Chapter 2
THAT BITCH IS BACK?
I’m standing in front of the open fridge, moving containers around, when I hear him on the stairs. Shoes, not slippers. Belt buckle clinking.
“Hey.” I lean back to look at him through the kitchen doorway. “I was thinking we could grill tonight. Or there’s that new Italian place on Ninth—Deborah said the pasta is insane.”
He rounds the corner and my stomach drops before my brain catches up. The fitted navy shirt. The one he hasn’t worn in months. Hair actually styled instead of towel-dried. And cologne—Tom Ford, the bottle I bought him for our anniversary that’s been collecting dust on his dresser since Christmas.
He’s dressed for someone. Not me.
“Oh—sorry, babe. I should’ve told you earlier.” He opens the pantry, grabs a granola bar. “A few of the college guys are getting together tonight. Kyle’s in town, and you know how that goes.”
I don’t know how that goes. I’ve never met Kyle. I’ve never met most of these college friends—they live in Clarence’s party stories, always funny, always vague, never with last names.
“When did you make these plans?”
“Couple days ago. Kyle texted the group chat.” He tears the wrapper, takes a bite, checks his phone. All at once, like this conversation is already handled. “Don’t wait up. You know how these guys get.”
A couple of days ago. He’s known for days—not last night when we watched TV in silence, not this morning when I asked about the farmers’ market. At no point did he think to mention it.
“I had stuff in the fridge for us,” I say. “I was planning around us eating together.”
“So save it for tomorrow.” He shrugs. “It’s not a big deal, Gin.”
He says it like I’m the one making something out of nothing. Like if I push it, I’ll get the patient face—I’m being reasonable and you’re being emotional—and I don’t have the energy to fight a performance tonight.
“Fine. Have fun.”
“Thanks, babe.” He leans in on his way past and kisses the air near my temple. Not my skin. The space next to it. “I’ll crash on the couch if it’s late. Don’t want to wake you.”
The front door opens. Shuts. His car starts and the headlights sweep across the living room ceiling, and then the house goes quiet.
I put the rice back. Close the fridge. The seal catches with a soft pop that sounds too loud because there’s nothing else—no TV, no footsteps, no voice from the next room. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the faucet dripping the way it does when the washer needs replacing.
His iPad buzzes on the coffee table.
The screen lights up. I can read it from the kitchen doorway because Clarence bumped his font size up two weeks ago, complaining about his eyes, and the notification banner fills the whole top of the screen.
Annabelle: Can’t wait to see you. Wearing that lingerie you bought me ??
My hand tightens on the counter edge.
Annabelle.
Annabelle Collier. Clarence’s college girlfriend—the one he dated for two years before we met.
The one he swore was ancient history. We were kids, Gin.
Totally different people. He said it so easily, so many times, that I stopped thinking about her years ago.
She moved to Seattle after graduation, then Portland, then somewhere else—bouncing around the way people do when they can’t settle.
Clarence mentioned it once or twice over the years, casually, the way you track someone you used to know.
She was always somewhere else. Always far away. Always not a problem.
Except she’s texting him about lingerie on a Saturday night. And he’s wearing Tom Ford to go see her. Which means she’s not in Seattle anymore. She’s here. And Clarence never mentioned that part.
I’m across the room before I’ve decided to move. The iPad is in my hands, the passcode typed from muscle memory because he used to hand me this thing every night to pick what we watched. He never changed it. He never thought he’d need to.
The thread goes back eight months.
I open it and the first thing I see is a photo she sent last week—her in black lace, shot in a mirror, one strap falling off her shoulder.
His reply underneath: three lines that make my hands shake against the screen because he hasn’t touched me in four months.
Four months of lying on my side of the bed wondering what I did wrong, and he’s been typing this to her.
I scroll down. More photos. His responses—detailed, specific, hungry in a way I haven’t seen from him in so long I’d forgotten he was capable of it.
Then I find the line that stops my breathing.
Three weeks ago. She’d asked: do you ever feel guilty?
His answer:
She has no idea. She’s boring but stable. You’re the one I want. You’ve always been the one.
