3. Jade
— ? —
Jade
The café on Third Street becomes our place after two weeks of hell.
It’s small, tucked between a dry cleaner and a used bookstore, the kind of spot you’d walk past a hundred times without noticing. Mismatched chairs. Chipped mugs. A barista with purple hair who remembers our orders after the second visit and never asks questions.
Damian found it. “No one from my family would be caught dead here,” he said that first day, holding the door open for me with a conspiratorial smile. “The coffee costs less than twenty dollars.”
I laughed and realized it was the first time I’d done that in weeks.
Now it’s become ritual. Every few days, when the walls of Donald’s house start closing in too tight, when Vivian’s saccharine texts make me want to scream, I slip away to this cramped little café where the world feels smaller and simpler.
Where Damian sits across from me and looks at me like I’m real. Like I matter.
Today, I’m already waiting when he walks through the door. My heart does something complicated in my chest when I see him, something I’m still not ready to name.
“You’re early,” he says, sliding into the chair across from me.
“You’re late.”
“Traffic.” He signals to the barista - our usual - and turns back to me with those dark eyes that see too much. “How are you feeling? Really?”
The question lands differently now than it did that first night outside his brother’s building. Then, I was a stranger. A mess. Someone he had no reason to care about.
Now...
“I had my doctor’s appointment yesterday,” I tell him, wrapping my hands around my mug. “At a clinic across town. Where no one knows me.”
“And?”
“Everything’s fine. Baby’s healthy. Due in the spring.” I try to smile. “I always wanted a spring baby.”
His expression softens in a way that makes my chest ache. “That’s good news, Jade.”
“Is it?” The words come out more bitter than I intended. “I’m pregnant with the child of a man who’s sleeping with my sister. I have no money, no job, no plan. And every time I close my eyes, I see them together, and I want to-” I stop. Breathe. “I don’t know what I want.”
Damian is quiet for a moment. The barista brings his coffee - black, no sugar, the same thing he always orders - and he thanks her without looking away from me.
“What did you do yesterday?” he asks. “After the appointment.”
The question surprises me. “What?”
“Walk me through it. After you left the clinic, what did you do?”
I frown, trying to remember through the fog of exhaustion that’s become my constant companion.
“I... went home. Donald wasn’t there, obviously.
I made dinner - just for myself, he texted that he’d be late.
Sat on the couch. Watched something on TV, I don’t even remember what.
” I shrug. “Went to bed early. Cried for a while. Fell asleep.”
“And Vivian?”
“Texted me three times.” I pull out my phone, scroll to the messages. “Look. ‘Hope you’re feeling okay, sis!’ ‘Let me know if you need anything!’ ‘We should do brunch this weekend, just us girls!’”
Damian reads them, his jaw tightening in that way I’ve come to recognize, the way he looks when he’s trying not to say something he’ll regret.
“I respond to all of them,” I continue. “With exclamation points and heart emojis. Like everything’s fine. Like I didn’t see her-” My voice cracks. “I’m living in a performance, Damian. Every single day. And I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.”
He sets down my phone. Reaches across the table, and this time he doesn’t stop himself. His fingers close around mine, warm and steady.
“You don’t have to perform with me,” he says quietly. “You know that, right?”
I do know. That’s the problem.
That’s exactly the problem.
***
A week later, it finally comes to a head.
We’re in our usual spot, the corner booth by the window, half-hidden behind a wilting potted plant that the barista keeps forgetting to water. Damian leans forward, his coffee forgotten, his eyes intense in a way that makes it hard to breathe.
“I made some calls,” he says. “Quietly. There’s a lawyer - not one of my family’s. Someone who handles cases like yours. Off the record.”
I freeze, my mug halfway to my lips. “You did that? For me?”
“I did that because of you.” He leans forward. “You keep saying you have no options. I’m telling you that’s not true anymore. You have one. If you want it.”
“And if I take it?” My voice drops. “If I start fighting back, and Vivian finds out before I’m ready-”
“Then we move faster than she does.” He says we like it’s the most natural word in the world. Like there was never any question.
I stare at him. “Why do you keep saying that? We. Like this is your problem too.”
