3. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
I woke up tangled in a stranger.
For one confused second, I didn’t know where I was, only that I was warm, and something heavy was pinning my legs, and someone’s heartbeat was thudding slow and steady under my cheek.
The scent was wrong. Not Stan’s cologne, not the familiar smell of our bedroom at The Anchorage. Something earthier. Cleaner.
Then memory crashed back in: the yacht, the phone, Birdie’s face on the screen, Stan’s hand shoving me over the rail, the cold dark water. I jerked upright so fast I rolled right off the couch and hit the floor.
“Fuck.” Reid sat up with a groan, one hand on his neck where I must have been crushing it all night. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I should’ve moved. I didn’t want to wake you, but I should’ve-”
“It’s fine.” I scrambled to my feet, face burning, suddenly aware of how I must look, tangled hair, borrowed clothes three sizes too big, yesterday’s mascara probably smeared down my cheeks. “It’s not - you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Bayes lifted his head from the couch cushion, looked at both of us with profound disappointment at being disturbed, and went back to sleep. The dog had the right idea. I wished I could do the same, just close my eyes and make all of this disappear.
The television was still on. The movie had ended at some point in the night, and now it was the news, the morning broadcast from Providence, and I was looking at my own face.
“-feared drowned,” the anchor was saying, her expression appropriately somber. “Search and rescue teams have been active since early this morning, but so far no sign of twenty-nine-year-old Blythe Chadwick, wife of shipping heir Stan Chadwick.”
The image cut to footage of the harbor at dawn. Boats. Divers in wetsuits slipping beneath the gray water. Coast Guard helicopters sweeping low over the waves.
“Mrs. Chadwick was last seen aboard the family yacht, the Anchorage II, during a celebration of-”
“Oh my god.”
The footage cut again. The steps of The Anchorage, the Chadwick family home, filmed in the harsh light of news cameras. And there was Stan.
He was wearing a blue sweater I’d bought him for Christmas two years ago, the one that made his eyes look brighter.
His hair was disheveled in a way that looked carefully arranged, just messy enough to suggest sleeplessness, not messy enough to be undignified.
And his face, his face was destroyed. Tears streaming down his cheeks, mouth trembling, hands shaking as he tried to speak into the microphones.
“I can’t-” His voice broke, perfectly timed. “I can’t believe she’s gone. She was the love of my life. The light of our family. I don’t know how to-”
He couldn’t finish. He buried his face in his hands, and Ivy appeared at his elbow, beautiful in black, steering him back toward the house with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d done this before.
And behind them, one hand on her belly and one hand on Stan’s arm, was Birdie.
She was wearing white. Of course she was wearing white, my little sister, who’d spent a year fucking my husband, wearing white like a virgin bride at a funeral.
Her face was pale and tearstained and perfectly tragic, and she leaned into Stan like she belonged there, like she’d always belonged there, and the cameras caught every inch of it.
Reid was standing behind me now, looking at the screen. His jaw was tight, a muscle jumping beneath his skin.
“Is he trying to make it look like you died?” he asked. Carefully.
“That’s what it looks like.” My voice came out strange, thin and far away.
“I need to go to the police.” I was already moving, grabbing for shoes I didn’t have, searching for a purse that was probably at the bottom of the ocean. “I need to tell them I’m alive, I need to-”
“Blythe.” Reid’s hand on my arm, steadying. “Take a breath. Let me drive you.”
“You don’t have to-”
“I’m driving you.” His voice left no room for argument. “You’re not going to a police station alone wearing my clothes with no identification and no proof of who you are. I’m driving you.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him I didn’t need help, didn’t need a stranger’s protection, didn’t need anything from anyone.
But my hands were shaking too badly to hold anything, and my legs felt like they might give out at any moment, and somewhere across town my husband was performing grief for the cameras while my sister stood at his elbow with her hand on her belly.
“Okay,” I said.
He nodded. Didn’t smile, didn’t say anything else. Just turned and walked toward the garage, and I followed because I didn’t know what else to do.
***
The police station was twenty minutes away. Reid drove too fast and didn’t speak, and I sat in the passenger seat staring out the window at a world that looked exactly the same as it had yesterday. The world hadn’t noticed.
The station was small and quiet, a station that mostly handled drunk tourists and parking violations. It wasn’t built for attempted murder, or for a Newport socialite rising from the dead.
Reid pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine.
“I’ll wait,” he said.
“You don’t have to-”
“I’ll wait.”
I got out of the car. My legs were steadier now, the shock fading into something harder, an edge that felt like purpose.
The officer at the front desk was young, maybe twenty-five, eager in a way that said he was still new enough to believe in things like justice and procedure. His eyes went wide when he saw me.
“Holy shit,” he said, then immediately flushed. “I mean - you’re - you’re her. The-”
“I’m not dead.”
“I can see that.” He fumbled for his radio, nearly dropping it. “Sarge? Sarge, you need to come out here.”
A door opened somewhere in the back, and an older officer emerged, fifty-something, gray-haired, with a kind face and a coffee stain on his tie. His eyes went wide too, but he recovered faster.
“Mrs. Chadwick.” He came around the desk, hands out like he wanted to shake mine and hug me at the same time. “My god. We’ve had boats out all morning. Are you all right? What happened?”
“My husband pushed me off a boat.” The words came out flat and hard, and I watched them land.
Watched his expression shift from concern to confusion to careful professional neutrality.
