5. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
I wake up alone.
Half-asleep, I reach across the mattress the way I still do some mornings, hand sliding over cool sheets, looking for a warm body that isn’t there.
Old habit. Five years of waking up next to someone will do that to you, apparently, even when the someone has been gone more than he’s been home lately.
The bed feels too big without Cameron in it, too cold, and I lie there for a moment in the gray pre-dawn light, staring at the empty space where he should be.
His pillow still holds the dent from where he slept three nights ago.
His coffee mug is still on the nightstand where he left it.
The whole room feels like a monument to his absence.
I check my phone. No messages. No missed calls. Just the same silence that’s been stretching between us for days, growing wider every time I reach across it and find nothing there.
He’s been in New York for two days and we’ve barely talked.
A few texts here and there, mostly logistics: landed safe, meetings running late, talk tomorrow.
One awkward phone call where neither of us knew what to say, where I asked how the trip was going and he gave me a status report like I was a colleague instead of his wife.
I keep waiting for him to ask how I am. He keeps updating me on meetings.
Last night I typed out I miss you with the sad face emoji, the same text that once pulled him out of a board dinner mid-course. I stared at it for a long time. Then I deleted it without sending, because I already know what it wouldn’t do.
The clock reads 6:47 a.m. I should get up. I have the literacy program call at ten, the one with the school coordinators to finalize the fall schedule. I should shower, review my notes, figure out what I’m making for dinner tonight even though I’ll probably eat it alone again.
Instead I lie there watching the light change on the ceiling and wondering when my marriage became something I have to survive rather than something I get to enjoy.
At some point I drift back to sleep, because when my phone rings at seven it jolts me awake like an alarm. I grab it thinking maybe, finally, it’s Cameron calling to say good morning, to say he misses me, to say anything that sounds like he remembers I exist.
But it’s not Cameron. It’s Summer.
“Hannah.” Her voice is shaking in a way that makes me sit up immediately, my heart slamming against my ribs. “You need to watch the video I just sent you. Watch it right now.”
“What video? Summer, what’s going on?”
“Just watch it. I’m so sorry, Hannah. I’m so fucking sorry.”
She hangs up before I can ask what she’s sorry for.
I stare at my phone for a moment, a cold dread settling in my stomach. Summer doesn’t call at seven in the morning. Summer doesn’t sound like that, scared and sorry and unable to explain. Something is very, very wrong.
I open my texts with hands that have started to tremble and find the link she sent. YouTube. A clip from some entertainment news show, timestamped from last night. The view count makes my stomach drop.
I click play.
Cameron appears on screen, looking polished and handsome in his tuxedo, standing in front of some glittering backdrop with a reporter leaning in close.
He’s smiling his media smile, the fake one, the one I used to tease him about.
The chyron at the bottom reads: TECH BILLIONAIRE CAMERON JASPER ON MARRIAGE, SUCCESS, AND BALANCING IT ALL.
The reporter asks about me. Background in charity work and teaching, is that right, how does she handle being married to someone so accomplished, the questions sliding out smooth and rehearsed, her red lipstick gleaming under the lights.
I watch my husband’s face on the screen. Watch him hesitate for just a second, a flicker behind his eyes that might be discomfort or might just be exhaustion.
Then he reaches for the easy answer.
“Oh, you know. We manage. Hannah’s got her projects, I’ve got mine.”
The word lands somewhere under my ribs. Projects.
“But don’t you worry she feels overshadowed?”
“She keeps busy in her own way.”
“Some might say those are hobbies more than careers.” The reporter smiles, shark-like, and my chest goes cold because that’s Prentiss’s word.
That’s the exact word his mother uses every time she wants to make me feel small, and now it’s coming out of a stranger’s mouth on camera and my husband isn’t correcting it.
Then the question that does it, delivered through a smile: is it challenging, being married to someone without your drive?
Cameron keeps talking. And with every word, more of me goes cold and still.
“Hannah’s great. She’s a little scattered sometimes, but in a cute way, you know? My sweet, chaotic wife. She’d lose her head if it wasn’t attached. But that’s part of her charm.”
Laughter ripples off-camera.
The room tilts.
I sit there in our bed, the bed where he kisses my forehead and promises to do better, and I watch my husband turn me into the evening’s entertainment.
Scattered. Chaotic. Would lose her head if it wasn’t attached.
He knows. He knows about my ADHD, my dyslexia, the things I’ve fought my whole life to manage, to hide, to overcome.
I told him in the dark on our third date, terrified he’d think less of me, terrified he’d see me the way everyone else did, as someone who couldn’t keep up, couldn’t focus, couldn’t be trusted to remember what mattered.
I told him how hard I work to seem normal.
How many lists I keep, how many systems I’ve built, how exhausting it is to compensate every single day for the way my brain is wired.
