3. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
I found the text at two in the morning.
I wasn’t supposed to be awake. I wasn’t supposed to be in Heath’s study, standing in the dark with only the moonlight through the windows to see by. I certainly wasn’t supposed to be holding his phone, scrolling through messages that weren’t meant for my eyes.
But after what I had overheard in the dining room, after Kendall’s whispered question and Heath’s guilty response, I couldn’t sleep.
I had lain in our bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, listening to the old house settle and creak around me.
Heath hadn’t come to bed. He was still downstairs somewhere, probably in his study, probably avoiding me the way he had been avoiding me for months.
I told myself I just needed to know. I told myself that suspicion was worse than certainty, that my imagination was torturing me with possibilities that might not even be real.
I told myself that if I could just see proof, one concrete and definitive piece of it, I could stop wondering and start dealing with whatever the truth actually was.
His phone was on his desk, face down, next to a stack of papers I didn’t recognize.
I picked it up before I could talk myself out of it.
The screen glowed to life, and I typed in the passcode he had used for years, the one he had never bothered to change, the one that was the date of our first kiss.
The irony of that nearly made me laugh.
His messages were organized the way Heath organized everything, neat and efficient. Work contacts. Family. A few friends from college. And there, near the top of the list, a name that made my stomach clench.
Kendall.
I tapped on the conversation before I could stop myself. The messages loaded, a long thread that stretched back weeks. Months. I scrolled up, watching the dates roll by, September and October and November, all those nights when Heath had come home late and distant and full of excuses.
Most of the messages were innocuous. Meeting times and addresses. Questions about documents and logistics. Nothing that looked like a love affair, nothing that confirmed my worst fears.
And then I found it.
The message was from Kendall, sent three days ago, while I had been sitting in this very house trying to make conversation with the woman who wanted to destroy my marriage.
I can’t wait to go to Europe with you. It will be amazing. We’re going to build something great there, us together.
I read it once. Then again. Then a third time, the words burning themselves into my brain, each one a small wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding.
Europe. Together. Building something great.
Heath hadn’t mentioned Europe to me. Heath hadn’t mentioned anything to me, not in months, not since he had started disappearing into his work and his silence and whatever secret life he was building without me.
And now I knew why. Now I knew what he had been planning, what he and Kendall had been whispering about, what truth he was waiting to tell me.
He was leaving. He was taking Kendall to Europe, and he was leaving me behind.
And the worst part was that I could hear how it would be told. I had been hearing it for nine years.
There was a dinner, the first winter we were married, at the long table at Fairhaven, every chair filled and too many candles.
I was twenty-two and wearing a dress I had bought specifically to be correct in, and Montana had waited until the plates were cleared and the room was quiet and then she had reached into her handbag and put a photograph face up on the tablecloth and slid it down to me with one finger.
It was Heath at eighteen. Brown from a summer on the water, laughing, his arm around a girl in a white sundress who was looking up at him like he had personally arranged the sky.
“That’s Kendall,” Montana had said, warmly, to the whole table. “Aren’t they beautiful together? We all thought, back then, that it was only a matter of time.” She had let that sit for exactly one second, the way she does. “But things take the paths they take. Don’t they, Delphine.”
And every person at that table had looked at the photograph, and then at me, in my correct dress, and I had smiled and said what a lovely picture, because I was twenty-two and I did not yet know that the only way to survive Montana Fairchild was to refuse to be embarrassed, and I had spent the whole dessert course learning it.
She had shown that photograph to room after room since. She had never once had to say the cruel thing out loud. She just put the picture down and let the room do it for her.
So I knew exactly how they would tell this. Poor Delphine. The engineer’s daughter from Boston. She never really fit, did she, and in the end he went back to the girl in the white dress, the way everyone always knew he would.
I set the phone back on his desk exactly where I had found it.
My hands were shaking so badly that it took three tries to get it positioned correctly.
