5. Cassie
— ? —
Cassie
Three weeks benched, and I’m crawling out of my skin.
The house is too quiet. The days are too long.
I’ve reorganized every closet, deep cleaned rooms that didn’t need it, started and abandoned four different books.
I’ve taken up running, which I hate, and yoga, which I hate more, and spent an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through social media looking at pictures of people living lives that seem so much fuller than mine.
The silence is the worst part. I never realized how much of my identity was wrapped up in being busy until suddenly I wasn’t anymore.
For five years, I’ve been Charles’s wife and Charles’s assistant, managing his calendar and his clients and his life with a precision that left no room for questions about who I was without him.
Now I have nothing but time, and the emptiness of these long, quiet days is slowly driving me insane.
Charles is busier than ever. He leaves before I wake up most mornings, slipping out while the sky is still gray, and comes home after I’ve given up on dinner and eaten alone at the kitchen counter.
The meals I used to make for two now stretch into days of leftovers that I pick at without appetite, sitting in the breakfast nook where we used to share coffee and conversation, back when we still had things to say to each other.
When he is here, he’s distracted, distant, always checking his phone with a small smile that disappears the moment he notices me watching.
I’ve started timing those smiles, counting the seconds before his expression flattens into neutral.
Three seconds, on average. Three seconds of genuine pleasure at whatever’s on that screen, and then nothing but the blank mask he wears around me now.
I’ve become an expert at reading those micro-expressions, at cataloguing the tiny shifts in his face that tell me his mind is elsewhere, with someone else, living a life I’m not part of anymore.
We haven’t had sex in four months. I’ve stopped counting the exact days because the number makes me feel pathetic, like I’m keeping score in a game I’ve already lost. But I know it’s been four months because I remember the last time clearly, a hurried, perfunctory coupling after a company dinner where I’d had too much wine and he’d been feeling generous.
Or maybe just guilty. Looking back, I wonder if he was already sleeping with her then.
If he came home and touched me with hands that had touched someone else, performing husbandly duty while his mind was elsewhere entirely.
I tried again last week. Put on the lingerie, lit the candles, waited in bed with my heart pounding and my hopes stupidly, painfully high.
I spent an hour getting ready, shaving and moisturizing and putting on the black lace set he used to love, the one that used to make his eyes go dark.
I arranged myself on the bed like an offering, like a woman in a magazine spread about rekindling your marriage, and I waited.
He came home at midnight, said he’d eaten at the office, and fell asleep on the couch watching sports.
I found him there in the morning, still in his work clothes, and he acted like it was perfectly normal to choose a leather sofa over his wife.
Like the idea of coming to bed with me hadn’t even occurred to him, like I was so far from his thoughts that the possibility of intimacy never crossed his mind.
“Long night,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “Didn’t want to wake you.”
I didn’t point out that waking me was exactly what I’d wanted. I didn’t point out that I’d been lying awake for hours, waiting, hoping, hating myself for hoping. I just made coffee and smiled and pretended everything was fine.
That’s what I do now. I pretend.
I pretend I don’t notice when he angles his phone away from me, tilting the screen just slightly so I can’t see what he’s typing.
I pretend I don’t hear him taking calls in the other room, his voice low and warm in a way it never is with me anymore.
I pretend I don’t see how his face changes when he talks about work, about the office, about Celine and how well she’s doing now that she’s “really found her footing.”
I pretend I’m not losing my mind, one empty day at a time, watching my life shrink down to the walls of this beautiful house that feels more like a cage with every passing hour.
I pretend I don’t spend my mornings wondering where it all went wrong, replaying our early years together and trying to pinpoint the exact moment when I stopped being enough for him.
I pretend I don’t cry in the shower sometimes, muffling the sound with my hand over my mouth, terrified that he might hear and know how broken I really am.
This morning, Charles leaves early again, rushing out the door with barely a goodbye. I’m still in my robe, nursing my first cup of coffee, when I notice his phone on the nightstand.
He forgot it. Charles never forgets his phone.
The thing is practically grafted to his hand, an extension of his body that he checks every few minutes like a nervous tic.
In six years, I can count on one hand the number of times he’s left the house without it, and each of those times he turned around within five minutes to retrieve it.
I pick it up, intending to bring it to him.
Maybe I’ll surprise him at the office, take him to lunch, try one more time to connect.
The thought feels desperate even as I think it, the last gasping attempt of a woman who doesn’t want to admit her marriage is already over.
But I’m running out of ideas, running out of ways to reach him, running out of hope that anything I do will make a difference.
The screen lights up in my hand.
Missed call from: Bunny ??
My stomach turns to ice.
Bunny. With a rabbit emoji. Like a pet name. A private endearment between two people who share things they shouldn’t share, cute and intimate and secret.
Charles has never called me anything but Cassie.
Not even Cass, most of the time. I used to think it was because he respected me too much for silly nicknames, because our relationship was too mature for that sort of thing.
Now I wonder if it’s because he was saving them for someone else.
Saving the tenderness, the playfulness, the easy affection for a woman who hadn’t been demoted to the role of housekeeper and schedule manager.
I know his passcode. His birthday, because of course it is, he’s never been creative about these things. My fingers shake as I type it in, and part of me is screaming to stop, to put the phone down, to preserve the ignorance that’s been protecting me for months.
But I’m done pretending.
The messages load.
