10. Izzy
— ? —
Izzy
The photo is everywhere.
I scroll with shaking hands and watch it multiply across every platform, every gossip site, every corner of the internet that has decided my life is entertainment.
James and me on the sidewalk outside my mother’s brownstone.
His arms around me. My face buried in his shoulder while I sobbed about a husband who couldn’t see me.
The comments are a feeding frenzy.
@nyc_exposed: so she’s out here playing victim while she got a whole man on the side?? classic ??
@carterwatch: wilson needs to take EVERYTHING in the divorce she doesn’t deserve a single penny
@gossipqueen_daily: she’s worse than sabrina tbh at least sabrina never pretended to be the good wife ??
@truthseeker99: hope he destroys her in court lmao what a hypocrite
I throw the phone across my mother’s living room. It bounces off the couch cushion and lands face-up on the Persian rug, still glowing, and a sound comes out of me that I don’t recognize.
“What was that?” Helena appears in the doorway, reading glasses pushed up into her silver hair.
“Someone leaked a photo of me hugging James.” I’m pacing now, bare feet wearing a track in the rug, arms locked around my middle. “And the whole world has decided I’m sleeping with my own cousin.”
“That’s absurd.” She crosses to the couch and picks up my phone, frowning down the screen as she scrolls. “James is family. Anyone who knows you…”
“Nobody knows me.” I take the phone back with trembling fingers. “Nobody wants the truth. They want a villain, and it’s my turn.”
The phone buzzes in my hand. Then again. Then a flood, the whole device rattling against my palm.
I open the messages and everything below my ribs goes cold.
Unknown number: You deserve everything that’s coming to you. Wilson should have known what you really are.
Unknown number: Bet you’ve been cheating for years. Someone should follow you and drag every dirty secret into the light.
Unknown number: Women like you always get what they deserve. I hope it hurts.
My knees buckle. I grab the arm of the couch, the leather slick under my sweating palm.
“Izzy.” Helena keeps saying my name until it lands. “Talk to me. What is it?”
I can’t make words. I hold out the phone, and she takes it, and she reads, and her face goes gray.
“We’re calling the police.” She’s already moving toward the landline. “This is harassment. This is criminal, and we are not going to sit here while…”
“It won’t do anything.” I sink onto the couch. “They’ll tell me to log off. They’ll tell me anonymous accounts are hard to trace. They always tell women that.”
“Then we hire security. We call the lawyer. We…”
“I need to find Wilson.” The words are out before the thought finishes forming. “I need to look him in the face when I ask if he did this to me.”
Helena stops with her hand on the receiver. “You think Wilson leaked it?”
“I don’t know what I think.” I press my palms against my eyes until they ache. “But someone has been feeding the press for weeks, and I’m the one getting threats, and the story makes him the wounded one. Follow it, Mom. Who does the story help?”
“Sweetheart, I truly don’t believe he would…”
“Where is he tonight?” I’m already on the stairs. “The Foundation’s donor dinner is tonight. The Kensington. He cleared his whole calendar, Mom, and he kept the one thing with my name on it.”
“You cannot walk into a black-tie dinner in jeans and start a war in front of…”
“Watch me.”
The Kensington hits me the second I walk in. Chandeliers that cost more than most people’s cars. Staff who’ve been trained to smile like they mean it.
I come through the gilded doors in dark jeans and a gray sweater with my hair barely brushed, and my sneakers squeak on the polished floor with every step. A security guard in a black suit moves into my path, one hand up.
“Ma’am, this is invitation only. I’ll need to see…”
“Isadora Carter.” I pull my license from my back pocket and hold it up. “Wilson Carter’s wife. Let me through.”
He looks at the license, then at my face, and his jaw does a small drop he tries to hide. He steps aside without another word.
The ballroom is packed with tuxedos, diamonds, crystal flutes. I scan the tables while my heartbeat climbs into my ears.
Wilson sits near the front, surrounded by suits, wearing his public face. It isn’t working tonight. Even from across the room I can see the machinery behind it running on fumes.
He looks up and finds me.
Surprise crosses his face, then confusion, then one flash of hope that hurts to watch. Then fear. He pushes back his chair and stands, his napkin sliding to the floor.
The room quiets in a spreading ring. Conversations die mid-sentence. Forks stop moving.
Good. Let them watch. They’ve been watching me all night anyway.
I cross the ballroom past silent tables and staring faces, fists tight at my sides, and stop in front of my husband close enough to see the pulse going in his throat.
“Did you leak that photo?” My voice carries to every corner of the room. “Did you hand it to the tabloids so the whole world would think your wife is the cheater?”