“Because somewhere in these last weeks, it became my problem.” He turns his coffee cup slowly in his hands, not looking at me now. “I told myself I was just helping a woman my brother wronged. That it was about doing the right thing.” A pause. “I stopped believing that days ago.”
The air shifts between us - quiet, careful, like neither of us wants to breathe wrong and break it.
“Damian-”
“I’m not asking you for anything.” He finally looks up. “You’re pregnant. You’re in the middle of a war. The last thing you need is one more complication.” His jaw tightens. “But I’d rather tell you the truth than keep pretending I don’t feel it.”
I should pull back. I should remind him whose wife I am, whose child I’m carrying.
Instead I hear myself say: “What if it’s not just you?”
My heart is pounding so hard I’m sure he can hear it. Every nerve in my body is aware of where we’re touching - just our hands, just our fingers intertwined - but it feels like more. It feels like everything.
This is wrong.
He’s Donald’s brother.
You’re pregnant with Donald’s baby.
You shouldn’t be feeling this. You shouldn’t be wanting this.
But I am.
God help me, I am.
“I don’t know what this is,” I whisper. “I can’t afford to know yet. But you’re the only thing in my life right now that doesn’t feel like a trap.” I swallow. “So don’t apologize for it. Please. It’s the one good thing I have.”
For a long moment, neither of us moves. The barista calls out an order. A chair scrapes somewhere behind us. The whole ordinary world keeps turning, oblivious.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “Then we don’t name it. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” I agree.
And somehow that - the not yet - feels more like a promise than anything either of us could have said out loud.
We stare at each other across the table. Two people standing at the edge of a cliff, knowing the fall will break them, unable to step back.
***
Vivian
I’m in Donald’s bed when my phone buzzes.
Our bed, really. This house stopped belonging to Jade the moment I first spread myself across these Egyptian cotton sheets, the moment Donald buried his face in my neck and whispered that he’d never felt this way before.
The moment he started spending his weekends with me and Jade thought he was traveling for business, each moment slowly, methodically replacing her in every corner of his life.
She still sleeps here, of course. Still folds his laundry and cooks his dinners and plays the dutiful wife. But she’s just a placeholder now. A warm body keeping my seat until I’m ready to claim it.
I remember the first time I saw Donald at Jade’s engagement party, three and a half years ago. He was standing by the window, champagne in hand, looking out at the city like he owned it.
Because he did.
And my sister - my lucky, stumbling, never-had-to-try sister - was going to marry him.
I smiled at their wedding. Gave a beautiful maid of honor speech. Let everyone cry at how much I loved her.
And I started planning.
“This is wrong,” he’d said, pulling back, the first time I kissed him. “She’s your sister.”
I’d traced my finger along his jaw. “But doesn’t wrong feel good sometimes?”
He never pulled away again and now he is in the shower, washing away the evidence of the last two hours, the scratch marks I left down his back, the bite mark blooming on his shoulder.
I can hear him humming through the bathroom door, something tuneless and satisfied.
He always hums after. Like a man who’s just eaten a particularly good meal.
Men are so simple, I think, stretching languidly against the pillows that still smell like his cologne. Feed their ego, stroke their... ambition, and they’ll follow you anywhere.
I scroll through the photos Margot sent me. Jade’s face, soft and open in a way it never is around Donald anymore, not that he’d notice. Damian’s jaw, tight with barely restrained longing. The chemistry between them practically radiates through the screen.
They haven’t done anything. Not yet. I know my sister - she’s too moral, too good to actually cross that line while she’s still married.
But it doesn’t matter what they’ve actually done.
It only matters what it looks like.
I set the phone aside as the bathroom door opens and Donald emerges in a cloud of steam, a towel slung low around his hips.
Water droplets cling to his chest, trailing down the planes of his stomach.
He’s handsome, I suppose. Conventionally attractive in that wealthy, well-maintained way.
Good bone structure. Nice teeth. The kind of man who photographs well at charity galas.
He’s also vain, insecure, and so desperate to be adored that he’d believe almost anything from a woman who tells him what he wants to hear.
Perfect.
“Come back to bed,” I purr, letting the sheet slip just enough to remind him what’s underneath. “I’m not done with you yet.”
He grins - that boyish, self-satisfied grin that probably worked on Jade when they first met. “Insatiable.”
“Only for you.”
Lie. Lie. Lie.