Chapter 5 #2
On our fucking anniversary, my husband left our bed, showered in our bathroom, drank the coffee I made him, kissed me at the door, and drove into town to put his dick in another woman.
“How long?” I ask.
Grant answers this time. “Laurel—”
“How. Long.”
He looks toward the window. A fist closes around my heart, and every breath becomes a struggle. After fourteen years, this man can look me in the face and lie about my song, but he needs a skyline to tell me the truth about her.
Sloane folds her arms over her stomach. “February.”
Six months fits inside one word with insulting ease.
February.
I think of Grant sending roses to Mama on Valentine’s Day because he knows she likes him a little more when he remembers.
Three nights in Charleston because I told him I missed the ocean, and the embarrassing tears that came when I realized my husband had listened.
His hand beneath my dress in a restaurant bathroom, eleven years of marriage apparently incapable of curing us of behaving like teenagers after too much wine.
Grant coming home from a “studio session” at three in the morning and slipping into bed behind me, warm and familiar, as though the hour meant nothing.
Every time I tried to talk about the distance between us, there was a reason. He was tired. Busy. Buried alive by the label.
I was proud of him for working so hard, and I believed every excuse he gave me.
God, there are humiliations, and then there is discovering how willingly you helped someone lie to you.
“Were you with her in Charleston?”
His head turns. “No.”
“Did you come home to me after being with her?”
His throat moves with a swallow. I get my answer.
“Did you sleep with me on the same days?”
“Laurel.”
I smile. It feels awful on my face. “That one was yes too.”
Jesus, I need to get tested. For everything.
He kissed me less than an hour ago with the same mouth he’s used on her.
I’m going to be sick.
Who knows what he’s brought home to me? Who knows how many women he’s been with, how many times he climbed into our bed carrying something I never agreed to risk?
Sloane starts crying. One tear. A clean little track through her foundation.
I wrinkle my nose at it, with the detached interest I might give a stranger crying at the next table. “Please don’t.”
Her face crumples. “I’m sorry.”
“No.” My eyes stay on hers. “You’re scared. Different emotion.”
The tears keep coming, but I know the difference. Sloane wanted me to find out. She wanted this. What swirls in her eyes now is something else—the uncertainty of what I’ll do.
Grant steps between us, defense firing through his strides.
Isn’t that just perfect? My husband protecting his mistress from me.
“Are you defending her?”
“I’m saying this is between us. Don’t drag an innocent person into this.”
Innocent?
“Did you just call your mistress innocent?”
His jaw locks. “I fucked up.”
“You fucked her.”
Sloane flinches. Grant does not.
“Don’t be crude.”
I laugh, and the sound comes from somewhere so deep it scares me. “You had your dick in another woman this afternoon and would like me to improve my manners?”
“Keep your voice down.”
Reputation. Always reputation. The man could be standing in hell with his trousers on fire and still ask if the smoke was flattering.
“Do you love her?”
Sloane looks at him before he answers. That tells me she has asked him, too.
“No.” The word comes fast, and her face closes.
Grant watches me. “It was just sex.”
I wish he had told me he loved her. I do. Love could’ve been made into a tragedy. Love gets people drunk and wrecks cars and convinces respectable women to move three states for men with guitars. But this? He gambled fourteen years because he was bored and a beautiful woman opened her legs.
There’s no poetry in that. Just waste.
“Was I bad to you?”
His brows draw together. “What?”
“Did I humiliate you? Starve you of affection? Refuse to touch you? Make the house unbearable? Give you some grand excuse you’ve been keeping polished for the documentary?”
“No.”
“Then I need you to understand something, Grant.” I step close enough to smell Sloane on him again. “When people find out what you did—and they will—you don’t get to tell them I drove you to it.”
The first mistake he made, you might ask, isn’t sleeping with Sloane or stealing Magnolia Rain.
Those are disasters, but men like Grant survive disasters because someone else gets assigned the cleanup.
His mistake is looking at me and believing the woman who loved him for fourteen years is still the same.
He cares about his reputation so damn much, I am tingling with the urge to bless him with the truth about what he did, who he did it with, and what he stole from me to make her shine.
“Let’s go home,” he says. “We’ll cancel dinner. We’ll talk. I’ll fix the credit on the song, I’ll end this with Sloane, whatever you need.”
I chuckle.
Whatever I need.
I face sweet Sloane where she’s standing behind him. “Did he ever tell you we were separated? That he was leaving me?”
Her eyes drop. “No.”
So Grant wanted me introducing her onstage while he stood in the wings smelling of both of us.
I nod. “Thank you.”
Grant frowns. “For what?”
I pick up my purse, grateful I haven’t told him about the news from Dr. Mehta, the news I spent all afternoon trying to give my husband. I almost handed him my future while he was carrying the wrecking ball behind his back.
“Nothing.”
“Where are you going?”
“Dinner, of course.”
“What?”
“Your mother moved the reservation to eight. She hates being kept waiting.”
Grant stares at me like I’ve started speaking Mandarin. “Laurel, we are not going to dinner after this.”
I put my hand on the knob when I reach the door.
“Oh, my sweet, sweet husband.” I look back at him with my brightest smile. “You are.”
Confusion clouds his face. “What does that mean?”
I tilt my head, a glint in my eyes that doesn’t match the thorn lodged in every part of me. “It means your mother said you’re never late when it matters.”
I leave him with his mistress, his stolen song, and the comforting belief that heartbreak has made his wife irrational.
In the elevator, I take out my phone. The first thing I do is open the folder where Grant has always sent me the contracts that require my signature as a director.
I search the words writer agreement, publishing, catalogue, master, assignment, and begin forwarding every document with my name on it to an email address Grant doesn’t know exists.
By the time the elevator reaches the lobby, I’ve sent myself thirty-seven files.
The doctor told me this afternoon there’s a chance I may get my voice back. Grant has just shown me how easily one can be silenced.
I have no intention of learning the lesson twice.