27.
For several seconds, I couldn't move.
Rodney sat across the bedroom in the armchair near the windows, one ankle resting casually over his opposite knee as though I'd walked in on him sitting alone in a dark room waiting for me.
He didn't look surprised to see me. There was no confusion over why I was there, no question about what had brought me back to a house I'd been avoiding for weeks.
He had expected me.
My fingers remained pressed against the light switch while the rest of my body seemed to forget what it was supposed to do.
"I was starting to wonder how long it would take before you finally came home."
Something cold moved through my stomach.
The purse.
Reese asking me to come tonight. Reese insisting Vivian couldn't find it. Reese suddenly needing something she'd left here nearly a year ago badly enough that it couldn't wait until morning.
I'll figure it out myself.
I'd felt guilty.
That was all it had taken.
Rodney watched the realization move across my face, and whatever I saw in his expression made panic tear through the momentary paralysis holding me in place.
My heart slammed hard enough against my chest to hurt, and suddenly I couldn't pull in a complete breath.
Every instinct in my body screamed the same thing before my mind had time to form a plan.
I turned and ran.
I didn't think about where I was going beyond the staircase at the end of the hall.
I didn't think to reach into my bag for my phone or scream for Grant, who was sitting in the car no more than a few dozen yards away.
I didn't even have time to understand what Rodney knowing I would be here meant about Reese.
Behind me, the legs of the armchair scraped violently against the bedroom floor.
The sound sent another surge of adrenaline through me.
I ran harder.
My feet struck the hardwood too quickly for me to feel each individual step, and the hallway stretched ahead of me in a blur of familiar walls and furniture.
I could see the staircase. If I could make it there, I could scream.
Grant would hear me. He'd said five minutes, and there was no chance five minutes had passed yet.
I opened my mouth.
"Gra—"
My right leg disappeared from beneath me.
Rodney caught me somewhere around the ankle, and the force of being yanked backward lifted my foot completely off the floor. My upper body kept moving forward while everything below my waist was dragged in the opposite direction, leaving no time to put my hands out before gravity took over.
My forehead struck the hardwood.
The crack that followed was so loud that, for one strange instant, I thought something in the house had broken.
Then I realized it had come from me.
Everything stopped.
There was no immediate pain. No fear. Even the frantic pounding of my heart seemed to disappear beneath a high, piercing sound that filled both ears.
I was lying facedown, but the floor beneath my cheek didn't look like a floor anymore.
The grain in the hardwood stretched in and out of focus, the lines bending strangely whenever I blinked.
Light from the hallway fixture spread into long, hazy streaks across my vision, and when I tried to lift my head to understand where I was, the entire hallway seemed to move with me.
My stomach rolled.
I lowered my head again, trying to breathe through the sudden nausea, and that was when the pain finally caught up.
It began where my forehead had struck the floor and seemed to split outward across my skull, pulsing behind my eyes and down into my jaw.
I sucked in a breath and tried to get my palms underneath me, but something had gone wrong between deciding to move and actually doing it.
My left arm shook beneath my weight. My elbow folded before I could straighten it, dropping me back onto the hardwood.
Rodney was speaking somewhere behind me.
At least I thought he was.
I could hear the shape of his voice beneath the ringing, but the words were distorted, stretched as though he were speaking to me from the opposite end of a tunnel.
Grant.
I needed Grant.
The thought came with startling clarity compared to everything else, and I tried to pull in enough air to call his name.
Before I could, the sole of Rodney's shoe pressed into my side. The pressure moved beneath my hip, and then he shoved.
My body rolled because he made it roll.
My shoulder struck first, followed by my back, and my head was too slow to follow the rest of me. It knocked against the floor a second time, not nearly as hard as the first impact but hard enough to make white burst across my vision.
The ceiling above me split into two.
I stared at both of them, blinking rapidly as I tried to force them back together. Instead, the lights seemed to drift farther apart, and the nausea I'd been fighting surged so violently that I barely managed to turn my head before I vomited onto the floor beside me.
My entire body contracted with it.
Pain throbbed behind my forehead with every heave, and by the time my stomach finally stopped convulsing, tears had gathered at the corners of my eyes.