My vision tunnels. The edges of the room go dark and the gray bubble is the only thing left and I read it three times because my brain won’t let the words be real.
Boring but stable. That’s me. That’s the woman who ironed napkins for his dinner party and marinated lamb overnight and reached for his arm at the table and landed on tablecloth.
Stable. Like a floor. Something you stand on and never look down at.
I call Deborah.
She picks up on the second ring. “Oh my God, okay, I’m watching that show you told me about and the girl just found out—”
“He’s cheating on me.”
The TV noise cuts off.
“With who.”
“Annabelle Collier.” Saying the full name out loud puts a crack in my voice that I can’t seal back up. “The college girlfriend. The one he told me moved to Seattle. The one that was ancient history.”
“No.”
“Eight months, Deborah. There are texts going back eight months. Photos. Hotels. He bought her lingerie.” My voice pitches high and splinters.
“He won’t touch me. He flinches when I reach for him.
And he’s been buying this woman lingerie and meeting her at hotels and telling her—” I have to stop.
Clamp my teeth together until my jaw aches. “He called me boring but stable.”
“Read it to me.”
I read it. Word for word. My voice breaks on stable because that’s the one that eviscerates me—not boring, which is just mean, but stable, which means useful. Load-bearing. Something he leaned on while he lived his real life with somebody else.
“That’s not a man who’s confused,” Deborah says. Her voice is flat and hard. “That’s a man who made his choice and didn’t bother telling you.”
I fold forward until my forehead hits the couch cushion and the leather is cold against my skin and it smells like his cologne from where he sat to lace up his shoes before he walked out the door to go fuck someone else.
The anger and the grief are tangled together so tight in my chest I can’t tell which one is making it hard to breathe.
I want to scream. I want to drive to every hotel in Denver until I find his car.
I want to throw this iPad through the window and watch it shatter on the driveway.
“Ginny.” Deborah’s voice cuts through. “Don’t confront him tonight. He doesn’t know you know, and that’s the only advantage you’ve got. Don’t give it up.”
“I’m not—I won’t—”
“Screenshot everything. Right now, while I’m on the phone. Every text, every photo, every hotel. Send it to your email.”
I sit up. Wipe my face with the heel of my hand. Pick up the iPad.
My thumb finds the screenshot buttons. Twelve minutes. Eight months of texts, photos, hotel confirmations—all of it packaged and emailed to myself before he’s finished his first drink with her. I delete the sent folder on his iPad. Set it back on the coffee table. Same spot. Same angle.
“Good,” Deborah says. “Now bring the iPad and come over.”
I pull into Deborah’s complex twenty minutes later with the iPad on the passenger seat and mascara smeared across the back of my hand. She’s waiting at her front door in sweats, and when she sees me she doesn’t hug me or say anything soft. She takes the iPad, walks to the couch, and sits down.
“Show me everything.”
I drop next to her and unlock it. The thread is still open.
Deborah holds the iPad between us and we scroll from the beginning—eight months of messages that move from flirty to filthy to domestic in a progression that makes my stomach clench for a different reason.
They have inside jokes. Pet names. He sends her memes the same way he used to send them to me, back when he still thought I was worth sharing things with.
“Here.” Deborah taps a hotel confirmation. The Kimpton downtown. “Isn’t this where he took you for your anniversary?”
“Fifth anniversary. The rooftop bar.”
“That’s not careless. That’s contempt.” She keeps scrolling. Another reservation two weeks later. Another the month after. When she gets to the photos she stops, stares at the screen, then tilts it so we can both see.
Annabelle in black lace, posing in a bathroom mirror.
“That’s her?”
“That’s her.”
Deborah reads the boring but stable text one more time, then sets the iPad face-down on the coffee table and picks up her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking up this bitch.” She’s already on Instagram, typing. “Annabelle Collier?”
“Try searching Clarence’s followers.”
She pulls up his profile, taps his following list, scrolls.
“Annabelle... Annabelle C... here.” She taps the profile and the grid loads—yoga poses on expensive mats, iced lattes with foam art, rooftop cocktails at sunset.
Public. Everything on display. “Of course her Instagram looks like this. Of course it does.”
She scrolls. I lean in, tracking the geotags.
