16. Odette
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Odette
Elliott brings it up in the car on the way over.
He waits until we’re stopped at a light, the city sliding gold and wet across the windshield, and then he says it quietly, the way he says the things that matter most. “I want to stop hiding you.”
“We aren’t hiding.”
“We are, a little. You introduce me as Laurence’s brother.
As your friend. As the person who drove you.
” His thumb moves over my knuckles. “I want to walk into that room tonight and have people know. That you’re mine.
That the baby is ours. That I’m not standing next to you because I’m being kind.
I’m standing next to you because I love you, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t. ”
My chest goes tight. “Elliott.”
“I know. It’s fast, and it’s messy, and he’ll use it against us. I just hate watching you make yourself small so no one talks. You did that for your whole marriage. I don’t want to be one more man who asks you to disappear.”
“You aren’t.” I look out the window so he won’t see my face. “But I’m not ready to hand them the story tonight. When it comes out, and it will, I decide how. Not you, not Laurence, not a single person in that ballroom. Me. For once in my life, me.”
He’s quiet a moment. Then he lifts my hand and presses a kiss to the back of it. “Then I follow your lead,” he says. “Whatever you decide in there, I’m one step behind you.”
It undoes me a little, that answer. A man who wants to claim me out loud, and who’s willing to wait until I’m ready to be claimed. I don’t know what to do with a man like that. I’m still learning.
I used to live for the Whitlock Foundation dinner.
Crystal chandeliers dripping light onto tables set with bone china and sterling silver.
Women in gowns that cost more than cars.
Men in tuxedos discussing philanthropy while waiters in white gloves refill champagne glasses that never seem to empty.
This is the world I married into, the world I spent years learning to navigate, the world that taught me how to smile when I wanted to scream.
Tonight I’m not smiling.
As I move into the room a woman I have air kissed at more of these dinners than I can count catches my arm.
Diana Ostrander, who’s known me for years and never once meant a kind word.
“Odette,” she breathes, all sympathy, her eyes bright with the opposite of it.
“You poor thing. So brave of you to come out. I’d simply die. ”
She drifts off before I can answer, satisfied, and for a second it lands exactly where she aimed it.
Under the chandeliers, in the world I gave fifteen years to, I’m the woman whose husband was unfaithful on a screen the size of a wall.
That’s all I am to them now. The heat crawls up my neck, my eyes prick, and the old shame opens in my chest like a trapdoor.
I have to breathe through the urge to find a bathroom and cry the way I did the night it happened.
I don’t. I lift my chin instead and keep walking. But it costs me, and I let it cost me, because pretending it doesn’t hurt is the thing I’m finally done doing.
I’m standing at the entrance to the ballroom with Elliott’s hand warm on the small of my back, scanning the room for threats. Because that’s what these events are now. Battlefields dressed up in silk and diamonds.
“There.” Elliott’s voice is low. “Table seven. Center of the room.”
I follow his gaze and feel my stomach drop.
Laurence is already seated. He’s wearing his best tuxedo, the one that makes him look like he stepped out of a magazine, and he’s talking to the Whitlocks themselves like he hasn’t spent the last two weeks becoming Manhattan’s most whispered-about scandal. Next to him is an empty chair.
My chair.
“He moved the place cards,” I say. “Of course he did.”
“We can leave.”
“No.” I straighten my spine until every vertebra locks into place, hard and untouchable. “I’m done leaving. I’m done letting him control where I go and who I talk to and how I live my life.”
The Orchid Society has been working for two weeks. Quietly, carefully, the way we always work. Whispers planted in the right ears. Invitations to certain events mysteriously lost. Doors that used to open for Laurence Fairbanks suddenly closing without explanation.
But tonight is different. Tonight isn’t about whispers.
I spot Lucia first, her red dress a beacon across the room. She catches my eye and gives me a small nod, then casually lifts her phone like she’s checking a text.
Isla is at a table near the stage, her blonde hair pulled back in an elegant chignon. Her phone is already out, propped against her water glass at an angle that could be accidental but isn’t.
Dayana is speaking with the event coordinator, her hand resting on the woman’s arm, her smile warm and genuine. But her husband Rhyson is filming the room in a slow pan, pretending to capture the decorations for social media.
