17. Maren
— ? —
Maren
I last eighteen hours.
Eighteen hours of pacing Nora’s guest room, of staring at my phone and not calling him, of replaying every word Rachel said, every detail she shouldn’t know, every implication I can’t escape.
By the time dawn breaks on Wednesday, I’m vibrating with something that isn’t quite anger and isn’t quite fear. It’s more like a wire pulled too tight, humming at a frequency that makes my whole body ache.
Nora finds me in the kitchen at 6 a.m., already dressed, keys in my hand.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“To get answers.”
“Maren-”
“Don’t.” I hold up my hand. “Don’t tell me to calm down, don’t tell me to wait, don’t tell me I should have a plan or a script or a… a fucking strategy.”
Nora’s face goes soft with worry. “What happened?”
“Rachel came to the shop yesterday.”
“She what?”
“She told me she slept with Rhodes.”
The words land like a bomb in the quiet kitchen. Nora’s mouth opens, closes, opens again. “She’s lying.”
“Maybe.”
“Rhodes wouldn’t-”
“I know.” My voice cracks. “I know, okay? That’s what I told her. That’s what I’ve been telling myself for three years while she wormed her way into every corner of his life. Rhodes wouldn’t. Rhodes would never. And then she told me something she shouldn’t know, and now I don’t-”
I stop. Breathe. Try to remember how to form sentences.
“What did she tell you?” Nora asks.
“Something private - about his body.” I can’t look at her. “Something only someone who’d seen him naked would know.”
The silence stretches. Nora moves toward me, but I step back.
“I’m going to the house,” I say. “I’m going to ask him directly. And then I’m going to know.”
“Maren, you’re not in any state to-”
“I’m not going to sit here wondering.” I grab my jacket from the hook by the door. “I’m not going to spend another day living inside a question mark. Either he did it or he didn’t, and I’m going to look him in the eye and find out which one.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No.”
“Maren-”
“I need to do this alone.”
I leave before she can argue. The drive to the house takes twenty-three minutes, and I spend every single one of them rehearsing what I’m going to say.
The words arrange and rearrange themselves in my head like flowers in a bad arrangement, nothing fits, nothing flows, nothing looks the way it should.
By the time I pull into the driveway, I’ve given up on rehearsing.
The house looks the same as it always has. Stone facade. Manicured lawn. The hydrangeas I planted three summers ago blooming blue along the walkway. I used to love this house. I used to dream about raising children here, growing old here, filling every room with the sound of a life well lived.
Now it just looks like a monument to everything I’ve lost.
I don’t knock. I still have my key, and some stubborn part of me refuses to ask permission to enter my own home.
The foyer is quiet. The living room is empty.
I follow the sound of movement to Rhodes’s home office, where I find him behind his desk, phone pressed to his ear, frowning at something on his laptop screen.
He looks up when I appear in the doorway, and his face does something complicated. Surprise, hope, concern.
“I’ll call you back,” he says into the phone, and hangs up without waiting for a response.
“Maren.” He’s already moving around the desk, coming toward me. “What’s wrong? You look, are you sick?”
“Don’t touch me.”
He stops. His hands fall to his sides, but his eyes are still scanning my face like he’s trying to diagnose something. “What happened?”
“Did you fuck her?”
The words hit him like a physical blow. I watch him flinch, watch his expression shift from concern to confusion to something rawer.
“What?”
“Rachel.” My voice is steady. Flat. Dead. “Did you sleep with her?”
“No.”
“Think very carefully before you answer me again.”
“I don’t need to think.” He moves toward me; I edge back. “No. Maren, I’ve never, what’s this about?”
“She says you did.”
His whole body goes still. “She fucking what?”
“She came to my shop yesterday.” I keep my eyes on his face, watching for the tell. Watching for the lie. “She told me she slept with my husband. At the hotel. The one from the photos.”
“That’s-” Rhodes stares at me, and he looks genuinely bewildered. Genuinely furious. “That’s insane, a complete fabrication. I never touched her.”
