8. Brooke #3
A photographer at the edge of the pack catches the motion, the way they do, camera already half up. “Hey. Hey, wait.” His voice pitches, snagging the guy next to him. “Isn’t that… is that the wife? Somebody said the wife’s here, is that her?”
Two more heads turn. A lens swings toward me.
I don’t give them the second look that would confirm it.
I keep my head down and my pace even and I round the corner before the pack decides I’m worth the chase, and the car is there, idling at the curb where I told it to wait, and I’m in the back with the door shut and the city sealed out before one of them gets a clean frame of my face.
“Home,” I tell the driver, and give him the address of the glass box that has never once been home, because that is where he’ll be, and that is where I need to be, one last time.
The second the door thunks closed and the noise of the whole glittering machine goes muffled and far, the fury doesn’t drain, it just banks, settles into a low steady thing I can carry, and I take out my phone.
It’s already started.
The launch is trending.
His face and Layla’s, everywhere, the two of them glowing under the banner. Near the top, from a gossip account with too many followers, a photo already up, blurry, shot from across the street, a woman in a dark dress hurrying out of the venue alone and getting into a car.
Me. The one shot they got.
Trouble in paradise? Spotted leaving Ashbourne’s big night solo and NOT looking happy… is that the mystery wife? ?? Why so glum when your man’s got the whole city in love with him (and his gorgeous muse)?
The comments are already there, hundreds of them, strangers deciding who I am.
@laylasloverr: she looks MISERABLE lol can you blame him@cinematildy: layla is stunning i’m sorry. the wife gives off jealous energy honestly@notyourbabe_92: bro upgraded ?? free him@romancereader44: imagine being married to him and still looking like that. sad
I read them anyway, every one, thumb moving down the screen, and I wait for them to gut me the way things have been gutting me for months.
And instead the thing that has been holding all night, the cold clean surface, the steady voice, the woman who didn’t make a scene, finally goes. Not into grief. Into a thing with teeth.
It comes up out of nowhere and my eyes sting and one tear gets loose and slides hot down my cheek before I can stop it.
I wipe it away with the back of my hand, hard, and that’s the only one they get. That’s the only one any of them get, the strangers, my husband, and my best friend, one tear in the back of a car in the dark where nobody can sell it.
And then for some absurd reason, I laugh.
It cracks out of me short and ugly, because it is genuinely absurd, the whole shape of it, when you hold it up to the light.
Twelve years of friendship and two years of marriage with a heroine I built in the dark, and it ends with me alone in a hired car at midnight reading a stranger tell four thousand people my husband upgraded.
I laugh because the alternative is the tear, and I’m out of tears for these people. I laugh because somewhere in the last hour the grief burned all the way down and left this… this hard bright thing that isn’t sad at all.
For months I have been a woman things happen to.
Erased, and I absorbed it. Suspicious, and I apologized for it. Humiliated, and I called it my own fault. I have been so busy understanding everyone. Him, her, the internet, that I forgot understanding is not the same as doing.
I have understood my way straight to the bottom of my own life.
Now, I’m done understanding.
Tonight I decide instead.
It arrives without drama, cold and simple and entirely mine, the first decision I’ve made in months that isn’t about how to keep the peace or hold the marriage together or make myself small enough to fit.
I am going to end it. Not threaten it, not survive it, not wait for him to notice it’s already over.
End it. Tonight, with my own mouth, while I still have the fury to do it clean.
I lean my head against the cool window.
The lights of the city slide by, and I don’t feel like the woman who left that party an hour ago. That one was still hoping, underneath everything, still leaving a door open.
This one has closed it.
The car turns onto our street, and forty floors up the penthouse windows are dark, the whole glass box of it waiting for a husband who is still downtown being adored, who has no idea his marriage got home before he did.
“Right here is fine,” I tell the driver, and I step out into the cool dark and tip my head back and look up at all that black glass, the life I was supposed to be grateful for, and for longer than I can remember, I am not afraid of it.
Every night for two years I have come home to that penthouse to wait.
Wait up, wait for him to notice, wait for the promo to end, wait to be chosen.
I press the button for the elevator, and I feel the last of the old me let go, because I am not going up there to wait for anything.
This time, I am going up there to be the one who leaves first.