Chapter 5
I’M EXPECTED TO BELIEVE THIS?
“What about this one?”
Duane turns the laptop toward me. Turquoise water, white sand, a thatched bungalow perched over the Caribbean on stilts. He clicks through photos, tapping the trackpad, leaning back so I can see.
“Private beach. Butler service. Couples’ massages on the deck over the water.” His hand finds my hip. His thumb strokes the bone. “Look—private plunge pool on the balcony. We can swim naked.”
“Duane.”
“What? It’s vacation. Live a little.” The boyish grin. “Remember Turks and Caicos? When you got scared of that barracuda?”
“I wasn’t scared. I was startled.”
“Babe. You screamed underwater. I didn’t even know that was physically possible.”
I laugh. His hand is warm on my hip and my molars are grinding together so hard my jaw pops.
Behind us, white lilies crowd the island—he brought them home this morning, petals waxy and open, pollen dusting the marble.
A card in his handwriting: For my favorite person.
Flowers on Tuesday. Takeout from the Italian place on Wednesday.
A silk scarf on Thursday that I’d pointed out in a shop window months ago.
My favorite person. My skin is crawling under his thumb and he can’t feel it. He can’t feel any of it.
“Okay, this suite.” He clicks again. “King bed, outdoor shower, direct beach access. Seven-course tasting menu with wine pairings.” He tilts the screen further. “What do you think—the king suite or the villa?”
“Which one has the plunge pool?”
“The villa. But the king suite has the better view.”
“Book the villa.”
“Yeah?” His whole face opens up.
“We deserve it.”
His phrase. Out of my mouth. He catches my hand and presses his lips to my knuckles and my stomach lurches so hard I almost pull away. Don’t. Don’t pull away.
“God, I’m excited.” He drags the laptop back, starts typing. “We haven’t done a real trip in—what, a year?”
“Fourteen months. The anniversary trip to Napa.”
“Right. That vineyard with the cheese cave.” He squeezes my hand without looking up. “See, you remember everything. I’m moving the Tokyo call. Second week of next month. Done. This is happening.”
The cursor blinks on the booking form. Our names side by side in the guest fields.
Mr. and Mrs. Webster. And somewhere across town Cassandra Merrill is wearing his ring and growing his child and waiting for him to handle the board and handle the divorce and handle me—because that’s what I am now.
The thing that needs handling. The obstacle.
“Oh, and I was thinking.” He swivels the stool toward me. “Maybe we do a vow renewal while we’re there. On the beach. Just us. No guests, no production—just you and me and the water.”
The floor drops out.
A vow renewal. He wants to stand on a beach and promise to love me again. He wants to hold my hands and look in my eyes and say forever while Cassandra sits at home rubbing her belly, waiting for him to come back and tell her it’s done. He wants to renew the vows he broke before he ever made them.
“That’s...” My voice is splintering. I can hear it. He can’t. “That’s a big idea.”
“I know. But I’ve been thinking about it.
I want you to know I’m in this. That I chose you.
” He’s looking up at me with those steady brown eyes, his face so open, so goddamn earnest—and I want to grab the laptop and smash it on the marble.
I want to pull up the forty-seven emails to Cassandra and shove the screen in his face and say you chose me?
You CHOSE me? Read me the one about the ring, Duane.
Read me the one where you told her two more months and this is done.
“Can we talk about it more later? I want to think about it.”
“Of course. No pressure.” He smiles. Goes back to typing.
My phone buzzes.
I pull it out under the counter. One text from a number I saved under a name Duane would never open.
Yoga Studio: I have what you need. Come to the office.
Jacob.
The kitchen sharpens. Gold pollen on the marble. Steam curling off his coffee. The cursor blinking on the booking page with our names in the guest fields.
“Everything okay?”
“Paulette. She’s spiraling about her boyfriend again. You know how she gets.”
“Oh God. What now?”
