2. Lily #2
“I made myself smaller and quieter and grayer because your mother said good wives disappear. I stopped wearing colors. I stopped laughing loud. I stopped being anyone at all, because that’s what you people wanted from me.
” The words are pouring out now, unstoppable.
“And the whole time you had this. A porch light. Babies. Someone you actually wanted to come home to.”
The silence stretches between us. Elena is breathing hard, her hand pressed against her belly. Edward’s face has gone carefully blank in a way I recognize - the boardroom mask, the one he wears when he’s calculating how much a problem is going to cost.
“You’ll get a settlement,” he says finally. “Be reasonable, and this stays quiet. Make a scene, and my mother will bury you so deep no one will remember your name.”
I stare at him.
This man I married. This man I tried so hard to please. This man who stood at an altar and promised me forever, knowing he’d already given forever to someone else.
“Your mother has been trying to bury me for three years,” I say. “Every dinner party critique. Every dress she picked out to make me fade into the background. Every time she corrected my posture or my speech or my goddamn fork placement.”
“Lily-”
“The difference is, starting tonight, I’ve stopped agreeing to stay in the ground.”
I turn and walk back down the path. My heels crunch over broken glass. Behind me, Elena is screaming something about restraining orders and custody lawyers, and Edward is trying to quiet her down, and somewhere upstairs those children are sleeping through the destruction of everything they know.
Poor kids, I think distantly. They didn’t ask for any of this.
Neither did I.
I make it to the car before the tears start. Make it out of the neighborhood before they turn into sobs. Make it to a gas station parking lot three miles away before I have to pull over because I can’t see the road anymore.
I sit there in the fluorescent light, mascara streaming down my face, and I think about the woman I was this morning.
The one who woke up in a penthouse she never felt at home in.
The one who spent an hour on her makeup and another hour on her hair, all so she could stand in a corner at a party and be invisible in exactly the right way.
That woman is dead now.
I don’t know who I’m going to be instead. I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know anything except that I’m never going to shrink myself down to fit in Edward Burton’s life again.
***
The penthouse is dark when I arrive.
I don’t turn on the lights. I sink onto the Italian leather sofa, the one Victoria selected because it “suited the space” - and I sit in my ruined gown until two in the morning, not moving, barely breathing.
My mind keeps circling back to that porch. To the wine sliding down the butter-yellow paint. To the way Elena said set dressing, like she’d been saving the words for years.
Edward still hasn’t come home. Of course he hasn’t. He’s twenty minutes north, in that yellow house, soothing the woman who threw a glass at the wall while his children slept upstairs.
The thought should gut me. Instead it makes me stand.
His study is the one room I’m not allowed to enter. Three years of marriage, and I’ve never questioned it. Never questioned anything. Good wives don’t ask questions - that’s what Victoria told me at our engagement party. Good wives trust.
I trusted them. I trusted him. I gave away everything I was, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but a woman in a beige dress who couldn’t remember how to laugh.
The lock is laughably easy to pick. A bobby pin from my updo, two minutes of fumbling, and I’m in.
His study smells like leather and scotch and secrets. Moonlight streams through the windows, illuminating shelves of books he’s never read, awards he didn’t earn, photographs of a man I don’t recognize.
The lockbox sits in the bottom drawer, hidden under tax documents.
I try Edward’s birthday. Nothing.
His mother’s birthday. Nothing.
On a whim, I try today’s date, the anniversary of the Burton Foundation’s founding.
Click.
Inside, there’s a marriage certificate. Ours. I stare at it, looking for... I don’t know what. Proof of something. Proof that any part of the last three years was real.
That’s when I see it.
The witness signatures are wrong.
I was at my own wedding. I remember everyone who was there - Edward’s college roommate Tim, his cousin Helena from the Hamptons branch. These names are neither of those people. These are strangers. Names I’ve never heard, signatures I’ve never seen.
My hands start to shake.
I pull out my phone and type the registration number into a government database I have to create an account to access. My fingers fumble on the keys. I get the password wrong twice.
When the search finally completes, the screen glows with two words that change everything:
No results found.
I check again. And again. And again.
Our marriage is fake.
I was never his wife.
I was a prop. A placeholder. A lie told in lace and promises.
My phone buzzes in my clutch.
I almost ignore it. Almost throw the whole thing out the window and drive until I hit an ocean. But old habits die hard, and I’ve been trained to respond immediately, to be available, to be whatever anyone needs me to be.
The text is from a number I don’t recognize:
I know what happened tonight. I know who you really are. Meet me at the Mandarin Oriental, Suite 1408. Come alone.
-M. Reid
I stare at the message.
I know who you really are.
For three years, I thought I knew who I was. Lily Burton. Edward’s wife. Victoria’s project. A foster kid who got lucky enough to marry into money and should be grateful for every crumb.
But the marriage was a lie. Edward was a lie. Maybe all of it was a lie.