I turned and walked out of his study, down the dark hallway, past the door to the bedroom where we had made love and talked about our future and planned a life that apparently had an expiration date I hadn’t known about.
Somehow I made it to the guest bathroom at the end of the hall before the tears came.
I sat on the cold tile floor with my back against the door and cried as quietly as I could, pressing my hands over my mouth to muffle the sounds.
The last thing I wanted was for anyone in this house to hear me breaking.
Montana would be delighted. Kendall would be triumphant.
And Heath would feel guilty, which was somehow the worst option of all.
I didn’t want his guilt. I wanted his love. I wanted the man I had married, the one who used to look at me like I was the only person in any room, the one who had promised me forever and made me believe it.
That man was gone. I understood that now. Somewhere in the last three months, my husband had transformed into someone I didn’t recognize, someone who kept secrets and made plans and prepared to leave without ever telling me why.
I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Until my eyes were swollen and my throat was raw and my body felt hollow and emptied out. Then I sat there in the dark, listening to the silence of the house, trying to figure out what to do next.
I should confront him. I should march downstairs and demand answers and refuse to accept any more of his evasions. I should scream and throw things and make him look me in the eye while he admitted what he had done.
But I couldn’t. Not tonight. Not when I felt like this, shattered and exposed and far too vulnerable to fight.
Tomorrow, I told myself. I would talk to him tomorrow. I would be calm and composed and I would ask the questions that had been building in my chest for months. And whatever he told me, whatever truth he finally revealed, I would face it. I would survive it.
I had to believe that. It was the only thing keeping me upright.
I didn’t go back to bed. I couldn’t bear the thought of lying in those sheets, staring at the empty space where my husband should have been, counting the hours until morning. Instead I went downstairs, moving quietly through the dark house, and let myself out onto the back porch.
The December air was sharp and cold, biting at my cheeks and my bare arms. I should have grabbed a coat, worn more than the thin nightgown I had on. But the cold felt good. Real. A sensation I could focus on besides the pain tearing through my chest.
I sat down on the old wooden swing at the far end of the porch, where Heath and I had spent whole summer evenings in the first years, telling each other everything. I had told him my dreams on this swing. It seemed like a very long time ago and a very stupid thing to have done.
What a fool I had been.
I thought about my life. The choices I had made, the paths I had taken, the woman I had become.
I had been an engineering student when I met Heath. Twenty years old and ambitious and absolutely certain of what I wanted. I was going to build things. Design things. Leave my mark on the world in concrete and steel and beautiful, functional structures that would outlast me by centuries.
Then Heath Fairchild had walked into the lab, and everything had changed.
I hadn’t meant to fall in love with him. I hadn’t meant to let his world swallow mine. But that was what had happened, slowly and then all at once, and it had never once been a decision. It had been nine years of small ones.
I had not stopped working. I want to be fair to myself about that, even now, even sitting in the frost at five in the morning hating my own life.
I ran the Fairchild charity. I ran it properly.
I had turned a tax shelter with a nice name into an operation that put roofs over people, and I did it with a phone and a spreadsheet and a stubbornness that Montana had never once managed to legislate out of me, and it was real work and I was good at it.
But my degree had been in a drawer since I was twenty-two.
Every year I said next year. Every year there was a season, a committee, a wing of the house, a reason.
And the reasons were always good and they were always his, and somewhere in there the engineer had quietly become a woman who had once been an engineer, and I had not noticed the day it happened because it did not happen on a day.
Nothing I had ever built had my name on it. Nine years, and not one thing in the world had my name on it.
Now I wasn’t sure I had ever really had him at all.
The sky began to lighten. I watched the dark thin out across the lawn, the frost going from black to gray, the world turning slowly visible and impossibly cold. My body was numb from the cold. My mind was numb from everything else.
A door opened behind me.
I turned, expecting Heath, bracing myself for the conversation I wasn’t ready to have. But it wasn’t my husband standing in the doorway.
It was Kendall.