5. Tess
Tess
Tess drew the fork through the center of the steak.
The tines carved pale tracks through the congealed grease.
The meat had stopped steaming a long time ago.
So had the potatoes, the vegetables, the sauce she had ruined once and started over because tonight was supposed to matter.
Four hours in the kitchen, and Camden still had not walked through the front door.
The vaulted kitchen gave nothing back except the scrape of silver against porcelain. She pushed another strip of meat across the plate, then nudged it back where it had started. Eating would have been easier if she could stop looking at the empty place across the island.
“Come on.”
The fork slipped from her fingers and landed beside the plate. Tess reached for her phone instead, waking the black screen with her thumb. No missed calls. No new messages. Camden’s name still sat at the top of the thread above the text he had sent hours ago.
She tapped the call icon. The line never rang.
“The dialed cellular party is currently unreachable. Please record your message after the tone.”
Tess stared at his name while the automated voice finished.
She considered leaving a message. She could ask where he was.
She could remind him what day it was. She could tell him that the steak had gone cold, that the candles had burned lower and lower while she kept bargaining with herself for another ten minutes.
Instead, she ended the call before the tone.
“This steak is practically freezing to the plate. Pick up the line, Camden.”
The words vanished into the kitchen without an answer. Tess set the phone beside her plate, then immediately snatched it back and opened their messages. His last text filled the lower half of the screen.
“So sorry, babe. OC just caught me at the exit doors. He’s demanding a full teardown on the third-down blitz packages for Sunday. Officially trapped in the film room for the rest of the night. I swear I’ll fix this tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was always waiting for them. Her thumb stayed over that final line as she remembered old versions of the same promise. Tomorrow after film. Tomorrow after Marcus needed one more photograph, one more handshake, one more hour that somehow became the whole evening.
The clinic envelope meant for him was still inside her purse. She had pictured sliding it across the island after dinner. Camden would open it under the pendant lights, see the sonogram, and forget every camera and contract for once.
Instead, the meal sat ruined beside her.
Tess looked at the timestamp again. Hours ago. He had known he was missing dinner when he sent the text. He had known what date sat on the calendar. Whether Marcus had trapped him at the facility or Camden had stopped fighting his father’s schedule no longer changed what sat in front of her.
The anniversary had lost. Not to the league itself, or the shoulder that had been bothering him, or even the coming game, but to the same choice they kept making whenever Marcus demanded more. Camden had promised this night would belong to them, but he hadn’t put up enough resistance to get home.
Her finger hovered over the keyboard, but there was nothing left worth typing. Any message she sent now would become another item Camden could postpone until morning. Tess stared at the ruined dinner again.
She set the phone down.
It rattled against the granite island. Tess stared at the black glass for a moment before the screen lit up.
TMZ Sports.
“What now?”
She picked up the phone and unlocked the alert. Video flooded the screen immediately.
“Looks like QB1 is officially hard-launching that nine-figure apparel crossover! League MVP Camden Ford and supermodel Chloe Kensington just fed the paparazzi with a highly intimate exit straight out the front doors of O’Malley’s!”
Tess pulled her finger away from the screen.
The neon sign burned behind them.
O’Malley’s.
Not the practice facility. Not some film room with an offensive coordinator holding Camden hostage over third-down packages.
O’Malley’s, where they had split cheap pitchers before anybody cared about his completion percentage.
O’Malley’s, where he had held her hand beneath the table the night his whole life changed.
The footage jolted as photographers crowded the sidewalk.
Chloe stepped through the doorway first. Camden emerged beside her a second later, shoulders squared beneath the camera flashes. Chloe slid her hand down his arm and tangled her fingers through his.
Tess stared at their hands.
“No. Pull away.”
Camden stayed where he was.
Chloe pressed closer until she was flush against his side.
Camera flashes washed the screen white, then cleared again.
Camden’s face returned between bursts of light, controlled and familiar, the same face Tess had studied across breakfast tables and hospital waiting rooms and silent nights in this house.
Chloe rose onto her toes.
Her mouth touched his cheek.
Tess waited.