“She seemed pretty confident.”
“I don’t care how confident she seemed.” He moves toward me again, and this time when I step back, I hit the doorframe. “Maren, look at me. I’ve never touched that woman. Not once. Not ever.”
I want to believe him. God, I want to believe him so badly it feels like a physical ache in my chest. His eyes are clear. His voice is steady. There’s no flicker of guilt, no tell-tale hesitation.
But.
“Then how does she know about the freckle?”
The color drains from his face. “What freckle?”
“Don’t you dare.”
“I’m not, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The freckle.” I push off the doorframe and move toward him now, closing the distance between us. “Low on your stomach, right side, almost at your hip. The one I’ve kissed a thousand times. The one no one should know about unless they’ve seen you naked.”
Rhodes stares at me. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
“She described it to me,” I say. “In perfect detail. She watched me realize what it meant. And then she left.”
“I don’t-” He shakes his head. “I don’t know how she’d know that.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“Maren-”
“That’s not fucking good enough, Rhodes.” My voice breaks on his name. “I defended you. Do you understand that? After everything, after the gala, after the photos, after all of it, I still defended you. Because cheating was the one thing I believed you’d never do to me.”
“I didn’t.” He reaches for my hands, but I jerk away. “Maren, I swear to you. On everything we’ve ever meant to each other, on our wedding vows, on the life we built together. I’ve never touched Rachel Vaughn.”
“Then explain how she knows.”
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
“I don’t know!” His voice rises, cracking with frustration. “I don’t know how she could possibly, I’ve never been undressed around her. I’ve never-”
“Are you sure?” I step closer, getting in his face. “Are you absolutely certain? Because you’ve spent a lot of time with her, Rhodes. A lot of late nights, a lot of hotel rooms, a lot of closed doors.”
“None of that means I slept with her.”
“No.” I laugh, and it sounds like breaking glass. “It doesn’t. And that’s not even the point.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“The point is that you built this.” I gesture between us, around us, at everything.
“You built a marriage where another woman could walk into my shop, describe your body, claim she fucked you, and be believable. You gave her so much access, so much intimacy, that when she said the words, I couldn’t immediately dismiss them. ”
“I never-”
“You never what? Never noticed how she looked at you? Never wondered why she needed to be on every trip, at every dinner, in every photo?” I’m shaking now.
“You never thought it was strange that she knew your schedule better than I did? That she could predict your moods? That she finished your sentences the way I was supposed to?”
“We work together. That’s what happens when you work closely with someone.”
“Is it? Because I’ve worked closely with people, Rhodes. I’ve never let any of them believe they had a claim on me.”
He flinches. “That’s not fair.”
“Fair.” I taste the word. “You want to talk about fair? Let me tell you what’s not fair. Standing in my own shop while another woman tells me she knows what my husband looks like naked. That’s not fair. Realizing I can’t even be certain anymore. That’s not fair.”
“You can be certain.” He moves toward me again, and this time I don’t step back. “I’m telling you the truth. I’ve never cheated on you. Not with Rachel, not with anyone.”
“Then how does she know?”
“I don’t know!”
The words echo off the walls of the office. We stand there, both breathing hard, both furious, both terrified of what comes next.
“She texted you,” I say suddenly. “Last night. Something you needed to know about me.”
Rhodes goes still. “How do you know about that?”
“I saw it. At the shop, when you left your phone on the counter.” The memory surfaces, sharp and clear. “What did she say when you called her back?”
“She said-” He stops. His jaw tightens. “She said she wanted to talk to me about something important. Something about your state of mind.”
“My state of mind.”
“I told her it wasn’t her business. I told her to stay out of it.”
“And then she came to my shop the next day and told me she fucked you.” I nod slowly. “Interesting timing.”
Rhodes’s expression shifts as the implication lands. “She was setting this up.”
“Looks like it.”
