4. Skye
— ? —
Skye
Twenty Days After the Altar
Shelby’s guest room has a theme. The theme is exercise equipment she never uses, and now, me.
I’ve been sharing the space with a treadmill that functions as a coat rack for twenty days.
My suitcase sits in the corner, still packed, because unpacking feels permanent and I can’t decide what I want to be permanent yet.
On the nightstand there’s a glass of water, a sleeve of saltines, and a black and white printout of a smudge.
The smudge has a heartbeat. I watched it flicker on a screen yesterday while a technician said “there we go” in the gentlest voice, and I sobbed so hard in my paper gown that she brought me apple juice meant for the blood draw patients.
A knock, and Shelby shoulders through the door with a bowl. “Soup. Eat it.”
“I ate.”
“Crackers are not eating. You’re building a person, the person needs more than sodium.” She sets the bowl in my hands and drops onto the end of the bed, eyeing the printout. “Has the bean done anything cool today?”
“Its whole job is to have a heartbeat.”
“Overachiever. Just like its mother.” She watches me force down a spoonful, then another, satisfied as a prison warden. “You cried at the appointment yesterday. I heard you through the door.”
“I had allergies.”
“You told the ultrasound tech you loved her.”
“She was extremely good at her job, Shelby.”
“You asked her to come live with us.”
“I offered her the treadmill as a room divider. It was a fair deal.” The joke lands soft, and for a second we’re both smiling at a machine draped in winter coats. Then she ruins it.
“Your mom called me again.”
“I know. She calls me every morning.”
“You should pick up.”
“And say what?” The spoon goes still in the bowl. “She cried at my wedding, Shel. Happy tears, all day. If I hear her voice I’ll have to hear how worried she is, and if I hear how worried she is, I’ll fall apart, and I don’t have time to fall apart. I have a doctor’s appointment schedule.”
“Okay,” she says. At the door she pauses. “He called again tonight. Eight o’clock.”
“I know. I watched it ring.”
“That’s twenty, if you’re counting.”
“I’m not,” I lie, and she leaves, kind enough to pretend she believes me.
The door clicks. Down the hall her mattress creaks, and then the apartment settles.
Midnight finds me on the floor with my back against the bed and the phone in my lap.
Twenty voicemails. I haven’t played a single one. His name lights up the screen at eight sharp every evening, and every evening I watch it go dark, and every evening it costs a little more.
Tonight I break. Blame the hormones. Blame the fact that rage is exhausting and three weeks in, the tide keeps pulling back to reveal what was under it the whole time, which is love, which is humiliating.
I press play on number twenty.
“It’s me.” A rough breath. He sounds destroyed.
“I’m not calling about the wedding. I don’t care about the wedding.
I don’t care what you think I did. Just tell me you’re safe.
You don’t have to talk to me. Tell Shelby and have her hate-text me, I’ll frame it.
I just need to know you’re somewhere safe.
” A long pause, static and breathing. “I’m not giving up, Skye. I don’t know how to give up on you.”
The message ends. The automated voice asks if I want to repeat it.
I do. By the third listen I have it memorized, the rough breath, my name, the crack running through the middle of the word safe.
Then I’m crying with a fist against my mouth so Shelby won’t hear, ribs aching, the printout blurring on the nightstand above me.
He deserves to know about the smudge. That’s the thought that will not die, no matter what I feed it.
Whatever he did, whatever she was, half of that heartbeat is his, and I know exactly what a lie of omission feels like from the receiving end.
Do I want our baby’s story to start with one four years long?
I open a new message.
We need to talk. It’s important. It’s not about us.
My thumb hovers over send.
The door opens. Shelby, in pajamas, phone in hand, face grim in the hallway light.
“Don’t send that.”
“You were asleep.”
“I was googling cribs when I heard you sobbing to find you on your phone.” She crosses the room and holds her phone out. “Look at me. Then look at this. If you still want to send yours after, I’ll press the button myself.”
“Shelby, what.”
“Look.”
The headline crawls across the screen in tabloid yellow.