“I don’t know yet. Let me go deal with it. We’ll finish talking about Belize tonight?”
“Go, go.” He waves me off, already back in the screen. “Tell her I said hi. And tell her he’s a loser.”
“I will.”
“Hey.” He catches my wrist. His fingers circle the bone, loose, warm—not like the hallway at the gala. Gentle. “I love you. You know that, right?”
Don’t crack. Do not crack. Not here. Not with his hand on my wrist and the vow renewal hanging in the air between us like a grenade with the pin out.
“I know.” I lean down and kiss his forehead. Cedar soap. “I love you too.”
The garage. The door shuts and my hands are shaking so badly I can barely get the key in the ignition.
I grip the wheel. White knuckles. My breath is coming in jerks, these ugly little gulps that fog the windshield, and my whole body is vibrating—wrists, forearms, shoulders, jaw—like something inside me is trying to tear its way out.
I love you. You know that, right?
I said it back. I kissed his forehead. I smiled at him.
The same mouth that told Cassandra two more months and this is done.
A vow renewal. On a beach. While she carries his child.
At this point, I don’t know if he’s lying to me or lying to her, or if he’s lying to himself that he can have her and me at once.
Something rips out of my chest—this raw, guttural sound I don’t recognize—and I slam my palm against the steering wheel. The horn blasts. I jerk back, panting, my palm on fire, my eyes burning so hard I can barely see.
Not yet. Not here.
Jacob opens the inner door before I knock. He steps back and I walk past him—close enough to catch cedar and clean cotton and something else, warm, underneath—and I shove it aside because I can’t, not right now.
“Sit down.” He pulls the leather chair out. “You’re going to want to be sitting.”
I sit. He drops a manila folder on the desk and flips it open.
Duane’s face.
My husband and Cassandra walking through a hotel entrance—glass doors, brass handles, a doorman at the edge of the frame. Duane’s hand spread wide on the small of her back. His mouth at her ear. Her body curved into his chest. In step. Matched. Like they’ve done this a hundred times.
I pick up the photo. The image blurs and I blink hard, force my eyes to lock on the timestamp in the corner.
I was making dinner that night. He texted me that the board meeting was running long.
I left a plate in the microwave. He came home and ate it and climbed into bed beside me and I was already half-asleep and he kissed my shoulder and said sorry, babe, long day.
Long day. At the Langham Hotel. With her.
“Three dates in the surveillance window.” Jacob fans four more photos across the desk. “Same hotel every time. The Langham, downtown.”
“The Langham.” My voice sounds scraped, wrong, like it belongs to someone else. “That’s fifteen minutes from our house.”
“He checks in under a different name. David Webster.”
“David—” I look up. “David Webster? His middle name?”
“Middle and last. The front desk doesn’t look twice because the credit card matches. Plenty of people use their middle names.”
A laugh rips out of me, ugly, jagged. “He just flipped his name around? That’s his big move? That’s what he—” I press my hand over my mouth. The laugh is turning into something else. Something with teeth. “Nobody even checked. Nobody looked.”
“Nobody checks on the CEO.”
The next photo. Cassandra leaving the hotel the next morning in sunglasses and a white sundress. Coffee in one hand. The ring catching light even in the grainy long-lens shot. My stomach clenches and I taste something sour at the back of my throat and I swallow it down.
“She shows up after he checks in. Same gap every time.” Jacob leans forward, forearms flat on the desk. “He parks in the garage. She takes a rideshare to the front entrance. They leave separately.”
“Of course they do.” I’m gripping the edge of the desk. My fingertips are bloodless. “He’s got a system. He’s got a whole—he’s got a system for this.”
The fourth photo. His car in the hotel garage. Cassandra climbing into the passenger side, her hand on the roof, laughing. The fifth—a sidewalk outside the hotel. His arm around her shoulders. Her palm flat against his chest. His wedding ring and her engagement ring both catching the same light.
