Chapter 3 Abbie
ABBIE
Gray left yesterday morning. Another Thursday, another departure, another kiss at the door while his driver waited with the car running. "Two weeks max," he promised. "Maybe less. I'll call you when I land."
Before he left, he pressed something into my palm. Cool metal. Delaney's spare key.
"You were right," he said. "I'm sorry."
I dropped the key into the drawer by the door.
"Safe flight," I said.
And watched the car pull away with my husband and my sister inside. He always calls when he lands. That's not the problem. The problem is everything that happens between the calls.
At my desk, I stare past the campaign mockup toward the elevator.
Nearly eight years ago, I was twenty-three and desperate to be someone other than a Montgomery.
I walked into VTG with a new badge and a résumé that didn’t trade on my family connections. Then the elevator doors opened.
* * *
The elevator stopped between floors eleven and twelve, and the lights went out.
"Emergency lights should kick in," I said into the darkness. "Give it a second."
They did. Dim red glow. Enough to see the enormous tattooed man pressed into the corner, hands flat against the walls.
"Hey. You okay?"
"Fine." The word came out tight.
"Tell me five things you can see."
He looked at me like I'd lost my mind.
"It's a grounding technique. Works better than you'd think. Emergency light. That's one. What else?"
"I don't—"
"Control panel."
"Good. Three more."
"Your shoes. The ceiling tiles. My hands."
"There. Five. Now five things you can hear."
"I can hear you talking."
"Rude, but accurate."
His expression shifted. "The machinery. The building settling. My own heartbeat, which is embarrassing."
"It's really not. My family runs hotels. You know how many people I've seen have panic attacks in elevators? Dozens. You're doing great."
"I'm pressing myself into a wall like I'm trying to merge with the building."
"But you're talking. That's the important part."
His hands came off the walls. "This is humiliating."
"It's not. It's just your brain doing a thing brains do. Nothing to be ashamed of."
His face changed at that word. Ashamed. I recognized it.
"Want to count your tattoos?" I asked.
"What?"
"On your arms. Counting is grounding. Those look interesting."
"You want me to count my own tattoos."
"Unless you want to count the ceiling tiles again. But I feel like you already know how many you have."
"Seventeen. Just on the forearms. I have more."
"I figured." I smiled. "I'm Abbie, by the way."
"Gray."
"Like the color?"
"Like my grandfather. He was a pretentious man."
I laughed. "My family's hotel elevators are worse than this. The one at the Biltmore property gets stuck twice a week. I've started bringing snacks."
"Snacks."
"Emergency granola bars. Very important for elevator survival."
"I'll remember that for next time."
"There won't be a next time. These things almost never happen twice."
"You don't know that."
"I do, actually. Statistically—"
"Are you making up statistics to make me feel better?"
"Is it working?"
"Annoyingly, yes." His breathing was almost normal now. "Why are you being so nice to me?"
"Because panicking alone is worse than panicking with company. I've done both."
"You don't seem like someone who panics."
"Everyone panics sometimes. The trick is finding people who don't make you feel bad about it."
He looked at me for a long moment. "I'm buying you coffee after this."
"You don't have to—"
"I'm buying you coffee. It's the least I can do."
"For counting your tattoos?"
"For not making me feel like an idiot."
Forty minutes after we stopped, the elevator jerked. The lights came on, and we were moving again.
"Gray Valentine," he said as the doors opened. "In case you need to know who to send the coffee invoice to."
"Valentine like the talent agency?"
"Like the talent agency. Yes."
"So you're important."
"I'm very important." But he said it like a joke. "And you're..."
"Abbie Montgomery."
Recognition crossed his face.
"Montgomery," he repeated.
"Not if I can help it."
* * *
The coffee became dinner. Dinner became weekly phone calls. Phone calls became the thing I looked forward to most, Gray's voice on the other end of the line, asking about my day, remembering everything I'd told him the time before.
He left sticky notes on the coffee machine at VTG after that first day, little messages that made the other assistants whisper and speculate. '2 sugars.' And the next day: 'Proud of you.' And a week later: 'Green again?'
I still have the notes in a box in my closet.
