Chapter 6 #2
“Representative Cole—” Janet tries to cut in.
“— and I think when you look at the strength of a family unit, you see—”
“Representative Cole.” Sharper now. “Something seems to be happening in the audience.”
Bennett stops. He turns. The back rows are a mess—reporters on their feet, phones out, voices rising over each other. A cameraman swings his rig toward the audience and then swings it back, confused. Bennett’s hand tightens on the arm of his chair.
“What is going on?”
I look at Janet. The studio lights are hot on my face and my heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my fingertips and my voice comes out steady as concrete.
“I’d suggest you check your phone.”
Janet stares at me. Her hand moves to the desk. She picks up her phone, reads the screen, and the color leaves her face in a single wash. She looks at me. I look back.
“Mrs. Cole—”
“I’ll save you the question.” I turn to the camera.
The red light. The lens. Every television in the metro area.
“What those journalists just received is a documented account of my husband’s eighteen-month affair.
Photos. Texts. Dates. Hotels billed to his campaign travel account.
Timestamped surveillance.” My voice doesn’t waver.
Fifteen years of performing—smiling when I didn’t mean it, laughing when nothing was funny, saying I believe in him when belief had been dead for years—all of it funneled into this moment, because if my husband taught me anything, it’s how to hold a room.
“You at home will find out soon enough.”
“Claire.” Bennett’s voice. Low. Warning.
I don’t look at him.
“My husband is not who he says he is. And he does not live by the values he stands at podiums and preaches.” The studio is dead silent.
The cameras are live and the red lights are steady and somewhere in the back of the room a phone is recording and I don’t care.
“Three years ago, we lost a pregnancy. It devastated me. It devastated us both—or I thought it did. He had a one-of-a-kind necklace commissioned for me. The birthstone for the month our child was supposed to be born. He put it around my neck and said so we never forget.”
I hear him shift in his chair. I hear the creak of his weight.
“One month ago, at a campaign rally, I saw a woman wearing that necklace. His mistress.” A breath. “His pregnant mistress. Carrying his child while he was using spermicidal lubricant on me without my knowledge to make sure I would never carry another one.”
The sound that goes through the room is physical—a collective intake of breath, chairs shifting, someone saying oh my God just loud enough for the microphones to catch. Bennett is on his feet.
“Claire—Claire, stop—”
“If you’ve wondered why I haven’t, at any point tonight, publicly voiced my support for my husband—” I stand.
The microphone is still pinned to my dress.
Every word is going out live. “— it’s because I don’t have any left to give.
He betrayed me and our marriage. Not just with another woman, but by taking something sacred—something that belonged to our loss, to our child—and giving it away like it meant nothing.
That is not a man who deserves a congressional seat. That is not a man who deserves a wife.”
I unclip the microphone. Set it on the chair. The studio erupts—voices crashing over each other, reporters shouting questions, camera operators scrambling. Janet is saying something into her desk mic but I can’t hear it over the noise.
“CLAIRE.” Bennett’s voice cracks through the chaos.
I’m already walking. Past the cameras, past the producer with her headset hanging off one ear and her mouth open, past the rows of folding chairs where every single person has a phone raised and pointed at the stage.
“Claire, you don’t—you can’t just—CLAIRE. ”
I don’t stop. I don’t turn around. My heels hit the concrete floor and the exit sign glows green ahead of me and behind me I can hear him—not chasing, not yet, but his voice is shredding at the edges, the polished tone splitting open to reveal something raw and panicked underneath.
The hallway is bright and empty and my reflection moves in the glass doors ahead of me—black dress, straight spine, dry eyes. The doors push open and the night air hits my face and Darcy’s car is idling at the curb.
I get in. Shut the door. My hands are shaking so badly I have to press them flat against my thighs. Darcy pulls away from the curb without a word. No questions. No celebration. Just the engine and the road and the city sliding past the windows.
My phone starts ringing. Bennett. I decline the call. It rings again. I decline it again. A text: Where are you. We need to talk. This is insane.
I turn the phone face-down on my lap.
Darcy glances at me. Just once. Quick. And the corner of her mouth lifts—not a grin, not triumph. Something fiercer. “Proud of you, sis. I know what that cost.”
The city lights blur past the window and my jaw aches from clenching and my pulse is still hammering and somewhere behind me, in a convention center studio with cameras still rolling, my husband’s career is dying on live television.
I roll down the window. The air is cold and sharp and clean.
I breathe.