Seattle, Portland, Seattle again—and then, about nine months ago, the locations shift.
Denver brunch spots. Denver gyms. A rooftop bar I recognize on Larimer Street.
She moved back. After years of bouncing around, Annabelle Collier landed right back in Denver, and within a month the texts with Clarence started.
He never said a word. Not hey, you’ll never guess who’s back in town.
Not even a throwaway mention. He just let her slide back into his life and kept me on the other side of the wall.
My fingernails dig into my palms hard enough to leave marks.
Deborah keeps scrolling through the tagged photos and slows down on one from three months ago. Candlelit restaurant, white tablecloth. Annabelle beaming across the table at a man with silver hair, dark eyes, and a jawline that belongs on a billboard. The caption: Daddy-daughter dinner ??
“Hold on.” Deborah zooms in. Zooms in more. “That’s her dad?”
“Keep going.”
“No, I’m serious—damn.” She tilts the phone toward me. “Patrick Collier. That man is somebody’s father?”
“Deborah. Focus.”
“I’m focused. I’m focused on the fact that Annabelle Collier’s father looks like he should be running for office or modeling watches.
” She taps the tag and his profile loads—sparse, three posts, all professional.
Bio links to a company website. “Collier Commercial Properties. Wait—is this the guy who owns half the commercial real estate downtown?”
I take the phone from her. The About page has a photo of Patrick at a conference, shaking hands with somebody important. Silver hair, dark eyes, the posture of a man who built something with his name on the door and intends to protect it.
“That’s him.”
“So trust fund princess over here is living off daddy’s money.
” Deborah takes her phone back and flips between Annabelle’s grid and Patrick’s company page.
“The yoga retreats, the rooftop brunches, the designer lingerie she’s sending to your husband—you think she’s funding that with her wellness influencer career?
Daddy’s paying for all of it. Including the underwear Clarence is peeling off her. ”
Something hot and sharp twists behind my ribs. Not grief anymore. The grief is still there, pulsing underneath, but something harder is pushing through it—something with edges.
“I want to blow her life up.”
The words come out steady and cold and they don’t sound like me. Or maybe they sound exactly like me and I’ve never heard this version of my own voice before.
Deborah goes still. Sets her phone down. Looks at me.
“I’m not confronting Clarence,” I say. “He’ll do what he did after the dinner party—rearrange the whole conversation until I’m the one who’s crazy. He’s had eight months to prepare a script, and I’m not giving him the chance to perform it.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“She’s living on her father’s money. The apartment, the lifestyle, all of it—it runs through him.” I can feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. “What happens to Annabelle’s life if her father finds out she’s been screwing a married man for eight months?”
Deborah’s eyes widen. Then narrow.
“You want to tell the father.”
“I want to walk into that man’s office and show him every screenshot on that iPad. And then I want to watch him cut her off.”
“Ginny.”
“She blew up my marriage. I want to blow up her safety net.” My voice is shaking, but it’s not from sadness.
The anger is so bright behind my sternum it feels like swallowing a lit match.
“She gets to call me boring? She gets to take my husband and keep her daddy’s credit cards and her yoga retreats and her little curated Instagram life like none of this matters?
No. I want consequences. Real ones. The kind her father can deliver and I can’t. ”
Deborah stares at me for a long time. Something in her expression is shifting—recalibrating, making room for a version of me she hasn’t seen before.
“How are you getting in the room?”
“I just signed a restaurant group with four locations. I need commercial real estate contacts. It’s not even a stretch.”
“You’re going to cold-call the hot dad and pretend you want to talk about office space.”
“I’m going to schedule a meeting like a professional. And then I’m going to tell him everything.”
Deborah picks up her coffee. Takes a long sip. Watching me over the rim the way she does when she’s already decided something and is just waiting for me to catch up.
“You’ve been planning this since the car ride over.”
“Your ceiling fan wobbles, by the way. I can fix it.”
She laughs—sudden, sharp, the kind that escapes before you can stop it. Then she sets her mug down with a click that sounds like a decision.
“Monday?”
“His office opens at nine.”
“Then we need to figure out what you’re wearing.”