3. Cedrick
— ? —
Cedrick
Something is wrong with my wife.
I can’t put my finger on it, can’t name the thing that’s making my skin crawl every time she smiles at me, but it’s there. A wrongness. A too-perfect quality to everything she does lately, like she’s performing the role of Chantal instead of actually being her.
She made me breakfast this morning. Again. Fresh squeezed orange juice, eggs benedict with homemade hollandaise, the works.
“What’s the occasion?” I ask, sliding onto the stool at the island.
“Does there have to be an occasion for me to feed my husband?” She sets the plate in front of me and kisses my cheek, warm and lingering, like we’re newlyweds.
“No. Just-” I pick up my fork and put it back down. “You seem happy lately.”
“Shouldn’t I be?” She turns back to the stove, one hand resting on her belly. “New baby coming. Handsome husband. Hollandaise that finally didn’t break. Life is good.”
“Right.” I make myself eat. “Life is good.”
It’s everything I wanted, six months ago.
It’s everything I wanted when I first started pulling away, when the distance between us felt insurmountable and Hazel’s attention felt like oxygen.
Now it feels like a trap.
You’re being paranoid, I tell myself, watching her hum at the stove. She’s nesting. Hormones. The books say this happens.
But then I think about the clinic. The paper bag with the prenatal vitamins. A gentleman dropped them off. Isaac Wren? He said you’d know what it was about.
Isaac drove my pregnant wife to a doctor’s appointment, and she never mentioned it. Not once. And when I pushed, she looked at me with those wide, innocent eyes and said it wasn’t a big deal in a voice that made it feel like the biggest deal in the world.
“You’re going to be late,” Chantal says, without turning around.
“Yeah.” I stand, grab my briefcase, kiss the back of her head. “Love you.”
“Love you too.”
She says it easily. Perfectly.
That’s the thing that’s bothering me, I realize, all the way down the driveway. She says everything perfectly now.
Nobody happy is that rehearsed.
Sometime after lunch, my phone buzzes for the fourteenth time.
HAZEL: 8:00. The usual place. Show up or I swear to god, Cedrick.
I stare at it for a long minute. Then I type back one word: Fine.
The hotel bar is forty minutes from town, the kind of place where no one we know ever goes. It’s our place - or it was, before everything went sideways.
I spend the whole drive rehearsing. It’s over. It has to be over. We had something, but it was a mistake, and the baby’s coming, and-
Every version sounds like a speech. Every version sounds like a coward.
When I walk in, she’s already two drinks deep at the end of the bar.
“Nice of you to finally show up.”
“Traffic,” I lie, sliding onto the stool beside her.
“Three weeks, Cedrick.” She doesn’t look at me. She looks at her whiskey. “Three weeks of radio silence, and you open with traffic.”
“Chantal needs me right now. The baby’s coming soon. I have to be present.”
“Present.” She laughs, ugly and raw, and flags down the bartender for another.
“That’s rich. You want to know what present looks like?
Present is me sitting next to your wife at her prenatal appointments because you had a client emergency.
Present is me holding her hand while your daughter’s heartbeat played over the speakers.
I’ve been more present in your marriage than you have. ”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Or what?” But she drops it anyway, leaning in close, and I can smell the whiskey on her breath. “You’ve been avoiding me. Don’t insult me by pretending otherwise.”
“We have to stop.” There. It’s out. “This - whatever this is - it has to end.”
“This is what you said six months ago.” Her fingers tighten around her glass until I think it might crack. “When she first started getting suspicious. You said we needed to cool off, and two weeks later you were in my bed again.”
“It’s different this time.”
“Why? Because she’s being nice to you?” Her lip curls. “She made you breakfast, didn’t she. She’s doing the doting wife thing, and you’re eating it up like a golden retriever.”
“Don’t talk about her.”
“Don’t-” She actually laughs. “That’s incredible. That is incredible. You didn’t mind me talking about her for eighteen months. You didn’t mind me telling you when her book club met so you’d know when the house was empty.”
Jesus. I glance down the bar. Two women at the corner table, close enough to hear if we get loud. “Hazel-”
“She’s manipulating you, Cedrick. Whatever this sudden wifely devotion is, it’s not real. She’s playing some kind of game.”
“She’s my wife.”
“And I’m the woman you’ve been fucking for a year and a half.” She leans closer, eyes bright and wet and furious. “I gave you everything. Do you get that? I gave you my best friend, Cedrick. Twenty years. Do you have any idea what that cost me? What I paid for you?”
“I never asked you to pay anything.”
“You said you were going to leave her.” Her voice cracks down the middle. “You said after the baby was born-”
“I never said that.”
The words come out sharper than I intended. Hazel recoils like I’ve slapped her.