I told him things I’d never told anyone, and he held me and said he loved my brilliant, beautiful brain, that he wouldn’t change a single thing about how I think.
Now he’s entertaining strangers with it.
I watch the whole interview with my hands shaking and my vision blurring. Watch him fail to defend me when the reporter implies my work doesn’t matter. Watch him call my life’s work “projects” like his mother does. Watch him reduce me to a joke for the cameras, a cute quirk instead of a person.
The video ends. I watch it again. Just the last thirty seconds, the part where he smiles and calls me chaotic and the audience laughs like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.
I watch it three times, four, trying to understand how the man who danced with me in kitchens became the man on this screen.
My phone starts buzzing. Texts from people I barely talk to anymore, people from college, people I haven’t seen in years.
omg is this your husband???
Hannah are you okay??
just saw the video, what an asshole
The view count keeps climbing while I watch, ticking up every time I blink, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
A text from one of my fellow teachers: I’m so sorry. He doesn’t deserve you.
I mute my phone and set it face-down on the nightstand, but I can see the screen lighting up anyway through the gap between the case and the mattress.
Silent notification after silent notification, the world weighing in on my marriage while I sit here in my pajamas trying to remember how to breathe.
A voicemail notification appears. The foundation’s program director, her voice tight with concern: “Hannah, honey, I just saw something online and I wanted to check in. Call me when you can.”
My name is trending. I can see the notification at the top of my screen when I flip the phone back over, the little hashtag with a number next to it that keeps climbing. People are watching. People are sharing. People are laughing.
Somewhere in the scroll of notifications there’s a text from my mother. Call me when you’re ready, baby. I love you. I can’t. Not yet. If I hear her voice I’ll fall apart completely, and I can’t fall apart yet. There’s a phone call I have to make first.
The phone rings. Summer again.
“Do you want me to come over?”
“Not yet.”
“Hannah-”
“I need to talk to him first.”
I hang up before she can argue.
I get up. I don’t know what I’m planning yet, only that I can’t make this call lying in our bed like it’s any other conversation, so I walk to the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror.
The woman looking back at me is a mess. Yesterday’s pajama top with the stretched-out collar, hair flattened on one side, the ghosts of mascara I didn’t wash off properly smudged under both eyes.
Half the internet has now met my husband’s sweet, chaotic wife, and here she is, live and in person, looking exactly as advertised.
I grip the edge of the sink and say his name out loud.
It comes out wrong the first time, cracked down the middle, so I say it again.
And again. I keep saying it until my voice stops shaking, until it sounds like a woman who’s about to ask her husband a question instead of a woman who’s afraid of the answer.
Then I go back to the bedroom, sit on the edge of the bed, and stare at the frozen image of my husband’s face one more time.
Then I call him.
He picks up on the third ring, his voice groggy and confused. It’s ten in New York, but he sounds like I woke him; the gala must have run late.
“Hey, babe. What’s-”
“Are you alone right now?”
“What?” He sounds confused, still half-asleep. “Yeah, I’m at the hotel, just getting ready for-”
A woman’s voice in the background. Muffled but unmistakable. Cameron, where do you want these files?
Everything in me goes quiet.
“Who is that?”
Shuffling sounds. Then Cameron, annoyed: “What the fuck, Violet? Why’d you come in without knocking?”
More muffled conversation. A door closing.
“Hannah, babe, that was just Violet dropping off some documents for my morning meetings. You know how she is.”
“At this hour? In your hotel room? While you’re still in bed?”
“It’s not - she had papers for me to sign. Don’t make this into something.”
“I’m not making it into anything. I’m asking why your assistant is in your hotel room while you’re still half-asleep.”
He sighs, that frustrated sound I’ve heard too many times lately. “Look, can we talk about whatever this is tonight? I have meetings all day and I really need to-”
“Cam, I need to talk to you about the interview-”
“Tonight, Hannah. I promise. I love you.”
He hangs up.
He hangs up on me.
I sit there holding my phone, staring at the wall, and realize he didn’t ask how I was. In the middle of everything, in the middle of me trying to tell him about the worst morning of my life, he didn’t once ask if I was okay.
I get up. Walk to the bathroom. Turn on the shower and stand there outside the glass door, watching the steam rise and fog the mirror, listening to the water pound against the tile.
I should get in. I should wash my face and pull myself together and figure out what happens next.
Instead I just stand there, the world continuing around me while I can’t seem to move.
After a long time, I turn the water off without getting in.
I walk back to the bedroom and look around. His side of the closet. His reading glasses on the nightstand. The shape of five years everywhere I look.
Five years of building a life together.
And I realize, with a clarity that feels like ice water: if I stay, this is what I’m signing up for. Being an anecdote. Being an afterthought. Being the wife who waits on a man who never comes home.
I’m done waiting.