Every phone in our network is ready. Every camera pointed at the center of the room.
At Laurence.
“Showtime,” I murmur to Elliott, and walk toward my seat.
Laurence sees me coming. His face transforms, the public mask sliding into place, charm and warmth and the smile that used to make my heart skip. Now it just makes my skin crawl.
“There’s my beautiful wife.” He stands as I approach, reaching for me like we’re still the golden couple we never were. “I was worried you wouldn’t come.”
“I considered it.” I let him pull out my chair because refusing would cause a scene, and I’m saving the scene for later. “But I’ve never missed a Whitlock dinner.”
“Of course not. You’re too gracious for that.” He settles into the chair beside me, too close, his thigh pressing against mine under the table. “We should talk.”
“We have nothing to talk about.”
“We have everything to talk about.” His hand finds my elbow under the tablecloth. His fingers tighten. “You’re carrying my child. My heir. You can’t keep running from that.”
I try to pull away. His grip holds.
“Smile,” he says quietly, his voice pleasant and light, the voice of a man making small talk at a charity dinner. “Everyone is watching. Everyone is always watching. And you don’t want to make a scene, do you? Not in front of all these people. Not with your reputation already so fragile.”
The Whitlocks are looking at us expectantly.
Margaret Whitlock, seventy-three and sharp as a tack, is waiting for me to say something about the new children’s wing they’re funding.
Her husband Harold is already reaching for his wine, ready to toast to generosity and good works and all the things money can buy.
I smile. It doesn’t reach my eyes.
“Tell me about the project,” I say to Margaret, and she launches into a description of the pediatric oncology ward that will bear their name.
I nod in the right places. I ask thoughtful questions. I play the gracious society wife the way I’ve played her a thousand times before.
Under the table, Laurence’s hand stays on my elbow. His fingers dig into the soft flesh of my inner arm.
The dinner lasts forever. Soup, salad, fish, meat, dessert. Speeches about charitable giving and the importance of community and the way we can all make a difference if we just open our hearts and our wallets.
I don’t hear any of it.
I’m too focused on the pressure of Laurence’s fingers. The way they tighten every time I try to shift away. The bruises I know are forming under my skin, marks I’ll have to hide with long sleeves and careful makeup.
This is what it was like. This is what it was always like. The public performance and the private pain. The smile that hid the bruises. The fear that no one else could see.
Somewhere under the fear, my body is keeping its own count.
A dull ache has settled low in my belly, a tightness that comes and goes, and I know it’s the stress, know it’s his fingers and his voice and the effort of sitting still while every nerve screams at me to run.
Not now, I tell the ache. Not the baby. Not tonight.
I press my free hand flat to my stomach under the tablecloth and hold on.
By the time the speeches end, I’ve made a decision.
“Excuse me,” I say, standing. “I need to use the restroom.”
“I’ll come with you.” Laurence starts to rise.
“No.” I put my hand on his shoulder, pressing him back down. “Stay. Enjoy the coffee.”
He doesn’t like it. I can see it in the tightening of his jaw, the flash of anger in his eyes. But he can’t follow me to the ladies’ room without looking unhinged, and he’s too invested in his public image to risk that.
I walk toward the restrooms, but I don’t go in. Instead I circle around, approach the stage from the side, and pick up the microphone that’s still sitting on the podium from the last speech.
The room goes quiet.
The whole room turns to look at me. Every phone subtly shifts, capturing this unexpected development.
“Good evening,” I say. My voice echoes through the ballroom, clear and steady. “I apologize for the interruption, but I have something I need to say.”
Laurence is on his feet. I see him in my peripheral vision, moving toward the stage, his face a mask of controlled panic.
“Many of you know me as Odette Fairbanks. Wife of Laurence Fairbanks. Half of one of Manhattan’s most enduring couples.” I pause. Let the irony sink in. “Tonight I need to tell you the truth about that couple.”
“Odette.” Laurence’s voice cuts through the murmurs. “What are you doing? Put down the microphone.”
I ignore him.
“This man isn’t my husband in anything but paper,” I say. “We’re divorcing. He’s been served. He refuses to sign. Not because he loves me, but because I’m pregnant with what he calls ‘the legitimate Fairbanks heir.’ A child he didn’t want until he found out that biology entitled him to it.”