I tried to wipe my mouth, but my hand only made it halfway before dropping against my chest.
Even that simple movement required more concentration than I seemed capable of giving it.
Rodney stepped into my line of sight.
My eyes traveled slowly upward, following the dark material of his pants until I reached his face. There were two of him there too, one slightly behind the other, and every time I blinked they separated and came together again.
"You embarrass me."
His voice reached me more clearly now, although it carried a strange echo. Each word seemed to leave his mouth and then repeat somewhere behind him.
I tried to move away from his shoes. My heel dragged against the floor, but whatever message my brain was sending to the rest of my body wasn't getting there quickly enough to matter.
Rodney watched the pathetic attempt without helping me or stepping back. His chest rose and fell beneath his shirt, and the polished calm he'd worn when I entered the bedroom was gone. His jaw was clenched hard enough to make the muscles along the side of his face twitch.
"I gave you twenty-four hours to come home. Twenty-four hours, Naomi. Instead of doing the one thing I told you to do, you've spent the day running around this city pretending you don't have a husband."
I wanted to tell him that I hadn't been pretending anything.
My lips parted, but my mouth was so dry that my tongue seemed to stick against the roof of it.
Rodney didn't need an answer.
"I've watched you make a complete fucking fool of yourself over Grant Lennox."
Grant's name penetrated the fog more effectively than anything else had.
My eyes focused on Rodney for a fraction of a second.
He noticed.
Of course he did.
A smile touched his mouth, but there was nothing amused about it.
"Doctor Lennox," he said, stretching the title with enough contempt to make it sound insulting.
"The good doctor. Educated. Successful. Respected. The kind of man who spends his days convincing everyone how ethical and compassionate he is, but at night he's fucking another man's wife."
My stomach tightened again.
"Is that what makes him better than me?"
Rodney continued. "Because he speaks softly to you while he's helping you lie? Because he lets you sleep in his house and play pretend for a few hours? You think you've traded me in for some better class of man because he knows how to package his bullshit in a way that benefits you?"
"Stop."
The word scraped painfully against my throat.
For the first time since he'd started speaking, Rodney went quiet.
His head tilted slightly.
"What did you say?"
I swallowed against the sour taste still coating my mouth. The ceiling shifted behind him when I tried to focus, and I closed my eyes for half a second before forcing them open again.
"Stop."
It wasn't much louder the second time.
It didn't need to be.
Something changed in Rodney's face.
He lowered himself into a crouch beside me, and my body reacted before I could control it. My shoulders drew inward and my arm came weakly across my stomach as another rush of nausea rose into my throat.
Rodney didn't hit me.
Instead, he studied me from only a few inches away, letting me anticipate it.
When he finally spoke, the anger had disappeared from his voice so completely that it frightened me more than the shouting ever had.
This was the Rodney other people knew. The man who could stand behind a podium with a room full of people hanging on every word because he spoke with the absolute certainty of someone who had never considered that he might be wrong.
"You think Grant Lennox loves you."
It wasn't a question.
My vision blurred around his face.
"You think because he lets you stay at his house and tells you you're brave and makes you feel special that suddenly you've become somebody worth choosing."
His gaze traveled over my face with open disgust.
"He doesn't love you, Naomi. He's fucking the First Lady of the United States. That's the fantasy. That's what makes you interesting."
My stomach turned.
"You are a married woman sneaking into another man's bed, and somehow you've managed to dress it up in your head until you don't have to call yourself what you are."
His mouth moved closer to my ear.
"A whore."
I closed my eyes.
Rodney's fingers immediately closed around my jaw.
Pain shot through my face as he forced my head toward him, his thumb pressing hard enough into one cheek that my teeth cut against the inside of it.
"Open your eyes."
Fear made me obey faster than my body otherwise would have.
His face slowly came back into view.
"There she is," he murmured. He released my face with enough force to turn my head sideways.
The cold floor felt good against my cheek.
For a few seconds, I let myself stay there, concentrating on the temperature against my skin because it was easier than trying to make sense of anything else.
But my body had become unbearably heavy.