Chapter Five
Mandy
I never thought I'd become that woman.
The one who creeps into the hallway in the dead of night, holding her breath outside a closed door, straining to catch every word of her husband's phone call. The one who scrambles back to bed the second she hears footsteps, diving under the covers and faking sleep before the door even opens.
I used to watch clients do exactly this in my office and think, quietly, how did you let yourself get here. Every single one of those behaviors—the ones I'd always written off as beneath me, as poison, as things that happened to other women—I did every one of them tonight.
When Damon's footsteps padded past the bed toward the closet, I could have stayed put.
I could have let it go. But something colder than curiosity pulled me upright, and I crossed the floor barefoot and pressed myself against the wall beside the door, close enough to catch every word through the gap.
I couldn't make out her voice at all—just the tinny, muffled shape of it leaking through the phone speaker, too faint to catch a single word.
But I didn't need to hear her side. Damon's voice carried just fine through the gap in the door, low and fast, all reassurance, answering questions I could only guess at from the shape of his replies.
Then, after a pause—like he was answering something, she'd asked—his voice again. Unbothered. Certain. Wrapped in that particular brand of arrogant kindness he reserves for people he's already decided he's right about.
"Don't worry. Mandy will understand. I'll be there soon."
The words went through me cleaner than a blade, and just as cold.
I backed away from the door, two steps, three, and slid into bed in the dark, eyes shut, breathing forced into something slow and even and utterly false.
I lay there and listened to him move through the closet, the scratch of pen on paper at the desk, the soft roll of suitcase wheels across hardwood, the deadbolt clicking home behind him.
Only then did I let the tears come. They slid sideways across my temples and disappeared into my hair, and I didn't make a single sound.
Heartbreak, it turns out, isn't loud. Nobody warns you that it's not a collapse—it's an extraction. Something reaches in while you're perfectly still and takes what it wants, and you don't even get the mercy of screaming.
The lock clicked shut. Silence sealed the room like a lid.
I stopped pretending to sleep. I sat up in the dark, wrapped my arms around my knees, and stayed that way until the black outside the window turned gray, then gold.
By the time real light crept through the curtains, it caught the edge of a white square on the desk. I got up, crossed the room, and picked up his note. Damon's handwriting—clean, efficient, professional even at one in the morning. Flight number. A line about calling when he landed.
The lawyer in me tried, immediately and automatically, to build his defense.
Custody was the linchpin of the case. A client in crisis reaches out to her attorney; the attorney responds.
Cross-border emergencies don't wait for business hours.
Every part of it was procedurally, professionally flawless.
But the wife in me—the woman standing in this apartment at six in the morning with tear-stiff cheeks—that part of me had already died sometime around one a.m., quietly, without him even noticing.
Logic could excuse the phone call. Logic could even excuse the flight.
What it couldn't excuse—what I couldn't survive—was the certainty in his voice when he said my name.
Not worry. Not even guilt. Just certainty, flat and absolute, that I would understand.
That I always would. That I was less a wife and more a fixed point he could always return to, exactly where he left me, indefinitely patient, infinitely reasonable.
I set the note back down exactly where I found it. Didn't crumple it. Didn't write anything underneath it.
I went to the closet and pulled down my suitcase instead.
I didn't take much—my own clothes, my documents, a handful of case files I actually needed.
The apartment we'd built together for three years suddenly felt like a courtroom exhibit, staged and cold, nothing left in it I wanted to carry out with me.
I stepped through the front door into a morning that was too bright, too ordinary, sunlight hitting my face like it hadn't gotten the memo that my life had just come apart.
I thought about the girl I used to be—curling her hair for the first time, spritzing on gardenia perfume, standing outside his door with her heart in her throat, telling herself that someday, if she just waited long enough, he'd finally see her.
I'd told myself that ache would fade. That time healed everything.
Then he married me, and I thought that chapter had finally closed.
I never imagined that three years later, I'd be standing on the same threshold, waiting to be seen by the same man, and losing all over again.