CONSOLED BY THE ASSISTANT: JILTED BILLIONAIRE HEIR FINDS COMFORT CLOSE TO HOME
There’s a full spread. Long-lens shots, grainy and unmistakable.
Leslie and Jaime outside a restaurant, her hand cradling his jaw, his head bent toward her.
Leslie holding a car door while he ducks inside, her palm flat on his back.
And the last one, the one that ends me. Leslie in oversized sunglasses and a cocktail dress in the morning, walking out of the lobby of his building.
The caption gloats about the timestamp. Sources say the pair have grown inseparable since the wedding day scandal. At his side, day and night.
“Her hand is on his face.” My voice has gone somewhere flat and far away. “Shelby, look how she’s holding his face. That’s...”
“I know what it is.”
They look sweet together. That’s the detail that guts me.
“He begged for my voicemail tonight.” A laugh climbs out of me, cracked down the middle. “I believed him.”
“Skye.”
“Maybe it’s cropped.” I hate the words while they’re still in my mouth. “Maybe they staged it, maybe the angle...”
“Maybe.” Shelby sits down on the floor next to me, shoulder against mine.
“You had a maybe about the shoes, and before that a maybe about the midnight texts, and every maybe you ever gave that man, he spent.” She takes my hand, laces our fingers, and holds on.
“Men like him don’t give things up, babe.
They collect. You. Her. Whoever’s next. The only question is which shelf you’re willing to live on. ”
My thumb starts moving.
She catches my wrist. “What are you doing?”
“I want to hear him say it. I want to call and make him explain that photo to me.”
“And then what?” Her grip doesn’t loosen. “You’ll call to scream, Skye. You’ll stay to listen. He’s had four years of practice turning your scream into an apology. Yours. Never his.”
The fight drains out of my arm.
If I send it, he knows by morning. His mother knows by lunch.
“Walk me through it,” Shelby says quietly, watching my face. “Whatever’s happening in there. Out loud.”
“If he knows, Eleanor knows. If Eleanor knows, there’s a lawyer on it by Friday.” My hand goes flat against my stomach. “There’d be a custody schedule with holidays split down the middle. A photographer at every ultrasound. My kid would learn to smile for long lenses.”
“So.”
The calm in my own voice frightens me a little. “He does not get to have this.”
I delete the text one letter at a time. Then I open his contact page, and my thumb finds the block button, and pressing it feels like sawing through my own arm at the shoulder.
“Done?” Shelby asks quietly.
“No.” I wipe my face with the heel of my hand and look at her. “Blocking him isn’t enough. He has money, Shel. Bored money. Eventually he’ll hire people, and people like that find people like me.”
“So what do you need?”
“To disappear. For real. A version of me with no thread hanging off her that leads back to him.”
Shelby is quiet for a moment. Then she gets up, retrieves her laptop from the hallway, and settles back down on the floor with it open between us, screen glowing in the dark room.
“Your grandma’s maiden name was Warren, right?”
“You remember that?”
“You told me at her funeral that Warren women outlive their husbands out of spite. It stuck.” She’s already typing. “Court forms first, then the license, then we pick a state. I have a cousin in a town nobody spells right on the first try. Cheap rent. Good schools.”
“Shelby, I can’t take your cousin’s town and your savings and your guest room. You have a life. You have a job you actually like.”
“Stop.” She doesn’t even look up.
“I’ll pay you back.”
“I already told my cousin someone might be coming. She’s thrilled to have a companion.”
“Schools.” The word lands strangely in my chest. “I’m choosing school districts for a raspberry.”
“Mother of the year, early favorite.” She bumps my shoulder with hers, and for one second we’re both almost laughing, sitting in the wreckage like it’s a fort we built on purpose.
Her fingers pause on the keys. “So who is she? Skye Warren. Who are we building?”
I look at the printout on the nightstand. My hand settles flat over my stomach.
“Somebody’s mother,” I say. “And somebody he never gets to meet.”
Shelby holds my eyes for a long beat. “He’ll look for you. Money like his digs.”
“Then he’d better bring a shovel the size of his guilt.”
She grins, cracks her knuckles, and starts typing.