4. Brittney
— ? —
Brittney
I’ve spent ages planning our anniversary down to the candle scent.
My mother’s recipe for the appetizers, handwritten on index cards I found in my childhood bedroom.
The playlist from our first year, back when we danced in the kitchen of that tiny apartment above the bodega and laughed about how we couldn’t afford furniture.
Private. Just us. The way anniversaries should be.
I’ve imagined it for weeks. The two of us at that little restaurant where he proposed, the one with the crooked tables and the wine list written on a chalkboard.
No Elise. No business partners. No Mikayla in her red dresses and borrowed hoodies.
Just Shawn and me, remembering why we chose each other in the first place.
Then the invitations arrive.
The courier hands me the envelope like it’s nothing - just another piece of mail, just another Tuesday - and I sign for it without thinking. The cardstock is thick. Cream-colored. The kind of paper that costs more per sheet than some people spend on groceries.
Elise’s handwriting curves across the front in practiced calligraphy.
You are cordially invited to a celebration of family, legacy, and enduring partnerships.
Hosting: Elise Ross & Mikayla Bright
In honor of Shawn & the future of this family.
I read it four times.
Look for my name.
Find it nowhere.
My hands are steady as I set the invitation down on the kitchen counter.
That’s the thing about shock - the body doesn’t know how to react at first, so it just…
doesn’t. I stand there in the morning light, coffee growing cold beside me, and I read the words again as if they might rearrange themselves into something that makes sense.
Hosting: Elise Ross & Mikayla Bright.
Not Elise Ross and Brittney Ross. Not even Elise Ross and her daughter-in-law.
Elise Ross and Mikayla Bright. Like Mikayla is the family. Like I’m the guest who might or might not make the final cut.
Elise’s Instagram post from the previous night floats back to me: The next generation of Ross excellence. So proud of my son and his brilliant partner.
Partner. Not colleague. Not friend. Not daughter-in-law.
Partner.
My anniversary party. Hosted by my mother-in-law and the woman she’s already publicly anointed as my replacement.
And my first thought - trained into me after years - is: Maybe I’m overreacting.
My second thought is: No. No, I’m absolutely not.
I find Shawn in the study, laptop open, phone balanced against his ear as he half-listens to someone drone on about contracts or margins or whatever it is that always matters more than I do. He holds up one finger when I walk in. The universal signal for wait, I’m busy, your concerns can hold.
I don’t wait.
“No.” My voice comes out hard. Good. “This was supposed to be ours. Private. I told you that.”
He covers the phone with his palm, eyebrows raised in that particular way that means I’ve done something inconvenient. “Britt, I’m on a call-”
“Your mother is hosting our anniversary party. With Mikayla. My name isn’t even on the invitation.”
Something flickers across his face. Confusion, maybe, or the beginning of irritation. He mutters something into the phone and sets it down.
“And Mom upgraded it. It’s still our anniversary. You’ll still be there.”
“Your mother and Mikayla are HOSTING. Their names are on it. Mine isn’t.”
“Brittney.” He doesn’t even look up from the laptop.
When was the last time he touched me? Not the obligatory kiss on the forehead. Not the hand on my back at parties, performative and absent. When was the last time he touched me?
I try to remember. Weeks? Months?
There was a time when he couldn’t keep his hands off me. When he’d find excuses to be in whatever room I was in. When he’d pull me into closets at his mother’s parties just to kiss me breathless, laughing against my mouth about how we were going to get caught.
“I can’t help it,” he’d say. “You’re too beautiful. It’s your fault, really.”
Now I stand in front of him and he doesn’t even see me.
My body remembers being wanted. My body keeps waiting for the version of him who wanted me to come back.
He’s not coming back.
I need to stop waiting.
“I don’t have the bandwidth for this. Can you just, for once, let something be nice without turning it into a war?” he says, dragging me back to reality.
“It’s not a war. It’s my NAME not being on my own anniversary invitation.”
“It’s a party. That’s still technically for us.”
Technically.
I stare at him.
The man I married would have been furious.
The man who proposed to me in that crooked little restaurant, who held my face in his hands and promised me we were a team, who said it’s you and me against the world, always - that man would have called his mother and demanded an explanation.
That man would have seen the invitation for what it was: an erasure. A statement. A battle line.
