3. Freya
— ? —
Freya
I called Rex to ask if he was coming in for the grilled cheese I made him.
Annie answered his phone.
For a second, I thought I’d dialed the wrong number. Then her voice registered, sugary sweet and completely unapologetic.
“Hello? Oh, Freya! Hi! Rex is a little busy right now.” A giggle. “I’ll tell him you called, okay?”
The line went dead before I could respond.
I stood in my own kitchen, staring at my own phone, trying to process what had just happened. She answered his phone. She answered my husband’s phone and told me he was too busy to talk to me.
On the counter behind me, the grilled cheese sat on its plate.
I’d made it exactly the way Rex liked it, with three kinds of cheese and the bread toasted until it was crisp and golden on one side because he was weird about texture.
I’d been planning to surprise him, to take it out to the stables myself, but I’d gotten distracted by emails from the ranch manager and figured a call would be faster.
I set the phone down carefully, like it might explode if I moved too fast. Then I picked up the plate and put it in the refrigerator because I didn’t know what else to do with it.
An hour passed. Then another.
I tried to work on the household accounts, but the numbers blurred together. Reading didn’t help either, because I couldn’t focus. I ended up in the kitchen again, wiping down counters that were already clean, just to have something to do with my hands.
The back door opened, and Rex walked in with Annie right behind him. They were both laughing, covered in hay, looking like they’d stepped out of some kind of rustic catalog for beautiful people who did wholesome activities together.
Rex saw me, and his face changed. His eyes went to the counter, then to the refrigerator, then back to me.
“The grilled cheese,” he said. “I forgot.”
“You were busy.”
He winced. “I’m so sorry. We were breaking in the new horse, and time got away from me. Is it still good?”
I pulled the plate from the refrigerator and held it out. “Cold now.”
He took it from me and bit into the sandwich without hesitating, cold cheese and all. His eyes fluttered shut. “This is the best thing I’ve had all day.”
It was such a Rex thing to do, eating cold rubbery cheese on stale bread like it was a gourmet meal just because I made it.
Some of the tension in my chest eased. Maybe I was overreacting.
Maybe Annie answering his phone was just a thoughtless mistake and I was reading too much into everything because Louisa had gotten inside my head.
Then Annie leaned against the counter, all casual familiarity, and started talking.
“Do you remember that time we tried to teach Mr. Patterson’s mule to jump?” she asked Rex. “God, we must have been what, twelve?”
Rex laughed so hard he had to put the sandwich down. “That mule hated us. I still have the scar on my shin.”
“You deserved that scar. You kept pulling his ears.”
“I was twelve! I didn’t know better!”
They traded stories back and forth like I wasn’t even there.
The time they built a fort in the Waller barn and Louisa found them sleeping in it at midnight.
The summer they convinced their parents to let them camp by the creek and Rex got poison ivy so bad he looked like a monster for two weeks.
And all the inside jokes and shared memories that went back twenty years, long before I existed in Rex’s universe.
I stood in my own kitchen feeling like the help. Just the woman who made the sandwich while someone else made him laugh.
Stop it, I told myself. Childhood friends share childhood memories. That’s normal. That’s fine. You’re being jealous and petty and you need to get a grip.
But I couldn’t shake the image of Annie answering his phone. Her casual “he’s a little busy” like she had every right to decide when my husband was available. The way she was standing now, close enough to touch him, her body angled toward his like a flower following the sun.
She knew what she was doing. I was sure of it. Every hair flip, every casual touch, every story that excluded me was deliberate. She was staking a claim, drawing a line, showing me exactly how far back her history with Rex went and how short mine was in comparison.
And Rex didn’t see it at all. He stood there laughing, oblivious, happy to have his old friend back and completely blind to the game she was playing.
He finished the sandwich and wiped his hands on a napkin, finally turning back to me. “Hey, I need to tell you something.”
“What?”
“Mom and Annie are staying two weeks.”
The words hit me like a slap. I must have misheard because there was no way my husband just casually announced that his mother, who had tried to pay me off just this afternoon, and this woman, who had answered his phone and looked at me like I was furniture, were going to be living in my house for fourteen days.
“Two weeks.”
“Yeah, Mom wants to spend some time here, and Annie doesn’t have anywhere else to be, so…” He shrugged like it was nothing. Like it was a perfectly reasonable request. “I figured you two could use the chance to get to know each other better. Annie’s great once you spend some time with her.”
I opened my mouth to tell him about his mother’s offer. About the thirty million dollars and the suggestion that Annie would be more suitable. And about the question that had been echoing in my head all afternoon: Has he ever told you he loves you?
But the words stuck in my throat.
Because Annie was standing right there, watching us with those innocent blue eyes, and if I said something now, she’d hear everything.
She’d know that Louisa was trying to get rid of me.
She’d know that I was threatened by her presence.
And she’d know that my marriage wasn’t as solid as I pretended it was.
And somehow, giving her that satisfaction felt worse than keeping quiet.
“Great,” I heard myself say. “Two weeks. That’ll be great.”
Rex smiled, relieved that I wasn’t making a fuss. “Thanks for understanding. I know Mom can be a lot, but she means well.”
No, she didn’t. She meant to destroy my marriage and install Annie in my place. But I couldn’t say that either, because I didn’t have proof, and Rex would just tell me I was being paranoid.
He kissed my forehead on his way out of the kitchen, already talking to Annie about dinner plans and whether she wanted to ride again tomorrow. Their voices faded down the hallway, leaving me alone with the cold plate and the lingering smell of toasted bread.
Fourteen days of watching Annie cozy up to my husband while Louisa smiled in the background.
I’ll be biting my tongue and pretending everything was fine.
And fourteen days of sleeping next to a man who showed me he cared in a hundred small ways but couldn’t seem to say the one thing I actually needed to hear.
I gripped the edge of the counter until my knuckles went white.
I could do this, and I could survive this. I’d survived worse. I’d watched my mother die slowly, held my father’s hand when he lost everything, married a stranger to save what was left of my family.
Compared to all that, two weeks was nothing.
But as I stood there in my beautiful kitchen in my beautiful house that didn’t really feel like mine, I wondered how many more two weeks I could take before something finally broke.