Chapter 5
THEY’RE NOT GOING TO SEE ME COMING
“Go back.” Kellee taps the screen. “That Story highlight. The one with the ring emoji.”
I click it. A Save the Date graphic fills the screen—champagne gold text, a skyline silhouette, a photo of Drew’s hand on Patty’s waist with both their faces cropped out. Join us to celebrate! Luma Rooftop. Semi-formal. Cocktails at seven. The date is two Saturdays from now.
My ribs lock. Luma Rooftop. Glass walls, string lights.
Drew took me there for our first anniversary.
He held my hand across the table and told me he couldn’t believe he got to keep me.
That table. That rooftop. And now a different ring on a different woman’s finger, and I’m staring at the invitation on a laptop screen in Kellee’s kitchen while my coffee goes cold.
“She tagged the bridal party.” Kellee leans over my shoulder. “Scroll down.”
A row of tagged names under the graphic.
Maid of honor. Two bridesmaids. And—Courtney Jamison.
I haven’t seen that name in years. We ran in the same group in our early twenties, before Drew and I got serious.
She moved to Portland before we got married, missed everything.
She’s back in town and standing up in the bridal party of the woman my husband proposed to with my stolen ring. She has no idea.
“Keep scrolling,” Kellee says. “I want to see what else Patty’s posted.”
I click back to the grid. Brunch photos. A sunset over a rooftop I don’t recognize. Then a carousel post from two weeks ago—the engagement ring in golden light, Patty’s hand resting on a white linen tablecloth, and a caption long enough to make me scroll.
I still can’t stop staring at it. Drew told me the story of this ring on our six-month anniversary and I cried so hard the waiter brought me extra napkins.
His grandmother wore it every single day for fifty years.
FIFTY YEARS. When she passed, Drew kept it because he knew—he KNEW—he’d give it to the woman he wanted to spend his life with.
I can’t believe that woman is me. I can’t believe I get to carry her story forward.
This ring isn’t just beautiful. It’s a love letter from a woman I never met.
The screen blurs. I blink and it sharpens and the words are still there.
Fifty years.
“He told her fifty years.” My voice comes out scraped raw. “Fifty-two in the texts to Patty. Fifty on Instagram. He can’t even keep his own lie straight because it doesn’t matter—nobody checks. Not one person picked up the ring and looked at it. Not one question.”
“Because why would they?” Kellee says. “It’s a beautiful story.”
“It’s a fabrication.” I shove back from the table.
The chair legs screech on the tile. “She wrote a love letter to a dead woman who never existed. I can’t believe I get to carry her story forward.
That’s MY grandmother’s story. MY grandmother’s diamond.
And Patty is crying over it because Drew handed her a fairy tale and she swallowed it whole. ”
My hand slams flat on the counter. The sting shoots up my wrist and I don’t pull back.
“He’s going to do a toast,” I say. “You know that, right? That’s what this party is. He’s going to stand up in front of all those people and tell the ring story and everyone’s going to dab their eyes and clink their glasses and he’s going to bask in it.”
“So don’t let him.”
“I’m not going to let him.”
Kellee turns in her chair. “Walk me through it.”
“I walk in after the room is full. I wait for the toast. I let him get the words out—let him stand up there with his whole chest and sell the grandmother story one more time.” My finger taps the counter. Once. Twice. “And then I open the folder.”
“What’s in the folder?”
“Everything. Francis’s design sketch—dated.
The resizing work order with Drew’s name on it—dated.
My wedding photos with the same ring on my hand.
Carter’s financial summary. Two documents on the same letterhead, seven years apart.
One says he built the ring for his wife.
The other says he brought it back and had it resized for someone else. ”
Kellee’s eyes are bright. She’s leaning forward—elbows on the table, jaw tight.
“You talk to Patty?”
“Directly. Not a scene—I’m not screaming, I’m not throwing things. I lay the documentation in front of her and I tell her who I am and I let the paper do the work.”
“And Drew?”
“Drew is going to do what Drew always does. Say I’m not well.
Say I’m confused. Trot out the soft voice and the concerned face and every trick he’s used on me for the last year.
” I push off the counter. “But he can’t soft voice a resizing receipt with his credit card number on it.
He can’t concerned face his way past a wedding photo.
The paper doesn’t care how reasonable he sounds. ”
“God.” Kellee sits back. “You’ve been thinking about this.”
“I’ve been thinking about nothing else.”
“So then Arthur goes—and I’m not kidding, he says this in front of the whole table—he goes, ‘I thought the deadline was a suggestion.’“ Drew shakes his head, grinning. “A suggestion. Patterson’s face. I wish I had a picture.”
“What did Patterson do?”
“He just stared at him. For like ten seconds. Dead silence. Then he goes, ‘Arthur, the deadline is April first. Is April a suggestion?’“
I laugh. It comes out real. Drew grins wider and stabs a piece of chicken with his fork.
“This is really good, by the way.”
“You said that already.”
“Saying it again. The lemon thing you do—chef’s kiss.” He reaches across the table and steals an artichoke heart off my plate. “Can I have this? You never eat these.”
“I eat those.”
