally referenced something he hadn’t told me directly, and before I could reply, he blocked me.
Shit. Based on all the other signs I picked up from him, he had been well on the way to exposing himself as a cheat, and I blew it. I’d have to refund that client with my apologies since I had no one to blame but myself. Not wanting to screw up any more cases, I didn’t attempt to do any further work.
My stomach had just started to grumble when I turned onto my street close to supper time, and when I saw a figure sitting on my front step, for just a moment, I thought it might be Gabe. Even though that made no sense, even though I’d never told him where I lived, my heart beat a little faster and my tongue ran over my lips in anticipation.
As I drew closer, however, I realized the person had a much more feminine and familiar form than the missing Gabriel Carter.
“Did you get so drunk last night you forgot what day it is?” I teased Eda as I got out of my car. “You were here for dinner earlier this week.”
“Nice to see you too,” she teased back, coming over to give me a hug. “I was on my way home from the weekend, and you were sort of on the way, so I came to get all the juicy details in person.”
“On the way from where?” After grabbing my overnight bag from the car, I let us both into the house and we headed to the kitchen.
Her answer made my feet skid against the hardwood floor for a second. “San Francisco.”
Trying to cover up my surprise, I kept going and pulled a bottle of wine that I’d picked up at the Oxbow Public Market out of my bag. “What were you doing there?”
Eda slid into one of the chairs at my kitchen island, inspecting the wine bottle while I dug out some glasses for us. “After talking with my friend Betty the other night when I did that recon work for you, we realized it had been way too long since we hung out, so I went up for the weekend. That’s why you caught me at some random person’s birthday party when you called last night.”
I had been wondering about that, but with Eda working in the entertainment industry in LA, far stranger things had happened. “That sounds like fun. Did you have a good time?”
Eda shot me a pointed look. “Are you seriously going to ask me about my weekend when the last time we spoke, you’d just been kissed by a married man? I need an update!”
With a heavy sigh, I opened the wine and poured out our glasses. “I don’t really have one. I did what you suggested and he never wrote me back. This morning, he checked out of the hotel before I went to see him. He hasn’t responded to my message from last night or the one I sent this morning. I have no idea what’s going on.”
Her brows knit together, but only for a moment before she pulled out her phone and began to type.
“What are you doing?” I asked warily.
Her airy reply was just about the last thing I expected her to say. “Texting Monica to see where her brother is.”
“What?” I tried to grab the phone, but I got there too late. With a smug smile, she turned the screen to show me the message had already been sent.
“Don’t worry, I haven’t blown your cover. I got to meet her this weekend while Betty and I were hanging out. She’s pretty cool, and she loves her brother, which makes me even more predisposed to like him than before.”
My fingers rubbed against my forehead as I tried to process all of that. “You met her in person? And you talked about Gabe?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry, I didn’t mention you at all. I did have to invent new details about my nightmare sister-in-law, though. She’s going to be disappointed when you and Gabe get married and I have to admit my brother doesn’t exist.”
Her grin let me know she wanted to rile me up, so I took a deep breath and didn’t take the bait. “We’re not getting married. He’s still married right now, you might remember.”
“But not for long, surely,” she prodded, and though I hoped that would be the case, with no communication from Gabe, I had no idea. Had Celine somehow managed to convince him to give her another chance? What was going on with him?
Eda’s phone buzzed with a text, and her grin got even bigger as she looked back up at me.
“It’s Monica. Do you want to know what she said?”
I could try to play it cool, or I could give in to my curiosity, and the second impulse won out. “Tell me. ”
Her eyes scanned the text briefly before she read it out to me, and her smile faded from her face. With it, my stomach dropped too.
“What? What does it say?”
“It’s not bad,” she assured me quickly. “Apparently, he got in touch earlier today and asked if she could recommend a divorce lawyer. That’s good news, right?”
I wanted to agree, but there had to be more to it judging by Eda’s expression. “What else does it say?”
Her lips tightened before she looked back down at the screen and answered. “She says he seemed really distant and unhappy and he wouldn’t tell her anything else about what was going on. Since then, he’s been ignoring her calls.” Her eyes returned to me. “Seems like it’s not just you he’s hiding from.”
That made me feel a little better, actually, because it meant he wasn’t just avoiding me out of guilt over our kiss. And I knew he’d gotten home safely, which lifted another weight off my mind. But what happened to make him withdraw so much not just from me but from his sister too?
With no other ideas, I pulled out my own phone and messaged Celine directly.
There’s nothing more I can do. He passed the test. I’m closing the file.
It only took a minute for her reply to come in.
I got everything I needed. Thank you for your help.
~Gabriel~
Monica always had a knack of connecting with people as soon as she met them. Open and friendly, she had no problem letting people into her life, sharing details I would have considered too intimate to tell all but my closest confidants. She had circles of friends who had circles of friends, each one of whom would do almost anything for her, so when I needed to consult with a divorce lawyer, it made sense to go to my sister first. She would either know someone or she would find someone for me, no questions asked.
Well, one question asked, I supposed. When I made the request, her breath caught and she limited herself to two simple words: “What happened?”
I couldn’t go into it all with her at that point. Celine’s infidelity, Jen’s betrayal, and my own gullibility combined to leave me feeling ashamed and bruised. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I managed to say. “Not now.”
Something in my tone must have told her I meant it because she didn’t push. “Alright. Let me see what I can do.”