Three months in, he told me the truth.
We were at his apartment, the one he had before we bought the Trousdale house. I was curled up on his couch wearing his hoodie, that hoodie, the gray VTG one, and he was pacing like he couldn't figure out how to be still.
"I need to tell you something," he said.
"Okay." I braced myself for something bad. An ex-girlfriend. A secret child. A terminal illness. My mind ran through possibilities like a Rolodex of disasters.
"I've been in love with you since the elevator."
I stared at him. "What?"
"Since the moment you told me to count my tattoos. Maybe before that. Maybe since you got in the elevator and didn't look scared of me like most people do."
"Gray—"
"You don't have to do anything about it.
" He stopped pacing and faced me, hands shoved in his pockets like he was trying to keep himself contained.
"I know it's fast. I know you have your own timeline, your own plans.
I'm just... I needed you to know. That this isn't casual for me. That I'm not just passing time."
"You're very stupid for someone so smart," I told him.
He blinked. "Is that... a rejection?"
"It's an observation." I stood up and crossed to him, wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him down to kiss me. "And the answer is yes."
"Yes what?"
"Yes, I'll do something about it. Yes, I feel the same way. Yes, you're stuck with me now."
He smiled against my mouth. "Good."
* * *
PRESENT, 3:45 PM
"Earth to Abbie."
I blink back to the present. Wren is standing in my office doorway, phone in hand, expression somewhere between concerned and amused.
"You've been staring at that wall for like ten minutes," she says. "Either you're having a stroke or you're remembering something really good."
"Neither." I shake my head, trying to clear the memory. "What's up?"
"Nothing good." She crosses to my desk and sits on the edge, which she knows I hate. "I need to show you something, but I need you to not freak out."
"That's the worst possible way to start a sentence."
"I know. I'm sorry." She hands me her phone. "VTG gossip account. Someone sent me screenshots."
I look at the screen. It's an Instagram story, anonymous, private, the kind of account that exists specifically to spread rumors about people like my husband.
The image shows a hotel corridor, all generic beige carpeting and numbered doors.
The caption reads: Spotted: Gray Valentine's floor at the Lisbon hotel.
His "assistant" has the suite next door. Working late indeed ??????
I swipe to the next image. A car, the kind of sleek black sedan that VTG executives use. Two figures visible through the window, close together, not close enough to be conclusive. Assistant is basically his work wife at this point.
Another swipe. A comment thread, screenshotted from somewhere else. At this point she's the wife followed by three laughing emojis. Guess we know who's running his life ?? I give it six months before the real wife finds out. My stomach turns to ice.
"It's gossip."
"I know it's gossip. I have eyes, Wren. I can see it's gossip."
"Okay, but the way you're holding that phone like it personally wronged you tells me you maybe need to hear it again. It's gossip. Anonymous account, zero verification, could literally be anyone with a grudge and a photo app."
"The photo app didn't put them on the same hotel floor. The photo app didn't put them in the same car."
"Abbie. Come on. She's his assistant. They work together. They travel together. That's literally what assistants do."
"I know what assistants do. And I’m the wife who works in a different department so she doesn't have to watch her husband and her sister share hotel floors in Lisbon."
"You’re more than the wife in those comments. You're the creative director of a company you helped build. None of that changes because some anonymous account wants clicks."
"The comments, Wren. Have you read the comments?"
"I read some of them. Then I stopped, because I have self-preservation instincts."
"Workwife. That's what they're calling her. Delaney's the workwife who actually travels with him and knows his schedule and brings him coffee. And I'm the real wife who apparently hasn't caught on yet. Those are the words. Hasn't caught on."
"Strangers on the internet are not a reliable source of information about your marriage. You know this. You literally know this."
"Knowing it doesn't make me feel it. Knowing it doesn't make the humiliation go away.
I can sit here and recite all the logical reasons those photos don't prove anything, and then I can also tell you that I've been sitting in that house eating dinner alone night after night wondering if my husband remembers I exist, and both of those things are true at the same time. "
"Okay. Both things can be true. You're allowed to be pissed about the dinners and also acknowledge the photos are nothing."