“He shoved me over the rail into the water, and then he told the captain to drive away. And he knows I can’t swim. ”
Silence.
The younger officer’s mouth was hanging open. The older one, Sergeant something, I hadn’t caught his name, was looking at me like I’d grown a second head.
“Mrs. Chadwick,” he said slowly, carefully, the way you’d talk to someone who might be unwell. “That’s a very serious accusation.”
“I know what it is.”
“Why don’t we sit down.” He gestured toward a small room off the main area. “Can I get you some coffee? Water?”
“I don’t want coffee. I want you to arrest my husband for trying to kill me.”
We sat down anyway.
The room was beige and small and smelled like old sweat and stale coffee. The kind of room where difficult conversations happened, where bad news got delivered, where people’s lives fell apart under fluorescent lights.
The sergeant, his name was Moretti, I read it off his badge, sat across from me with a legal pad and a sympathetic expression that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Walk me through what happened,” he said. “From the beginning.”
So I did.
I told him about the yacht. The champagne. Finding Stan with the phone, his hand on himself, my sister’s voice coming through the speaker. The argument. The shove. The water closing over my head.
I told it exactly as it had happened, in as much detail as I could remember. The cold. The dark. The way the yacht pulled away with its lights getting smaller. Reid Navarro appearing out of nowhere, pulling me to safety.
“Reid Navarro.” Moretti wrote down the name, his pen scratching against the paper. “And he’s where now?”
“In your parking lot. Waiting for me.”
“We’ll want to talk to him.”
“Good. He saw everything. He saw Stan watch me go under. He saw the yacht leave.”
Moretti nodded, still writing. His face was careful, closed. I could see him building a narrative in his head, and it wasn’t the one I was telling.
When he looked up, his expression was gentle. Understanding. An expression that said he’d dealt with hysterical women before.
“Mrs. Chadwick,” he said. “I have to be honest with you. What you’re describing - it sounds like a domestic situation that got out of hand.”
“A domestic situation.”
“An argument. Things got heated. You fell over the rail. Your husband panicked and made a bad choice.”
“He didn’t panic.” I leaned forward, forcing him to meet my eyes. “He watched. He stood at the rail and watched me go under, and then he told the captain to leave. That’s not panic, Sergeant. That’s a decision.”
“I understand you feel that way-”
“I don’t feel that way. That’s what happened.”
Moretti sighed. He set down his pen and folded his hands on the legal pad.
“Mrs. Chadwick. You’re sitting right here. No body, no real injury-”
“I have a bruise on my hip from hitting the rail.”
“A bruise you could’ve gotten anywhere.” His voice was gentle, patient, infuriating. “You’ve got one witness - a man no one’s ever heard of, who conveniently happened to be anchored nearby in the dark. Against the word of this entire family. Against the word of everyone who matters in this town.”
“Because he thinks I’m dead. Because he left me to die.”
“Or because he loves you and he’s devastated and he made a terrible mistake in a moment of crisis.”
I stared at him. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, loud in the silence. Somewhere in the station, a phone was ringing.
“You’re not going to do anything,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“We’re going to investigate.” He held up his hands, placating. “We’re going to talk to your husband, talk to this Navarro fellow, look at the boat. But I have to be straight with you - what you’re describing, the way you’re describing it… it’s going to be very hard to prove.”
“He tried to kill me.”
“That’s your interpretation of events.” Moretti’s voice was so kind it made me want to scream. “His might be different.”
There was a younger officer standing in the doorway. Callahan, his name tag read. He’d been there for a while, listening, watching. His face was doubtful. Just for a second, belief crossed his face. Actual belief.
Then Moretti glanced at him, and he looked away.
I stood up. My legs were shaking, but my voice was steady.
“What happens now?”
“We call off the search, obviously. Let people know you’re alive.” Moretti stood too, reaching out to shake my hand. “We’ll be in touch if we have more questions. In the meantime - do you have somewhere safe to stay?”
I didn’t answer. I walked out of the room, through the station, into the bright morning sun.
Reid was leaning against his SUV, arms crossed over his chest, his face tight with tension. He straightened when he saw me.
“Well?”
“They’re not going to do anything.” I couldn’t feel my face. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “Domestic situation. No body. No real injury. One witness nobody’s ever heard of.”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
I pulled his phone out of my pocket, he’d given it to me on the drive over, in case I needed to call anyone. For a long moment I just stared at it, the screen blank and dark.
“I should call my mother,” I said.
“Okay.”
My hands were shaking as I dialed. The number I’d known since I was five years old, the number I could dial in my sleep. It rang once. Twice.
“Hello?” My mother’s voice, clipped and cold. The voice she used when she didn’t recognize the number.
“Mom.” My throat closed up. “Mom, it’s me. It’s Blythe. I’m alive. I’m at the police station, and I’m-”
“Where are you?”
I stopped.
She didn’t ask if I was alive. She didn’t say thank God, or I was so worried, or I thought you were dead, I’ve been crying all night.
Just: Where are you.
“The police station,” I said slowly. “Mom, did you hear me? I’m okay. Stan pushed me off the boat, but someone found me, and I’m-”
“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” she said. “Do not come to the house until you’ve calmed down.”
The line went dead.
I stood in the parking lot in Reid Navarro’s borrowed clothes, his phone in my hand, and stared at the blank screen where my mother’s voice had been.
She hadn’t asked if I was alive. She hadn’t asked if I was hurt.
She’d asked where I was.
And then she’d hung up.