Chloe
I wake up slowly, groggy and disoriented. There’s a dull ache through my body, and I can’t place where I am at first. The sterile smell and the beeping machines pull me the rest of the way back. I’m in a hospital.
Two nurses are beside my bed, their faces kind and professional. One of them adjusts the IV drip while the other leans toward me. “Mrs. Thorne, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I manage. My voice comes out raspy and weak, barely sounding like mine.
“How are you feeling?”
“Sore,” I tell her honestly. Everything hurts, a deep ache that’s settled into every part of me at once.
“You were hit by a car,” she explains. “But you’re going to be okay. You’ve been healing well. We’ve had you heavily sedated to manage the pain and allow your body to recover.”
Hit by a car.
I fall silent for a moment, trying to piece together what I remember. The road, the dark, the ringing in my ears so loud it swallowed everything, and then the headlights right there with no warning at all.
As the nurse continues talking me through things, I notice someone else in the room.
My eyes shift past her shoulder and find Tristan hovering near the door, watching me.
His hair is pushed back from his face, dark circles under his eyes, his jaw unshaven.
His shirt is wrinkled, his jacket gone, and he’s gripping the doorframe with one hand like he’s not sure he’s allowed to come closer.
How long has he been here?
The nurses step back as he slowly moves to the side of my bed, gripping the railing with both hands.
“How is she? Is she okay?” he asks, his voice a low rumble, his eyes not moving from my face even though the question is aimed at the nurse.
“She’s doing very well,” the nurse tells him. She glances at me with a small smile. “Your husband hasn’t left this room once since you came in. Not to sleep, not to eat properly. You’ve got a good one here, Mrs. Thorne.”
Something twists in my chest at that. I look at his face, at the exhaustion in every line of it, the shadows under his eyes, the tightness around his mouth, and I think about the last thing I remember before those headlights.
The ring on his desk. His voice flat and final.
The way he looked at me like he didn’t know me at all.
The nurses finish their checks and file out, pulling the door closed behind them. The click of the latch sounds very loud in the sudden quiet. Now it’s just the two of us and the beeping of the monitor and the thin afternoon light coming through the blinds in pale strips across the floor.
Tristan reaches out, his hand shaking slightly as he tries to brush my hair back from my face.
I turn my head away, just a little, before I can stop myself.
His hand pauses in the air for a second before he pulls it back, setting it carefully on the railing instead.
Neither of us says anything about it, but the space between us feels very large suddenly.
“Chloe…” His voice is rough.
“I didn’t do it,” I say at once, my voice hoarse. “I never stole any files from you. I never—”
“I know.” He nods, his expression grim.
“You know?”
“I did what I should have done in the first place and had an investigator from our security firm look into it properly. They figured out exactly what time the files were accessed and by whom, using security footage and facial recognition.”
I shift on the bed. My brain is still moving slowly, the painkillers making everything feel slightly removed. “Who was it?”
Tristan’s jaw tightens. He holds my gaze for a moment before he says it. “It was Genevieve. She used your computer in your office.”
Genevieve.
My eyes widen. Despite the grogginess clouding everything, a jolt of shock cuts through it.
I knew I was innocent, but I’d assumed it was some kind of mistake on his end, that maybe the data hadn’t actually been taken or something had gotten mixed up somewhere.
It never once occurred to me that my own sister did this.
That she sat across from me at that little West Hollywood bistro, her salad fork in her hand, and listened to me talk about falling for my husband, knowing exactly what she’d done.
“How could she?” I whisper, mostly to myself.
Tristan’s face is hard. I’ve seen that look before, and I know what it usually means.
He’s not the kind of man who lets things go.
What Genevieve took was huge—the full expansion strategy, the market plans, everything he and his brothers spent the better part of a year building.
MediaSphere could use every bit of it to gain a massive advantage over Tristan’s family.
My stomach twists. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing,” he says.
I blink. “What?”
“Nothing,” he says again. “Not unless you tell me to.”
My morphine-slowed brain still feels like it’s moving too sluggishly, and I frown. “Why?”
“Because I’ve hurt you enough already.”
Something shifts in my chest. I’ve always known him as someone who hates to lose, who doesn’t let transgressions slide. The idea that he’d let my family walk away with everything he built, just because he hurt me, is almost too much to process lying here in a hospital bed.
Tristan takes my hand, his fingers slightly rough against mine, and presses his forehead down against my knuckles. The scruff on his jaw brushes against the back of my hand. He stays there a moment without saying anything, and my throat goes tight.
“I’m so sorry, Chloe,” he murmurs. “I should’ve trusted you from the start, the second you looked me in the eye and told me you didn’t do it. That should’ve been enough.”
He lifts his head, his eyes finding mine.
“After Iris, I was always waiting for it to happen again. Another betrayal, another person turning out to be something different than I thought. I had my walls so fucking high I stopped seeing what was right in front of me.” He shakes his head. “That’s not your fault. And I’m sorry.”
His thumb moves across my knuckles, tracing back and forth over the same small path.
“You’re my wife,” he says quietly. “I should’ve trusted my wife.”
He reaches into his pocket and sets my wedding ring down on the blanket between us. The diamonds and spinel catch the harsh fluorescent light, scattering tiny points of brightness across the white cotton.
I stare at it for a moment, the ring I wore every day until it stopped feeling like a lie and started feeling like mine.
I think about Genevieve’s face at that bistro table, smiling past her betrayal.
Then Tristan’s expression in his office as he refused to listen to my confused pleas.
The road in the dark, the flash of headlights coming toward me.
Dragging in a breath, I pull my hand back slowly.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say, my voice trembling. “I thought we had something real, but now? I don’t know. I don’t know about anything anymore.”
The words stick in my throat as it fully hits me that things might never be the same.
I see the hurt in Tristan’s eyes, and it makes me feel even worse.
He’s been by my side through all of this, his dedication evident in every gesture and action.
But the trust between us has been shattered, and that’s something that can’t be easily repaired.
He nods slowly, his face a mask of pain and resignation. I can tell he understands, even though it’s breaking him inside. It’s breaking me too. But right now, I need to be alone, to figure out what I want and what this all means for us.
“Tristan, I’m so sorry… but I think I need some time apart.”