"Are they nothing, though? Because you showed them to me. You didn't have to show them to me. You could have decided I didn't need to see it."
"I showed them to you because you would've found them anyway and then you would've been mad I didn't tell you. I made a choice. Maybe it was the wrong one. But I wasn't going to let you walk into a meeting and have someone else bring it up first."
"So it's already that bad. People are already talking."
"People are always talking. That's not new. What's new is you actually seeming rattled by it."
"I'm not rattled. I'm humiliated. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"Rattled means I don't know what's real. Humiliated means I know exactly what's real and I still have to smile through it."
"Do you know what's real? Because five minutes ago you were asking me if the photos were nothing."
Wren's voice is gentle now, careful.
"I know my husband isn't sleeping with my sister. I know that. Gray has a lot of flaws but he's not... he wouldn't do that to me. Not with her. Not with anyone."
"Okay. Then what are we actually talking about here?"
"We're talking about the fact that knowing something doesn't stop it from feeling like a knife in my chest. We're talking about the fact that strangers are looking at pictures of my sister and my husband and making up stories, and I don't get to defend myself because defending myself means admitting I saw it, which means admitting it got to me. "
"You don't owe anyone a defense. You don't have to go online and explain your marriage to people who don't know you."
"I know. I just... there's this thing I haven't told you."
"Okay."
"The other night, Gray handed Delaney my hoodie from the laundry. The one he gave me when we were dating, when we used to actually spend time together like normal people who liked each other."
"I remember the hoodie."
"He gave it to Delaney. Just handed it to her because she was cold and it was sitting there and he didn't think about it. And she wore it. She was wearing it in our kitchen at one in the morning."
"Did you say something?"
"I told him. But it's a hoodie. It's just fabric. It doesn't mean anything except it means everything to me and apparently nothing to him."
"Did he know? That it was yours, that it mattered?"
"He knew it was mine. I don't know if he knew it mattered. I don't know if he notices anything about me anymore unless I'm standing directly in front of him demanding attention like some kind of desperate cliché."
"You're not a cliché."
"I washed it twice. The hoodie. After I got it back. I washed it twice and I still can't put it on because it feels like it belongs to someone else now. Like she touched something that was supposed to be just mine and now it's contaminated."
"That's not crazy. That's not you being dramatic. That's a real thing you're allowed to feel."
"She can say she just took a hoodie from her boss because she was cold. He gave it to me on our third date."
"But he should know. He should know and he should've thought about it."
"Yeah. He should've."
"Have you talked to him? About any of this? The photos, the hoodie, the dinners alone?"
"What's the point? He's in Lisbon. He's always somewhere. And even when he's here, he's not really here."
"The point is that you're his wife and you're hurting and he should know that."
"I can't call him about gossip. I can't be the wife who sees anonymous screenshots and immediately needs reassurance. That's not who I want to be."
"There's a difference between asking your husband to be a husband and defending yourself to the internet. You know that."
"I know. I just... I'm not ready. Not today. I can't hear his voice right now and pretend everything is fine when nothing is fine."
"You don't have to pretend with him. That's literally the whole point of marriage."
"In theory. In practice, I don't know what the point of my marriage is anymore. I don't know if I'm his partner or his roommate or just the person who happens to sleep in his bed when he bothers to come home to it."
"Abbie."
"I know. I know how that sounds. Can you just... can you give me a minute? I have the campaign mockup and I need to look at it and I need to not think about this for five seconds."
"You want me to go?"
"I want to be alone. Just for a little while. I'll find you."
Wren leaves. The campaign mockup is still open. I check my phone. No new messages from Gray.
I open Instagram. I find the gossip account Wren showed me. I read through every story, every comment, every speculation about my husband and my sister. It's just gossip. I read it again anyway, in the bathroom where no one can see me, and I hate myself for not being able to stop.
My phone buzzes. A text from Gray: Just woke from a nap. Missing you. Call tomorrow? I type back: Sure. He sends a heart emoji. I stare at it.
That night I lie awake in our bed, thinking about the way my sister is looking at him now.
At this point she's the wife.
I turn over and close my eyes and try to convince myself that everything is fine.