“She’s lying.” He says it with absolute certainty. “Maren, she’s lying. I don’t know how she knows about the freckle, but I swear to you, I never-”
“Stop swearing.” I hold up my hand. “Stop making promises. Just, stop.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to explain how she could possibly know something that intimate about your body if you never slept with her.” I meet his eyes. “Can you do that?”
The silence stretches. Rhodes opens his mouth, closes it, tries again.
“I don’t know,” he finally says. “But there has to be an explanation.”
“Convenient.”
“It’s not convenient, it’s the truth.” He moves toward me, and this time he doesn’t stop when I tense. “Maren. Look at me - really look at me.”
I don’t want to. Looking at him makes it harder to stay angry. Looking at him makes me want to believe every word he says.
But I look.
His eyes are red-rimmed. His jaw is tight. There’s a desperation in his expression that I’ve never seen before, not even at the gala, not even when I threw him out of the shop.
“I don’t know how Rachel knows about that freckle,” he says quietly. “But I know I didn’t sleep with her. I know I’ve never touched her. I know that whatever game she’s playing, whatever lie she’s telling, it’s not the truth.”
“The truth.” My laugh is hollow. “You want to talk about truth? Here’s some truth, Rhodes.
You let another woman into our marriage so deeply that she thinks she has a right to me.
To us. To you. You gave her so much of yourself that when she decided to claim you, she had enough ammunition to make it stick. ”
“I never meant-”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant.” My voice cracks. “It matters what you did, and that I have to stand here wondering if my husband fucked Rachel, because you never bothered to draw a single boundary that would make the answer obvious.”
“The answer is obvious. I didn’t do it.”
“Then why can’t you explain how she knows?”
He has no answer. We both know it.
I turn toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Rhodes grabs my arm, and I jerk away so violently that I stumble. The sudden movement makes my stomach lurch, and I have to press my hand against the wall to steady myself.
“Maren?” His voice shifts from desperate to alarmed. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You almost fell. And you look-” He reaches for me again. “Have you been eating? You look pale.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“Something’s wrong. Something you’re not telling me.”
I almost laugh. Something I’m not telling him. There’s a whole human growing inside me that I’m not telling him about, because every time I think about saying the words, I picture Rachel’s face when she asked if I really wanted to tell him now… now that I can’t even be sure what the timeline means.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Stay.” He blocks the doorway. “Please. Just stay until we figure out how she knew. We can call her, confront her together, we can-”
“I’m not staying.”
“Maren-”
“Move.”
He doesn’t move. His eyes search my face, looking for something I can’t give him.
“I’ll find out how she knew,” he says. “I’ll prove to you that I’m telling the truth.”
“Good luck.”
“I mean it. Whatever it takes.”
“Whatever it takes.” I repeat the words flatly. “You said that at the gala too. Right before you let her humiliate me in front of everyone we know.”
He flinches. “That’s not-”
“I’m done, Rhodes.” I push past him, shoulder checking him hard enough that he staggers. “I’m done believing promises, done waiting for proof, done being the idiot who defends her husband to everyone including herself.”
I’m halfway down the hall when I hear him pick up his phone. His voice is cold when he speaks, colder than I’ve ever heard it.
“Rachel. My office. Now.”
There’s no turning around.
I keep walking through the house I used to love, past the kitchen where we cooked terrible meals and laughed at our failures, past the living room where we watched movies every Sunday, past the foyer where he carried me over the threshold on our wedding night.
I keep walking until I’m outside, until I’m in my car, until I’m pulling out of the driveway.
And I keep driving until the house disappears in my rearview mirror, and I realize that I still don’t know what’s true, I just know that nothing will ever feel certain again.
My hand finds my stomach.
There’s nothing to feel yet, it’s far too early, but I press my palm flat against it anyway.
A reminder that whatever happens next, I’m not alone anymore.
I pull over on the side of the road and sit there for a long time, hand pressed against a future I don’t know how to face, wondering if I’ll ever be able to look at my husband again without hearing Rachel’s voice in my head.
Low on his stomach, right side, almost at his hip.
She shouldn’t know that.
But she does.
And until I understand how, I can’t trust anything else he says.