15. Nora #2
“She’s gone.” Brielle’s voice is hollow, dead, reciting the words the way you recite something that’s been playing behind your eyes every night for two years.
Her gaze lifts to mine, and there’s something haunted there.
Something broken. “We were never here.” She wraps her arms tighter around herself.
“Those were his exact words. I’ve been hearing them ever since. ”
Every question I’ve carried for two years just got its answer, in her flat, dead voice, in front of everyone.
“We were never here.” I repeat the words slowly, tasting each one. “You stood on the bank and watched me drown, and then you drove away and pretended you’d never been there at all.”
“We thought you were dead!” Brielle is crying now, mascara running down her cheeks in dark rivers. Her voice rises, cracking with hysteria. “We thought - if we called - they would ask questions, and Adrian was drunk, and I was - we were together, and-”
“And you chose to save yourselves.” I say it simply. Factually. The way you’d state the weather or the time.
“Yes.” Adrian’s voice is broken. Shattered. He sinks slightly, his knees buckling before he catches himself. “God help me, yes.”
The room has gone quiet. Everyone within earshot has stopped pretending not to listen. Champagne flutes hover halfway to lips. Conversations die mid-word. The string quartet trails off into silence.
Theo steps between us. His shoulder brushes mine as he moves, solid and warm.
“Walk away.” His voice is ice. Cold enough to burn. “While you still can.”
“I need to talk to her. I need to explain-” Adrian reaches out, his hand trembling in the air between us.
“There’s nothing to explain.” Theo doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. His hands are steady at his sides, but I can see the tension in his jaw, the vein pulsing at his temple. “You made your choice two years ago. Now live with it.”
Adrian looks at me one last time. His eyes are red-rimmed, swollen, desperate. In them I see everything - the guilt, the grief, the pathetic hope that somehow this can still be fixed, that I’ll offer him something he can use to forgive himself.
I don’t give him anything back. I let my face go blank. Empty. A mirror that reflects nothing.
“Goodbye, Adrian.”
He flinches like I’ve struck him. His whole body jerks backward, and a sound escapes his throat - small, wounded, animal.
Then Brielle takes his arm, her fingers digging into his sleeve, and leads him away.
The crowd parts for them like water around a stone, faces turning to watch, whispers rising in their wake.
I stand in the middle of the ballroom with my sleeve still pushed up and my birthmark showing and the truth finally, finally spoken out loud.
My legs pick this moment to remember they’re made of bone and water. Theo’s arm is around my waist before the first wobble finishes, his mouth at my temple, and in front of the entire gala and the smoking ruin of my marriage he holds me like a man collecting what’s his.
“I’ve got you,” he says against my hair. “You magnificent, terrifying woman. I’ve got you.” And God help me, with my whole world in ashes ten feet away, the thing my body feels is want.
Theo turns to me. His hand finds mine, squeezing gently.
“Nora-”
“Not here.” My voice is steady. Steadier than it has any right to be. I squeeze his hand back, feeling the solid warmth of his fingers wrapped around mine. “Take me home.”
He does.
We walk out together, side by side, leaving the whispers and the stares and the wreckage behind us. The night air hits my face like cold water. I breathe it in, deep and slow.
I don’t look back.
***
Neither of us speaks until the car doors shut.
The parking lot is dark and the gala is a wall of gold light behind us, and my sleeve is still pushed up.
The birthmark sits between us like a live wire, like evidence, like the answer to a question nobody asked for two years.
Theo grips the wheel of a car he hasn’t started, both hands locked at ten and two, knuckles white, jaw tight, his eyes fixed through the windshield like looking at me might break something he can’t afford to break.
The silence has weight. Texture. It’s full of everything we’re not saying.
“Say it.” My voice comes out rough. Raw. “Whatever you’re thinking. Just say it.”
“If I start saying things right now, Nora, I won’t stop at talking.
” His eyes stay forward. His knuckles don’t relax.
If anything, they tighten further, tendons standing out beneath the skin.
“The whole gala just watched your husband confess to leaving you for dead in a river. You should be in pieces. I should be handing you tissues and saying something useless about how it’s going to be okay. ”
“And instead?”
The muscle in his jaw jumps. Once. Twice.
“Instead I watched you stand in that ballroom like a loaded gun.” His voice drops to gravel, scraping against something deep and dangerous.
“Like a woman who walked out of her own grave just to burn down everyone who put her there. And God help me.” His throat moves as he swallows.
Hard. “I have never wanted anyone the way I want you right now, and I hate myself for the timing.”
Heat goes through my chest, sudden and indefensible, a match struck in the dark.
We shouldn’t, I think. Not tonight. Not an hour after the world cracked open.
Not with his confession still ringing in my ears, with the image of Adrian’s broken face still burned into my memory.
Somewhere there’s a version of me who waits.
Who grieves properly. Who processes and heals and does this in the right order.
That version of me drowned in a river two years ago.
I reach over and put my hand high on his thigh.
My fingers press into the muscle, firm and deliberate, and I feel the whole car change.
The air goes tight. His breath catches, and his hand leaves the wheel and covers mine, pressing my palm harder against his thigh, holding me there like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he lets go.
“Drive,” I say.
He reaches for the ignition-
A palm slams flat against the hood.