Chapter 6
CAN I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE?
The elevator opens and the noise hits me—laughter, clinking glasses, a bass line thumping through the floor. String lights strung between the steel beams. Glass walls catching the last band of sunset. The room is packed.
I take a champagne flute off a passing tray.
My fingers are steady. That surprises me—I was shaking in the car so hard I sat in the parking garage pressing my palms into my thighs until it stopped.
But now my hand is wrapped around this glass stem and nothing is moving.
My pulse is slow. My breathing is even. My body has gone somewhere past fear and come out the other side into something I don’t have a name for.
Drew is at the bar. Blue sport coat, collar open. He turns to flag the bartender and his eyes sweep the room and land on me.
The laugh dies. His mouth stays open for a half second—his glass tilts and champagne spills over his knuckles and he doesn’t notice. Then he’s crossing the room, fast, and his hand closes around my elbow with a grip that’s going to leave marks.
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to meet your fiancée.”
His fingers dig in. “You need to leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
The blood drops out of his face. His lips press flat and his nostrils flare and his eyes go wide and wild—a cornered look, the kind I’ve never seen on him, not once in seven years of marriage.
“You’re embarrassing yourself.” His mouth is close to my ear. Hot breath. Cologne I used to love. “Think about Audrey.”
A woman’s voice from the front of the room: “Can I get everyone’s attention? Grab your glasses!”
Drew’s head snaps toward the sound. A blonde in a green dress stands near the head table with a champagne flute raised.
“I’m not going to talk long because Patty told me if I cry she’s cutting me off.” Laughter. “But I have to say one thing about this ring. Drew proposed with his grandmother’s ring—she wore it for fifty years.” The blonde presses her hand to her chest. “To Drew and Patty—and to fifty more years.”
Crystal clinks around the room. My heartbeat is in my teeth. I set down my glass. Unzip my bag. Pull out the folder.
And I walk straight to Patty.
She sees me coming. Her champagne lowers. Her smile flickers—confused, polite, the way you look at a stranger who’s walking toward you with purpose at your own party.
“My name is Sloane Larson.” Every nerve in my body is firing and my voice comes out steady and clear and I don’t know where this calm is coming from but it feels like a weapon. “I’m Drew’s wife. We are still married. Our daughter isn’t even a year old.”
Patty’s face breaks open. Her lips part. The color drains from her cheeks the same way it drained from Drew’s.
“That’s—no. He told me you were his ex—”
Drew is behind me. His hand clamps onto my arm. “She’s confused. She’s been struggling since the baby—let’s just go outside and—”
I yank my arm free. The force of it sends heat up my shoulder and into my jaw.
“Don’t touch me.”
A woman at the nearest table nudges the man beside her. “Who is that?”
“His wife.” The man half-stands from his chair. “She just said wife.”
Drew reaches for me again. “Come on. We can talk about this—”
Patty’s voice cuts through. Drew’s hand drops.
“Let her talk.” Patty’s chin is up. Her jaw is tight. She’s looking at Drew with something I recognize—the first crack. The first second where the story stops making sense. “Go ahead.”
I open the folder on the table right in front of her.
My hands should be shaking. They’re not.
Something in my body has locked down—the shaking will come later, I can feel it building in my legs, in my shoulders, but right now every muscle I own is holding steady and I am going to use every second of it.
“This is the original design sketch for that ring.” I set the page in front of Patty. Pencil lines. Francis’s father’s handwriting. “Carlson and Son Jewelers. Dated the year Drew and I got married. Seven years ago. Not fifty.”
Patty’s eyes drop to the sketch.
“This is the resizing work order.” Second page, right on top.
“Drew’s name. His credit card. Size seven down to five and a half.
Six weeks ago. He told the jeweler I’d lost weight after the baby.
The opposite is true—I gained weight during pregnancy and had to stop wearing it because it no longer fit.
Then I couldn’t find the ring and Drew told me it’d turn up. He helped me search for it.”
The room has gone dead silent.
“And these are my wedding photos.” I lay the printout next to the work order. The same ring on my hand. The same diamond. The photographer’s flash catching the sapphire at the exact angle that the string lights are catching it right now on Patty’s finger.
Patty picks up the wedding photo. Her hand is trembling so hard the paper shakes. She holds it next to her own left hand and looks from one to the other and a sound comes out of her—small, involuntary, like she’s been hit.
“Drew, is that you?” The man at the nearest table is pointing at the printout. “That’s your face.”
Every head in the room swivels. Drew is standing behind me with his mouth working and nothing coming out and I can hear his breathing—ragged, fast, the sound of a man who has run out of rooms to hide in.
“She’s not well.” His voice cracks. “She’s been—since the baby—”
“Is the baby really eight months?” someone else asks, and the question is aimed at Drew, not me.
Patty is staring at the ring on her hand.
Her fingers are curled against her palm and her shoulders are shaking and when she looks up her eyes are wet and red and something in my chest twists so hard I almost double over—because I know that face.
I wore that face. The exact second your whole life flips over and you’re standing in the wreckage trying to understand how you didn’t see it.
She pulls the ring off. Slowly. Like the metal is taking something with it. She holds it for one second—her knuckles white, her breath hitching—and she sets it on the table in front of me.
“You told me she was your ex.” Her voice shakes. She’s looking at Drew. “You told me I was saving you.”
“Patty—”
“Don’t.”
I pick up the ring. The metal is warm from her skin.
The prongs press into my palm and the sensation shoots up my arm and my whole body clenches around it—seven years of wearing this ring, seven years of thinking it meant something, and now it’s warm from another woman’s hand and I want to scream and I want to cry and I do neither.