The murmurs grow louder. Phones lift higher.
“He keeps a secret family in the Florida Keys. An ex-wife he never told me about. A four-year-old son with the Fairbanks dimple. He was with them when that video played at my vow renewal. He sent a text claiming business, then flew to paradise with his other woman while I stood alone in front of everyone we know.”
“That’s enough.” Laurence is at the edge of the stage now, his face red, his hands clenched into fists. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“Am I?” I turn to face him fully. “Or am I finally telling the truth after fifteen years of your lies?”
Something snaps in his face. I watch the mask slip, watch the charm drain away, watch the real Laurence emerge from underneath the performance.
“You ungrateful bitch.” His voice is too loud, echoing through the ballroom. “I gave you everything. I gave you my name, my money, my family, and this is how you repay me? By humiliating me in front of everyone?”
“You humiliated me first. In front of everyone we know. With a sex tape that played while I gave a speech about how much I loved you.”
“You were supposed to file quietly!” He’s screaming now, veins bulging in his neck, spit flying from his lips.
“You were supposed to be humiliated and ashamed and desperate to make it all go away! I sent that fucking video myself! From a burner phone! I told them you asked for it because a humiliated woman files quietly! She doesn’t dig!
I wanted OUT and I was too much of a coward to say it!
I could survive being the cheater for a season.
What I couldn’t survive was you in a courtroom, picking apart every account, finding every secret I ever buried.
Better the whole city watch me than have you go looking! ”
The room goes dead silent.
The whole room. Every phone. Every word captured.
“But then you had to go and get pregnant.” He laughs, high and ugly.
“Had to go and make yourself useful for the first time in fifteen years. The legitimate heir. The Fairbanks bloodline. You think I’m going to let you take that away from me?
You think I’m going to let you raise my child with my brother? ”
He lunges.
His hand closes around my arm, right where the bruises are already forming, and he yanks me toward him with enough force to make me cry out.
“You’re MINE,” he screams. “You’ll ALWAYS be mine. And I won’t be erased from my own bloodline!”
Then Elliott is there.
He appears out of nowhere, grabbing Laurence from behind, hauling him off me with a force that sends them both stumbling.
Laurence swings, misses. Elliott doesn’t swing back.
He just holds on, pinning Laurence’s arms, containing the rage pouring out of him and the worse thing that must be pouring through himself.
I can see it in the set of his jaw, in the white of his knuckles where he grips his brother, the effort it’s taking not to end this the way part of him wants to.
Not here. Not with the whole room watching.
He holds Laurence still like a man holding a door shut against a flood.
“Someone call security,” Dayana’s voice cuts through the chaos. “And the police. Now.”
Laurence is still fighting, still screaming, but Elliott is bigger and stronger. He holds on until two security guards arrive and take over, pulling Laurence away from the stage, away from me, away from the room full of witnesses.
I’m shaking. My arm is throbbing. There are tears on my face that I don’t remember crying.
Elliott is beside me in an instant, his hands gentle where Laurence’s were cruel, checking me for damage.
“Are you okay? Did he hurt you? Where does it hurt?”
“I’m fine.” I’m not fine. “I’m fine.”
The security guards are dragging Laurence toward the exit. He isn’t fighting anymore, just staring at me with eyes that have gone cold and flat and terrifying.
He stops at the door. The guards pause, unsure.
Laurence wipes his lip where Elliott’s elbow caught him. He looks at me. At Elliott. At the room full of phones still recording.
“I’ll get her back,” he says. His voice is low and even, nothing like the screaming man of moments before.
“One way or another. That child is mine, and I don’t lose what’s mine.
Not to a court. Not to a whore’s tape.” His eyes cut to his brother, cold and flat.
“And not to a spare who thinks he can walk into my life and take my wife, my name, my blood, and my son. There’s exactly one thing standing between me and my family, Elliott, and it’s you.
I’d think very hard about that if I were you. ”
Elliott says nothing. But I feel him go still and dangerous beside me, and I feel the promise land like a stone dropped into deep water, sinking, disappearing, waiting.