I shove back. The chair screeches and I’m on my feet, my hand over my mouth, pacing.
Two steps to the wall. Two steps back. The office is too small and the walls are too close and those photos are sitting on that desk in a neat row and I can’t stop seeing them—his hand on her back, his mouth at her ear, the easy lean of his body into hers.
The same lean. The same goddamn lean he does with me at restaurants, the one I always thought was ours, and he does it with her in a hotel parking lot and it looks exactly the same. Exactly.
“He texted me.” I’m staring at the framed license on the wall because I can’t look at the desk. “That first night in your photos. He told me the board meeting ran long. I believed him. I made him a plate and left it in the microwave and went to bed.”
Quiet.
“I left him a plate, Jacob.”
He’s standing now. On my side of the desk, close, his hands at his sides. Not reaching for me. Just there.
“Tell me these are airtight.” My nails are cutting into my palms and the pain is the only thing keeping me here, in this room, in this body. “Tell me no lawyer makes these go away.”
“Every image is timestamped by the camera. I have the hotel’s exterior security footage pulling his car into the garage on all three dates.
I can testify to what I observed and subpoena the video through your attorney.
” He holds my eyes. “This is a man walking into a hotel with a woman wearing his ring. No one argues this away.”
Something shifts behind my ribs. Not breaks.
Locks. Like a gear catching, like a mechanism clicking into the position it was always meant to find.
The shaking just—stops. My hands go still.
My jaw unclenches. The tremor that’s been living in my body since Albert went white at the bar, since Lisa stammered on the yacht, since Cassandra’s voice came through Paulette’s phone saying he’s leaving her—gone. Clean.
I sit back down. Pull the photos toward me. Stack them, tap them even.
“For what it’s worth.” Jacob hasn’t moved. His eyes are dark and steady and there’s nothing careful in them—no pity, no professional softness. Something more direct. “You’re handling this better than anyone I’ve ever worked with.”
His jaw tightens. His eyes stay on mine and the moment holds—one beat, two—past client-and-investigator, past anything that should exist in this office. The back of my neck goes warm.
I look away first. Slide the photos into my bag.
“Send me digital copies.”
“Already in your email. Encrypted.”
I stand. He stands. The desk between us feels like less of a barrier than it should and neither of us moves to fix that.
“Thank you, Jacob.”
One dip of his chin. I turn for the door and the bell chimes and the hallway air hits me—coffee, carpet, the chemical smell of the elevator—and I don’t look back.
The car. Door shut. Phone out.
Victoria Parr. Paulette and I spent an evening going through every board member’s public record, and Victoria’s name kept coming back.
Governance committee chair. The only member who voted against Duane’s comp package last year.
The one who asked hard questions in shareholder meetings and never laughed at his jokes.
Paulette found the voting records. I found the pattern.
Two rings.
“This is Victoria.”
“Victoria, it’s Rachelle Webster.”
A pause. “Rachelle. Is everything all right?”
“No. I have evidence that my husband has been having a long-term affair with a woman named Cassandra Merrill. Surveillance photographs. Email correspondence going back years—before our wedding. She’s wearing an engagement ring he purchased, and she believes she’s pregnant with his child.”
Silence.
“He told her—in writing—that he would handle the board. Those are his words. He married me because the charter requires the CEO to be married, and now he’s promising another woman he’ll manage the governance implications of leaving me.”
“Rachelle.” Victoria’s voice drops low. “You understand what you’re telling me.”
“I understand exactly what I’m telling you.
I’m filing for divorce, and I want the board to hear it from me before Duane walks in with a PR strategy and a damage-control narrative.
He’s been running a parallel relationship for the entire marriage, using a seventy-year-old bylaw as cover.
The board deserves to know what kind of CEO they have. ”
“Bring everything. The photos, the emails. Don’t hold a single thing back.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“I’ll call an emergency session. When?”
“This week.”
“Done.”