This man just wants me to stop making noise so he can get back to his spreadsheets.
“Forget it,” I say quietly. “I don’t know why I try.”
“Neither do I sometimes,” he mutters, already reopening the laptop.
I leave the study before I say something I can’t take back. Before I throw the invitation at his head. Before I scream that I’ve been trying for years and he’s never once noticed because trying, to him, is just the background noise of a wife doing her job.
The hallway is quiet. The penthouse is too big, too cold, too full of things that belong to the Ross family and not to me. I press my back against the wall and breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
The acceptance letter sits in my email like a heartbeat. Soon I’ll have something that’s mine. Soon I’ll be more than the woman who arranges flowers and checks wine temperatures and smiles while her mother-in-law calls her a project.
Soon.
I just have to survive until then.
Later, passing the study, I hear Mikayla’s voice.
She’s on the phone, pacing by the window, her back to the door. I should keep walking. I should give her privacy. I should be the bigger person, the gracious hostess, the wife who doesn’t eavesdrop on guests.
But I’m so tired of being the bigger person.
I stop. I listen.
My phone is already in my hand. I hit record before I’ve decided to, the way I do everything - body first, reasoning later.
“The Oxford paperwork is fine. No one’s going to dig that deep.” Pause. She laughs, a brittle sound that doesn’t match the confident woman I’ve been watching for weeks. “The Harrington situation was different - they got paranoid. This family isn’t like that.”
She turns, and I move before she can see me - stepping sideways into the hall bathroom, heart pounding against my ribs.
Oxford paperwork. The Harrington situation.
I file it away. My instincts are faster than my reasoning - always have been - but at least now I have the recording to back them up. We all have our gifts.
The bathroom mirror shows me a woman with shadows under her eyes and a jaw set hard enough to crack teeth. I look tired. I look angry. I look like someone who’s finally starting to realize that the game she’s been playing was rigged from the start.
I splash water on my face and go back to pretending everything’s fine.
That evening, I find Mikayla’s text to Shawn left carelessly on the counter. His phone, face-up, glowing with her name and a preview of the message.
She’s going to love how we elevated it. Bless her heart - she really does try. It’s like watching someone bring a store-bought pie to a five-star restaurant. Sweet, but you can’t help feeling secondhand embarrassment. See you at planning tomorrow, genius. ??
Bless her heart.
Store-bought pie to a five-star restaurant.
She isn’t even pretending anymore. The mask has slipped and underneath is pure contempt.
I take a photo. Add it to the file. The file is getting thick.
Shawn walks in while I’m still standing there, phone in hand, staring at the screenshot on my screen.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading.” I hold up my phone. Show him the text. “This is what she thinks of me. This is who you’re letting plan our anniversary.”
He barely glances at it. “She’s being dramatic. You know how she is.”
“I know how she is? I’ve known her about five minutes and I already know exactly what she is. You’ve known her for years and somehow I’m the one who’s supposed to understand that she’s ‘just dramatic’?”
“Britt-”
“Store-bought pie, Shawn. That’s what she calls me. To you. And you’re still letting her host our party.”
He sighs. Rubs his eyes. The same gestures, over and over, like he has a limited repertoire of responses and I’ve heard them all a thousand times.
“It’s just a party. It’s one night. Can we please just get through it without a fight?”
I want to tell him that every night is “just one night” until suddenly you’ve lost years of them.
I want to tell him that I’m drowning in “just one nights” and he keeps throwing me anchors instead of life rafts.
I want to tell him that I’m so lonely in this marriage I’ve started counting ceiling tiles again, the way I did when I was a kid and couldn’t sleep.
Instead I say, “Fine.”
Because I’m tired. Because fighting takes energy I don’t have. Because some part of me still hopes that if I just hold on a little longer, something will change.
That night I find out: my original reservation - the private dinner I’d planned - has been canceled by Elise’s assistant. In its place: a full ballroom booked under “Ross Family Legacy Evening.”
Mikayla’s teaser post glows on my phone screen: Honored to co-host something so special for the man who deserves the very best ?? #FamilyFirst
My anniversary. Stolen. Rebranded. Handed to another woman on a silver platter.
I stare at the post until my phone goes dark.
Soon.
Then architecture school. Then my life. Then something that’s mine.
Soon.