My Husband Cheated with His Assistant (Her Marriage in Crisis #71)

1. Megan

— ? —

Megan

The stall door sticks, then bangs shut. I press my back against it and breathe.

My hands won’t stop shaking. I’ve held them out three times now, watching the little plastic stick rattle between two fingers. Twice it slips before I can read it. The third time I catch it against my chest and force myself to breathe through my nose, slow.

I look down.

Two pink lines.

I let out this weird noise that’s stuck somewhere between a cry and a laugh. I instantly slap my hand over my mouth before the sound can bounce off the bathroom tiles and travel right down the hallway.

Three years of marriage and two years of trying. Every appointment where a stranger in gloves told me my body just needed more time, more patience, more money. I nodded, smiled, went home, and cried into a towel so Bradley wouldn’t hear.

I’m seven days late.

Too scared to look, because hope is the thing that’s gutted me every month for two years, every time my cycle comes. So I stopped at the pharmacy on the way here and bought the test. And a stupid little pair of booties for good luck.

I told myself I’d take it tonight, on our anniversary. If it was bad news, at least I’d have him to fall apart on.

And now this.

“Okay,” I whisper to the stick, to the tiles. “Okay.”

I press the test flat against my sternum and let myself shake for a minute.

Sixty seconds is what I allow before I have to be a person again.

In two hours, the entire company will be downstairs in the ballroom for the annual gala, and I am going to walk into my husband’s office and hand him the best news either of us has ever gotten.

The pharmacy bag sits on the floor by my feet, thin plastic. The receipt still curled inside. The booties are impossibly small, soft yellow and the only newborn thing on a shelf otherwise full of cough syrup and bandages.

I bought them as a bargain with God.

If it’s positive, I get to give him these tonight.

I never once believed I’d actually get to.

I slide the test into the bag, tucked against the booties. My hands finally go still.

“This fixes it,” I tell the mirror when I come out, blotting under my eyes with a wet paper towel. My mascara has run in two gray tracks. I fix them carefully, leaning close. “All of it.”

The distant nights and the dinners he missed. He started sleeping turned away from me, leaving a careful foot of mattress between us that became a border neither of us crossed.

He’s been under pressure. The company, his mother, the weight of a name that was never going to let him just be a man married to a bookkeeper’s daughter. That’s all it is.

A baby reminds you why you started. A baby is a reason to come home.

I practice the smile until it looks real.

Then I go find him.

***

The elevator feels like it’s taking an eternity.

As the floors tick up, I’m just rehearsing the whole thing in my head.

I’m going to hand him the bag and make him pull the booties out himself so the realization hits him slowly, just so I can watch his face react the way it used to, back when he actually reacted to me.

The doors open onto the executive floor.

Silence. The first wrong note.

Dixie’s desk sits empty. Her monitor glows, her cardigan hangs over the back of her chair, her coffee still steams in the mug with the gold lipstick print on the rim.

But the assistant who guards Bradley’s door and once made me wait twenty minutes to bring my own husband his forgotten phone, is nowhere.

“Hello?” My voice is too loud in the empty reception. “Dixie?”

Nothing.

She might be in the supply room. Or maybe she’s downstairs, fussing over the gala seating. I hold the gift bag against my hip and walk to his door.

I don’t knock.

Why would I knock? It’s my husband. It’s our anniversary. I have his child living inside me.

I push the door open.

The first thing my brain lets me see is the heels.

Red soles, hooked over the arm of his chair. The leather chair I helped him pick out. The two of us in a showroom, laughing about whether a man at his level needed a footrest, his hand warm on the back of my neck while the salesman pretended not to listen.

Then the rest of it arrives all at once.

Dixie is on his lap. Straddling him. Her skirt shoved up her thighs, her blouse hanging open where the buttons used to be, her mouth working down the side of his throat.

Bradley’s shirt is open to the navel. His hands are on her hips, pulling her down against him hard enough that the chair creaks.

His wedding ring catches the lamplight where his fingers dig into her skin.

I don’t move because I can’t.

The gift bag is a dead weight on the end of my arm. My whole body has gone somewhere far away, watching from a corner of the ceiling, while Dixie lifts her head.

She sees me first.

And she smiles.

She doesn’t scramble, gasp, or push away like a person usually does when they’re caught. Instead, she slowly turns her head toward me, lipstick smeared past the corner of her mouth, and deliberately grinds down on my husband one more time while watching my face.