Months of them. The scroll seems endless, conversation after conversation dating back to before I even took my “break.” Flirty texts, dirty texts, escalating from playful to explicit in a progression that makes my vision blur with rage and grief and disbelief that any of this is real, that this is actually happening to me, that my husband has been conducting an entire secret relationship while I sat at home wondering what I’d done wrong.
Can’t stop thinking about yesterday
You’re so bad. I love it.
When can I see you again?
Soon, bunny. Soon.
Pet names that make me want to vomit. Inside jokes I don’t understand, references to movies they’ve watched together and restaurants they’ve tried and moments they’ve shared that should have been mine.
Plans made in code, meetings disguised as work obligations, a whole secret life conducted in plain sight while I reorganized closets and took up yoga and slowly went insane in our empty house.
And photos. So many photos.
A woman’s body, young and toned, photographed from angles designed to tease and tantalize.
No face in any of them, careful anonymity preserved, but the lingerie is familiar.
I’ve seen that bra before, that lace pattern, that specific shade of cream that washes out most complexions but looks stunning against tan skin.
Celine was wearing that exact bra the day she started. I remember because I thought it was odd, how it peeked above her neckline just slightly, like she wanted someone to notice. Like she was advertising merchandise that was already sold.
Someone did notice. My husband noticed, and apparently, he’s been enjoying the full collection ever since.
I scroll further, each message a knife sliding between my ribs. There are references to me scattered throughout, casual and cruel, jokes about how oblivious I am, how easy it’s been to hide everything right under my nose.
She doesn’t suspect anything?
Please. She’s too busy being the perfect wife to notice her marriage is over.
You’re terrible.
You love it, bunny.
The phone nearly slips from my shaking hands.
I catch it, grip it tighter, force myself to keep reading even though every word is acid eating through my chest. I need to see all of it.
I need to know exactly how deep this goes, how long it’s been happening, how thoroughly I’ve been deceived by the two people I trusted most.
The most recent messages are from this morning. He texted her before he left. While I was in the shower, while I was planning how to surprise him at lunch and maybe finally bridge the distance between us, he was texting his mistress.
Miss you already
Miss you more. Tonight?
Can’t wait.
I set the phone down carefully on the nightstand, and I’m surprised to see that my hands have stopped shaking. Everything feels very still, very quiet, like the moment before a storm when the air goes heavy and the birds stop singing and you know that everything is about to change.
I don’t cry or scream or throw the phone against the wall or collapse onto the bed in a heap of grief. Those reactions feel distant, like they belong to someone else, someone who still believed her husband loved her five minutes ago.
I’m not that woman anymore.
I walk to the bedroom with measured steps and put on clothes that feel like armor.
The red dress I bought for a company dinner two years ago, the one that made Charles’s eyes go dark when he first saw me in it.
Heels I can run in if I have to. Makeup applied with precision, each stroke of mascara and lipstick a deliberate act of preparation for whatever comes next.
I look at myself in the mirror when I’m done, and I barely recognize the woman staring back at me. She looks polished. Dangerous. Like someone who’s about to burn something down and doesn’t care who sees the flames.
Good. That’s exactly who I need to be right now.
I grab my car keys and Charles’s phone both.
The drive to the office is a blur of traffic lights and turn signals, my body operating on autopilot while my mind catalogues every lie, every deflection, every time he flinched away from my touch and claimed exhaustion.
All the nights he claimed to be working late.
All the business trips that ran long. All the meetings that couldn’t be rescheduled, the dinners with clients that never included me, the slow systematic erosion of our marriage while I smiled and nodded and believed every word he said.
Bunny. He calls her Bunny.
Four months without touching his wife, and all that time he was touching her.
The parking garage is nearly empty when I pull in. It’s almost noon, which means most people are at lunch, gone to restaurants and cafes and anywhere but here. Good. Fewer witnesses. Or maybe more witnesses would be better. Maybe I want an audience for what comes next.
The receptionist waves me through without question.
Of course she does. I still have my access card, still have my credentials, still have all the codes.
My “break” was never anything official, no paperwork, no formal leave, no end date, so nothing was ever switched off.
Charles never bothered to revoke my access because Charles never imagined I’d use it.
Charles never imagined I’d do anything but sit at home and wait for him, obedient and blind and grateful for whatever scraps of attention he deigned to throw my way.
The elevator feels like a coffin rising through the building. I watch the numbers climb and think about all the times I rode this same elevator, eager to see my husband, proud to work beside him, blind to everything rotting beneath the surface of our perfect life.
When the doors open on Charles’s floor, the assistant desks are empty. The lights are dim, that energy-saving mode they switch to when most of the staff is gone. Everyone must be at lunch.
Not everyone.
I hear them before I see them.
Moaning. The rhythmic creak of leather. A high feminine gasp that sounds rehearsed, theatrical, designed to perform pleasure rather than feel it.
I know those sounds. I’ve made those sounds, back when Charles still wanted me enough to earn them.
The door to his office is closed but not locked. Why would it be? No one’s supposed to be here. His wife is at home, benched and obedient, exactly where he put her.
I push it open.
Celine is riding my husband on the leather sofa in the middle of the room. Her back is to the door, blonde hair bouncing with each movement, designer skirt hiked up around her hips. Charles’s hands are on her waist, his eyes closed, his face twisted in pleasure.
Then he opens them.
And sees his wife standing in the doorway.
For one frozen second, nobody moves. The world stops spinning, time suspends, and I watch my marriage end in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Then Celine turns her head, and when she sees me, she doesn’t scramble to cover herself. She doesn’t gasp or cry or apologize.
She smiles.