“You did. In this hotel. Room 412. You said-”
“I don’t know what I said.” I run a hand through my hair, suddenly exhausted down to the bone. “I don’t know what any of this is anymore. I just know it has to stop. Whatever I promised you, whatever you thought this was - I can’t do it anymore.”
For a long moment, she just stares at me.
“You’re really doing this,” she says quietly. “You’re really going to crawl back to her like the last eighteen months never happened.”
“Hazel-”
“Say it never happened.” Her chin lifts. “Look at me and say it meant nothing.”
I look at her. At the woman I’ve wanted and resented and needed and hidden for a year and a half. And I can’t say it meant nothing, and I can’t say it meant something, because both answers cost more than I’ve ever been willing to pay for anything.
So I say the worst possible thing instead.
“I’m sorry.”
She picks up her whiskey and throws it in my face.
The burn hits first - liquid fire in my eyes, ice sliding down my collar, whiskey soaking into my shirt. I gasp, stumbling off the stool, and somewhere behind me I hear it: the unmistakable click of phone cameras.
“Oh my god,” one of the women at the corner table whispers. “Are you getting this?”
“You’re a coward,” Hazel spits, loud enough for the whole bar now. “A lying, cheating coward. You ruined my life, Cedrick. I gave you everything, and you’re going to go home and eat her goddamn hollandaise like nothing happened.”
“Hazel-”
“Don’t.” She grabs her purse, tears streaking her makeup, and I watch her shove through the crowd toward the door while whiskey drips off my chin onto the bar’s sticky floor.
The bartender slides a stack of napkins across without a word.
“She closed her tab an hour ago,” he says finally, like that’s the real insult in all this.
I pay mine and leave.
In the car, my hands won’t stop shaking.
It’s over. I ended it. I did the right thing, finally, after months of doing the wrong thing, and somehow I don’t feel relieved at all. I feel like I’ve stepped off a cliff and the ground is somewhere below me in the dark, patient.
My phone lights up on the passenger seat.
For one terrible second, I think it’s Chantal. I think somehow she knows, she’s always known, and everything that’s happened this past month was leading to this exact moment-
But it’s not Chantal.
ISAAC: I know you were with her tonight. Someone posted photos from that bar. End it for real this time, or I tell Chantal myself. Last warning.
The car swerves. I overcorrect, nearly clipping the guardrail, and for a moment the whole world narrows to the scream of tires and the slam of my own heart.
Isaac knows.
Isaac has known.
I pull onto the shoulder and sit there, engine idling, reading the message until the words stop making sense.
Last warning. Which means there was a first warning.
Which means - how long? Since the beginning?
Since one of our late-night whiskey sessions when I drank too much and said too much?
Or did he figure it out on his own - Isaac, who watches everything and says nothing, who’s been in love with my wife since the day I introduced them?
He looks at her like she’s the answer to a question he’s been asking his whole life. You’ve seen it for five years. You just never thought he’d do anything about it, because Isaac doesn’t take things. Isaac waits.
And you just handed him five years of waiting on a silver platter.
I type a reply.
It’s not what you think.
I delete it.
Stay out of my marriage.
I delete that too. My marriage. Even I can hear it.
I send nothing. I put the phone face-down on the seat and drive home with the windows down, trying to air the whiskey out of my shirt, my collar, my life.
When I get home, Chantal is already asleep.
She’s curled on her side, one hand resting on her belly, and in the silver moonlight she looks peaceful. Innocent. Everything I don’t deserve.
Her phone sits on the nightstand, six inches from her hand.
I stand there in the dark, whiskey-damp shirt balled in my fist, and I think about picking it up. Just to check. Just to know what she knows.
My thumb hovers over it.
I don’t do it. I tell myself it’s respect.
It’s not respect. Some part of you doesn’t want to know what you’d find. Some part of you already knows.
I strip off the shirt, bury it at the bottom of the hamper, and climb into bed beside her. She mumbles something in her sleep and reaches for me, and I let her curl against my chest even though every point of contact burns like acid.
“You smell like a bar,” she murmurs, ninety percent asleep.
My heart stops. “Client drinks. Mitchell again.”
“Poor baby,” she sighs, and burrows closer, and is gone again.
I lie there staring at the ceiling, her breath warm against my throat, her hand over my hammering heart.
I’ll be better, I tell myself. Starting tomorrow. Starting now. I’ll be the husband she deserves.
But even as I think it, I know it’s a lie.
Some things can’t be fixed. Some mistakes are too big to take back.
And somewhere in this house - in her phone, her laptop, some hidden folder I’ll never find - I have the terrible, growing suspicion that my wife is keeping score.
I just don’t know yet how high the number goes.