“Oh.” Warm as honey, sweet as a knife. “Megan.” She tilts her head. “Didn’t anyone tell you to knock?”

The gift bag hits the floor.

The booties tumble out across the hardwood, a little yellow heap. The test slides out after them and skitters across the floor and stops, of all the places in this room, against the toe of Bradley’s shoe.

He comes alive then. Shoves Dixie off his lap so hard she stumbles into the desk, catches herself on one hand.

“Megan.” He’s up, hauling his shirt closed, fumbling the buttons. “Megan, this isn’t what it-”

“Months.”

My voice sounds completely foreign, just totally flat and dead, but incredibly calm. I can feel how bad it is, and I can see it written all over his face when it hits him.

Dixie is the one who speaks. She straightens her blouse, unhurried, smoothing the fabric down over her hips, watching me in the dark mirror of the window.

“Long enough the whole company stopped gossiping about it.” She runs her fingers through her hair. “Long enough they started feeling sorry for you.”

My chest tightens.

“The Christmas party?” She shakes her hair back into place. “Everyone pitying the wife who didn’t know.” Her smile sharpens. “You were always the last to know things, Megan. Some part of you had to know. He comes home three nights a week smelling like my perfume.”

My stomach turns over. I grip the doorframe to stay upright.

Bradley steps toward me. His shoe nudges the test. He kicks it aside without even looking down.

“She’s nothing.” He drops into that quiet tone reserved exclusively for signing clients, soothing his mother, or securing exactly what he came for. “She’s a mistake, Megan. A stupid mistake. You’re my wife. We can fix this. We fix everything…you know we do.”

“You unbuttoned your shirt for a mistake.”

He stops.

“You moved your ring.”

I’m looking at his hand now. The gold band on the wrong side. The words come out of me slow as I figure it out in real time.

“You moved it to your other hand so it wouldn’t catch in her hair.”

His hand freezes halfway to me. He looks at it the way you look at a stranger’s hand. The ring sits on his right hand.

Dixie laughs, delighted. “God. She really didn’t know.” She tips her head at him, almost fond. “Bradley, that’s almost sad.”

I run.

He catches me at the elevator. One arm slapping the doors before they close. His shirt still hanging open. Dixie’s lipstick smeared across his collar like a brand burned into the cotton.

“Megan, please. Ten minutes. Just give me ten minutes to explain.”

“Explain what?” The doors strain against his arm. “That you were inside her while I sat in fertility clinics with my feet in stirrups?”

He flinches.

“That you let me believe I was the broken one? That my body was the thing that didn’t work? That it was my fault, while you-”

My voice just completely split on me, totally breaking right in the middle of talking.

“I love you.” He says it like it’s a trump card. “Whatever you think you saw in there…you didn’t.”

“I saw your assistant’s tongue in your mouth.” I step into the elevator. “I saw your hands up her skirt. I saw plenty, Bradley.”

A sudden, freezing stillness takes over my words, stripping away any trace of warmth.

“I saw all of it.”

His face shifts and the panic recedes. A colder look slides up underneath it.

His voice drops. “Don’t do anything stupid, Megan. Don’t make this bigger than it has to be.”

The doors close on his face.

I make it to my car.

Then I make it nowhere at all.

I sit in the parking garage with both hands on the wheel. I can’t turn the key.

My phone starts going off in my lap. I watch the screen light up. Again and again.

Bradley: Please come back up. We need to talk like adults.

Bradley: You’re overreacting. Answer me.

Bradley: I’m calling my mother.

Bradley: Where the fuck are you.

Then one that stops my heart cold.

Bradley: I will tell my mother you ran off in hysterics. Come home and we’ll pretend this never happened. For both our sakes.

My hands leave the wheel and find my stomach. Flat under my dress. The little life in there already a thing they’re circling. Already a weapon they’re deciding how to use.

For both our sakes.

Like he’s doing me a favor.

I turn the key.

I pull out of the garage. The gala entrance slides past my window. Women in gowns spilling out of town cars, a man in a tuxedo checking his watch under the lights. All of them about to go up and toast my husband.

None of them look at the woman in the sedan idling at the mouth of the garage with mascara dried on her cheeks.

I drive past them and toward my sister’s house on the other side of the city.