I close my fingers around it and shove it in my coat pocket and pick up the folder and leave the wedding photo on the table.
Drew can keep that.
The elevator doors close behind me and my legs give.
I catch the rail and my whole body starts shaking—knees, jaw, shoulders—everything that held still up there is coming apart.
A sound rips out of my chest that I don’t recognize.
Raw. Scraped. It echoes off the metal walls and then the doors open and the lobby is bright and empty and I walk through it on legs that don’t feel like mine.
The night air hits my face and I can finally breathe.
I make it to a bench near the parking lot. The concrete is cold through my dress. My hands won’t stop—this deep, rolling tremor that starts in my wrists and runs up into my shoulders and won’t quit no matter how hard I press my palms together. I pull out my phone and call Kellee.
“It’s done.” My voice comes out wrecked. “Is Audrey okay?”
“Sound asleep. What happened?”
“I can’t—not on the phone. I’m too keyed up. I’ll tell you when I get there.”
“Did he follow you?”
“No.”
“Drive slow.”
I open the text thread with Carter. His contact is still saved as Dr. Rhodes—Pediatrics.
It’s done.
Three dots. Then: Good. How are you?
I stare at the cursor. My thumbs are shaking too hard to type. I lock the phone.
The drive home is quiet. No music. Both hands on the wheel, squeezing, because the shaking gets worse every time I loosen my grip. The ring is a hard weight in my coat pocket, pressing against my hip with every turn.
Drew’s car isn’t in the driveway. The porch light is on. The front door opens before I reach it and Kellee is right there—searching my face, reading it, not saying anything yet.
She locks the door behind me. We end up in the kitchen. I press my back against the counter and my legs are buzzing and my chest feels like it’s been scooped hollow and refilled with something electric.
“Tell me,” Kellee says.
“The maid of honor started a toast. Told the whole room the ring was Drew’s grandmother’s. Fifty years. Everyone raised their glasses.” My jaw aches. “I walked right up to Patty and opened the folder in front of her.”
“What did he do?”
“Grabbed my arm. Tried to pull me out. She’s confused, she’s been struggling since the baby.” My voice goes low and smooth on the impression and it tastes like poison in my mouth. “Patty told him to stop. She looked right at him and said if she’s lying, let her talk.”
Kellee’s breath catches.
“I put the documents on the table. The design sketch, the resizing order, the wedding photo. She picked up the photo and held it next to her own hand and—” My throat locks. I press my thumbnail into my finger until the sting cuts through. “Kellee, the sound she made.”
“What do you mean?”
“When she saw it. When she held the photo next to her ring and realized. She made this sound—quiet, like she’d been punched. And I—” My eyes burn. I blink hard. “I know that sound. I made the same sound in our kitchen when Francis called.”
Kellee is very still.
“She didn’t even hesitate. She pulled the ring off and put it on the table in front of me. Looked Drew dead in the face and said you told me I was saving you.”
“Saving him.”
“She thought she was rescuing him.” My hand drifts to my coat pocket.
The ring is right there, hard against my hip.
“She loved him. She actually loved him. And the whole time he was lying to her the same way he was lying to me—same playbook, same voice, same babe-I-just-want-what’s-best bullshit.
She fell for it the exact same way I did. ”
My knees buckle. I catch myself on the counter’s edge and Kellee grabs my arm—the same arm Drew grabbed—and her grip is firm but gentle and the difference between the two is so sharp it hits me like a wall.
My eyes flood. The kitchen blurs. I press my free hand over my mouth and a sound comes out that I’ve been holding in since the elevator and I can’t stop it—this raw, shuddering thing that comes from somewhere below my ribs.
“Hey.” Kellee’s arm is around me. Her shoulder is under my chin. “You did it. It’s done.”
“I’m still so angry.” The words come out jagged against her sweatshirt.
“She wore my grandmother’s ring. She posted it online and called it a love letter.
She cheered him on while he built a custody case against me.
” I’m shaking against Kellee’s shoulder and my face is wet and I can’t tell if it’s tears or just my body finally letting go of everything it held in up there.
“But she didn’t know. She didn’t know any of it.
And the look on her face when she found out—”
“Was the same look you had.”
“Yeah.”
Kellee holds on. I let her. The monitor on the counter hisses with Audrey’s breathing and the refrigerator hums and I stand in my best friend’s arms in my kitchen and shake until the shaking slows.
When I pull back, Kellee’s sweatshirt is wet at the shoulder. She doesn’t look at it.
“He’s not coming home tonight,” I say.
“Good. I’m staying.”
“You don’t have to—”
I pull the ring out of my pocket and set it on the table. Under the kitchen light it looks small. Ordinary. It used to mean the world to me. Now it’s just the thing he stole.
“Go check on Audrey,” Kellee says. “I’ll lock up.”
Upstairs. The crib. Audrey is on her back with both arms flung out and her mouth open and one sock missing. The white noise machine hisses on the dresser. She’s so deeply asleep that her eyelids don’t even flutter when the floorboard creaks under my foot.
I wrap my hands around the crib rail. The wood is cool and smooth and my daughter is breathing and downstairs Kellee is checking the deadbolt and the sliding glass and for the first time in weeks someone else is checking the locks.
Audrey sighs—that tiny exhale that sounds like a question she forgot to finish.
My coat is still on. My grandmother’s ring is on the kitchen table.
Drew is somewhere in this city realizing that every lie he built just collapsed in front of fifty people.
And I am standing over my daughter’s crib with mascara on my face and a tremor still running through my hands and the lying is over.
That’s enough for tonight.