As usual, what Monica could do exceeded most people’s best efforts. By mid-afternoon, she had the name of a top family law lawyer who could meet me with me first thing Monday morning. She left me the details in a voicemail message when I didn’t pick up the phone, and when she tried to call me a few more times, I turned my phone off, not in the mood to talk to anyone. Celine had already left, taking a suitcase full of her belongings that didn’t take her very long to pack, making me wonder if she’d been planning her departure for a while. I didn’t bother to ask her where she would be spending the night since she’d probably lie to me anyway. I didn’t trust a word coming out of her mouth.
She set me up. Whether or not she actually believed I cheated on her before, I couldn’t prove, but I knew she would put on a show in front of the lawyers and any judge involved. All I knew for certain was that she’d decided to prove my infidelity, whether she believed in it or not, and she hired a woman who couldn’t have been better suited to test me .
No wonder things with Jen felt so easy, so natural. None of it had been real, and the loss of her, the loss of the woman I thought I’d been getting to know and even starting to develop feelings for, stung nearly as much as the loss of my wife of two years.
At least with Celine, I had some warning. Jen’s treason came out of nowhere.
Sleep refused to come that night. I tossed and turned for hours in the guest room, not wanting to sleep in the bed Celine and I had shared. Eventually, I dozed off out of sheer exhaustion into a fitful sleep, drifting in and out of consciousness, short and unsatisfying.
In the morning, I called my boss to say I’d had some personal issues come up that I needed to deal with. Since I never missed work if I could help it, she took me at my word. I would have been too tired to do any good anyway, not to mention I needed to meet with the lawyer, and I had to decide what to do when I saw Isaac again. Not only had Celine destroyed the comfort of my home, she’d made my workplace awkward too.
“Mr Carter. I’m Vicky Fairbanks.” The lawyer’s greeting and firm handshake gave the impression of strength and efficiency, two things that I didn’t feel at all that morning. Around forty, she wore a suit that looked professional but not too expensive, her blonde hair cut short and her blue eyes piercing as she looked at me directly once we were seated in her sleek, elegant office. “What can I do for you?”
Over the next hour, I laid out my relationship with Celine, the inheritance from my grandparents, and the events of the last two weeks.
“I’ve heard of these kinds of services,” she said when I told her about Jen’s business, or at least as much as I’d been able to glean about it. “This is the first time I’ve had one involved in one of my cases though.”
“There’s that much of a market for it?” I didn’t know why, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Jen would have been doing the same thing with multiple men, and the thought turned my stomach even more. Did she laugh with them like she had with me? Did she kiss them too? How far would she have been willing to go ?
“I’m afraid so,” Vicky answered. “There are a lot of scummy men out there.”
I couldn’t be sure whether or not she included me in that assessment. “I didn’t sleep with her.”
“I believe you,” she assured me. “Your wife has a point, though, that the messages don’t look good. If we were relying on them alone, we might be in trouble. Thankfully, we don’t have to rely only on them.”
It relieved me to hear her say it, though I didn’t know for sure what she meant. “What other kind of proof can I give?”
“Eyewitness testimony,” came her reply. “We need to get your loyalty tester’s side of the story. If she backs you up, you’ve got a much stronger case.”
“She’s on Celine’s side, though,” I pointed out. “She sent her all those messages. Why would she tell the truth?”
“Why did she help you arrange the PI to watch your wife?” Vicky countered. “And you said she had no idea you’d be at the hotel, right? Something doesn’t add up, and I think we should talk to her and find out what it is. Do you still have her contact information?”
The thought of getting in touch with Jen filled me with dread, but I would have to do it. If it meant the difference between Celine making off with the money she’d married me for or not, I would do whatever it took to stop her.
Reluctantly, I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through my messages, but it didn’t take long to notice a problem.
“They’re not here.”
“What aren’t?” Vicky asked, glancing up from the notes she’d been scribbling.
“All the messages Jen and I sent each other. Every single one. It’s all been deleted.”
How was that possible? I’d been pretty out of it during the long, sleepless night, but surely, I didn’t sleepwalk to my phone, delete those messages, and only those messages ?
Vicky didn’t seem fazed. “Were you texting each other? We can get records from your phone company of the number.”
“No, we only messaged through Instagram.”
She first approached me that way and we never bothered switching platforms.
Some kind of understanding seemed to settle over Vicky’s face, but I remained firmly in the dark until she asked another question. “Does your wife know your account password?”
She must. She must have gone in and deleted the entire chat so I wouldn’t have any proof of my own, and I couldn’t get in touch with Jen to have her verify my story.
I would be impressed with her forethought if it weren’t so thoroughly messed up.
“I don’t remember ever telling her, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she does,” I admitted. “She has access to my emails and my phone. She could have reset the password herself so she could access my account remotely.”
“Do you know anything else about this woman?” Vicky asked. “Her last name? Her username?”
We never bothered with last names. I didn’t think she knew mine either at the time, but she must have. And her username… I could almost remember, but not exactly. It had something about California in it? I hadn’t looked at her profile since the very first time she contacted me, trying to avoid the temptation that her pictures presented.
I did, however, have one other idea. “The hotel we stayed at over the weekend will have her information because she checked in under her own name. I can get in touch with the owner there.”
“Do it,” Vicky advised. “The sooner, the better. It seems like your wife isn’t above manipulating the records to suit her narrative.”
Apparently not, but what Jen might or might not add to the story, I couldn’t guess.