“Izzy.” He’s gone very still. “What are you, this isn’t the place…”
“Did you leak the photo of me and James?”
“Of course not.” His hand comes toward my sleeve. “I would never do that to you. You have to know…”
“Then who did?” I pull out of reach. “Because someone is feeding stories to the press, and I’m the one getting death threats, and the story only helps one of us.”
Everything in his face stops. “What death threats?”
“Oh, NOW you want to know what’s happening to me?” The laugh that comes out of me hurts. “Now that there’s an audience?”
“Izzy.” His hand closes on my elbow, firm, and his voice drops to a register only I can hear. “Come outside with me. Right now. Please. Not for their sake, because you’re about to say things you’ll wish they hadn’t filmed.”
Phones are already rising out of clutches and pockets all around us.
Fine. Let them film an empty doorway.
I let him steer me through the French doors onto the stone terrace. He pulls them shut and the ballroom noise cuts off, leaving traffic hum and wind moving through the boxwoods.
“Show me.” He turns to me with both hands out. “The threats. Show me right now.”
I slap the phone into his palm.
He scrolls, and I watch it hit him. His jaw ratchets tighter with every message. By the last one his hand isn’t steady.
“Izzy.” He looks up with horror all over his face. “I swear to you, I didn’t know this was happening.”
“You never know.” I take the phone back and shove it in my pocket. “That’s the problem, Wilson. You never know what’s happening to me, because you never look.”
“I didn’t leak that photograph.” He steps toward me. “On everything I have left, I had nothing to do with it.”
“Then who did?” I back up until the stone railing presses cold through my sweater. “Who benefits from making me the guilty one while you play the wounded husband?”
“I don’t know yet.” He drags both hands through his hair and wrecks it. “Someone who wants to reach me through you. I’ll find them. I promise you I’ll find them.”
“Your promises are furniture, Wilson.” My voice splinters on it. “I’ve got a whole house full.”
“Izzy, please…”
“The man in that photo is James.” I cut him off before he can build anything. “My cousin. You’ve met him a dozen times. He was at our wedding, Wilson.”
He opens his mouth. I don’t let him.
“He was on that sidewalk because my mother called him, because she didn’t know what else to do with me.” My voice climbs and I let it. “He was hugging me because I was crying about YOU. Hours of crying about you, the man I couldn’t even say I’d stopped loving when you begged me to say it.”
Relief floods his face.
Then shame moves in behind it, and his shoulders drop under the weight.
“I’m sorry.” His hands open and close on nothing. “When that photo loaded, for one second I thought the worst. I had no right to it. Not after everything I’ve done.”
“You convicted me in a second.” The railing bites into my back. “Seven years I waited for you, and you saw one picture and convicted me.”
“I know.”
“Right after I stood on that sidewalk unable to say the words that would have freed us both.”
“I know.” He stays where he is this time. His arms hang at his sides, and I can see what it costs him to leave them there. “I know what my face did, and I’ve hated myself for it every hour since. I have no right to jealousy. I burned that right down years ago.”
“Then why?” It breaks out of me. “Why did you look at me the way the comments look at me?”
“Because I’m terrified.” His voice drops to bare wood.
I wait.
“Because I finally understand exactly what I’m losing, now, at the end, when understanding it is worth nothing.” He swallows. “Because some sick part of me keeps hunting for proof you’ve already replaced me, so it can hurt on my schedule instead of yours.”
The wind moves the boxwoods. My eyes are streaming and I don’t touch them.
“I don’t know if I have anything left to give you.” It comes out barely above the traffic.
“Then don’t give anything.” He takes one step, only one, and stops himself. “Let me do the work. All of it. Every day, for as long as it takes, with nothing promised back.”
“Wilson, stop…”
“Just don’t decide tonight that I’m not worth…”
The terrace doors swing open behind us on a gust of warm air and party noise.
Sabrina Burnham steps out.
Midnight blue gown fitted within a breath of her skin, diamonds at her throat and ears, her hair in the soft waves the tabloids love.
Her perfume gets there first. It always gets there first.
Her father bought a table for this dinner back in September, when Wilson still needed him for the deal. Nobody thought to give him his money back.
“Wilson, darling.” She comes toward us unhurried. “The host has been asking for you, the auction, apparently, oh.”
Her eyes land on me. Her smile holds perfectly still while, behind it, she does fast math.
“Mrs. Carter. What a surprise.”
Her fingers settle on his sleeve. They stay there.
I look at Wilson.
I wait.