“You push them to the side. Every time.”
“That’s not—fine. Take it.”
Audrey bangs her sippy cup on the high chair tray. Drew catches it before the second bang, lifts it out of range, and makes a buzzer sound. “Foul. Unnecessary roughness. Fifteen-yard penalty.” He sets the cup back down and Audrey immediately grabs it and winds up again.
“She’s going to be hell in a courtroom someday,” Drew says.
My fork stops halfway to my mouth. I set it down.
“What?” He glances up. “I just meant—she’s persistent.”
“No, I know. It’s funny.” I pick the fork back up. My fingers are tingling.
After dinner Drew lifts Audrey out of the high chair and carries her to the living room rug. She grabs a fistful of his collar and shoves her other hand into his mouth and he pretends to eat it—that chomping thing that makes her whole body shake with laughter.
“Delicious,” he says through her fingers. “Tastes like banana.”
Audrey shrieks. He pulls her hand out gently and blows a raspberry on her wrist and she kicks both legs so hard she almost launches off his lap.
Drew catches her. Tucks her against his chest. She melts into him—that boneless baby slump where her cheek presses into his shoulder and her fist curls into his shirt.
My chest splits open.
Because this. This. When he does it—when he actually holds her and plays with her and makes her laugh so hard she hiccups—his hands are gentle.
His voice goes soft and silly and patient and Audrey loves it.
She grabs for him, melts into him, makes that humming sound against his neck that she usually saves for me.
He kisses the top of her head. Closes his eyes for a second. Breathes her in.
And I’m going to take this from her.
The thought hits like a fist to the sternum.
I grip the kitchen counter behind me because my knees just went soft.
Audrey is going to grow up with a father she sees on weekends.
Supervised weekends, if Carter’s documentation does what it’s supposed to do.
She’s going to ask why Daddy doesn’t live here.
She’s going to cry for him at bedtime and I’m going to stand in the doorway and listen to it and know that I chose this.
That I walked into a party and detonated her family because her father is a liar and a thief and she is too young to understand any of it.
Drew nuzzles Audrey’s hair. She grabs his ear. He yelps.
What if she hates me for it someday?
“Hey.” Drew looks up from the rug. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I let go of the counter. “Just tired.”
“So.” He shifts Audrey to his other arm. “Jake’s doing poker tomorrow night. Same crew—Mike, Sandoval, that new guy from his gym. I’ll probably be out till midnight, maybe a little after.”
“That sounds fun. You deserve a night out.”
“Yeah?” He looks pleased. “You sure you’re okay with Audrey solo?”
“Drew. I’m solo with Audrey every day.”
“Right.” A flicker behind his eyes. “I just meant—if you’re tired—”
“I’m fine. Go have fun.” I push off the counter. “Can you put her down tonight? I want to take a bath.”
“Of course. Absolutely.”
I fill the tub. Hot. Hotter than I usually run it, hot enough that my skin goes pink the second I lower myself in. The bathroom door is cracked. The baby monitor sits on the counter, the green light steady.
Drew’s voice comes through the speaker. Soft. Close.
“Time for sleep, Audrey-bug. Let’s calm down.”
The monitor crackles. Audrey fusses—that short, sharp cry that means she’s fighting it. Drew shushes her. Then he starts to sing.
My whole body goes rigid in the water.
Hush now, my darling. I know that melody the way I know my own pulse.
My grandmother’s voice—low, rough from decades of cigarettes she quit too late.
She sang it to my mother. My mother sang it to me.
I sang it to Audrey in the NICU when she was four pounds and wired to machines and I couldn’t hold her yet, so I pressed my mouth to the porthole of the isolette and hummed it because it was the only thing I had.
Drew is singing it now. Through a plastic monitor in a bathroom where I’m lying in water so hot my skin burns. He heard me hum it during late-night feedings and midnight walks and those delirious hours where the lullaby was the only thing holding me together.
Audrey’s fussing slows. The melody drifts through the speaker, tinny and warped. My grandmother’s song in Drew’s mouth. Clean. Smooth. Stripped of the rough voice, the cigarette rasp, the hand on my forehead when I had a fever.
I slide down until the water covers my ears. The sound goes muffled—Drew’s voice, the monitor, the hum of the house. Underwater, there’s just my heartbeat and the pressure against my eardrums and the heat soaking into my muscles. I hold my breath. The seconds stretch. My lungs start to press.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
I come up. Water streams down my face and I gasp and the air hits my wet skin and the bathroom is sharp and bright and real.
The monitor is quiet. Audrey is asleep. Drew’s footsteps creak down the hallway.
I pull the drain. The water spirals out and I sit in the cooling porcelain with my knees pulled to my chest and my wet hair dripping down my back.
I am done.
Not the way I was done before. This is final. The woman who watched him hold Audrey on the rug and felt her chest crack open—she’s still here. She’ll always be here. But the wife is gone. The wife left somewhere between the ring text and the lullaby and she is not coming back.
I stand up. Wrap the towel around myself. Wipe the fog from the mirror.
The woman looking back at me has wet hair and red skin and dark circles under her eyes and she is the most dangerous person Drew Larson has ever met.