One second of footage rolled into the next while Camden let it happen. No shove. No step backward. No hand breaking free from hers before the cameras captured what they wanted.
She slowly lowered the phone.
He had lied to her.
The proof was right there beneath the neon sign. His message was still in the thread behind this clip, still claiming film review while he walked out of their bar with another woman wrapped around him.
“And the footwear executives are supposedly eating it up! They are riding this power-couple aesthetic all the way through the playoffs!”
The anchor’s voice kept pouring from the speaker.
Tess looked past Chloe’s smile and fixed on Camden again, searching for something she might have missed. A recoil. A grimace. Some visible sign that he hated the performance as much as he always claimed.
The clip gave her none.
“You gave them O’Malley’s. You didn’t even pull away.”
She let go.
The phone struck the island beside the cold plate, still playing the footage. Tess stepped backward once, then again, until the cabinet edge stopped her.
She left it there.
Tess walked out of the kitchen before the clip could loop again, following the long hallway to the bedroom without turning on another light.
The quiet followed her all the way to the walk-in closet.
Rows of clothes waited behind the open doors, arranged with the same care everything in this house seemed to demand.
The suitcase sat on the top shelf.
Tess reached for the handle and pulled. It caught against another bag, forcing her to stretch and tug again.
“Come down.”
The suitcase scraped forward. She caught the weight against her chest, lowered it to the floor, then dragged the case across the bedroom and lifted it onto the mattress. The zipper resisted at one corner before sliding free.
She opened both halves flat.
Tess lingered between the bed and the closet.
Designer dresses filled one side of the wardrobe.
Dresses for owner dinners, charity galas, private boxes, sponsor events she could attend only when Marcus decided a wife-shaped absence looked safer than an actual wife.
Beyond them hung team-branded jackets and expensive pieces Camden had bought because somebody somewhere had decided that was what the quarterback’s woman should wear.
She reached for one dress.
The fabric slid between her fingers.
“Not that.”
She let it drop.
She ignored the next dress, too. She skipped the jacket beside it, the one Camden had brought home after some merchandise meeting and dropped across her lap with a grin because he thought she would like the stitching. At the time, she had kissed him and thanked him.
Now it belonged to the house.
Tess moved farther into the closet.
The clothes she wanted were pushed toward the back. Old cotton shirts. Faded things she had owned before luxury suites and private entrances, before she learned how to leave restaurants through service corridors so nobody caught Camden Ford’s secret wife in the background of a photograph.
She pulled three shirts free and carried them to the bed.
No careful folding. No matching outfits. Tess flattened each shirt once and placed it inside the suitcase.
A pair of practical shoes followed.
Then another shirt.
The work steadied her because every item answered a question she had been avoiding for years. What had she chosen because she wanted it? What had appeared because Camden’s money could buy it? What belonged to Tess, and what belonged to the life built around QB1?
She returned to the closet and reached past another row of dresses without touching them.
The footage from O’Malley’s kept replaying in her mind anyway: Chloe’s hand sliding into his, the cameras firing, Camden staying exactly where he was.
Tess pulled another shirt from the shelf.
She was not packing for a suite downtown. She was not waiting three days for an apology gift and another promise that Marcus would respect the next boundary.
The suitcase lay open on the mattress.
She set the shirt inside and left the dresses hanging behind her.
Tess caught the suitcase zipper near the corner and pulled until the teeth closed over the last shirt. The case shifted on the mattress beneath the pressure, forcing her to brace one hand against the shell while she worked the zipper around.
“Stay put.”
When it finally closed, she let go and stepped back from the bed. The suitcase looked ordinary sitting there, almost disappointingly so. No grand exit. No shattered glass. Just a few old shirts and shoes packed into something with wheels.
Her purse rested on the armchair near the closet.
Tess crossed the room and picked it up. The strap slipped over her wrist as she opened the inner pocket, pushing aside a receipt and a loose tube of lip balm until her fingers reached the stiff clinic envelope.
She stopped.
The envelope came free. She held it in both hands before slipping one finger beneath the flap and drawing out the sonogram prints.
The small grayscale images caught the bedroom light.
Everything else in the room receded.