Chapter 9
It took me three days to remember the cottage.
Three days of calling her blocked number.
Three days of driving to friends' houses and being turned away at the door.
Three days of wandering through our empty home like a ghost, picking up objects she'd touched and putting them back down again, trying to understand how I'd let everything fall apart.
Penny wouldn't tell me anything. Fatima slammed the door in my face. The few mutual friends I could reach either didn't know where Julianne had gone or refused to say. I was a pariah, and I deserved it.
I barely slept. I barely ate. I went to work on Monday and sat in my office staring at the empty desk where Chloe used to sit, feeling nothing but hollow relief that she was gone.
Pierce Levi stopped by to ask if everything was alright, his expression carefully neutral, and I told him I was dealing with a personal matter. He didn't press.
By Wednesday, I'd started to lose hope. Maybe she'd left the state. Maybe she'd flown somewhere far away, somewhere I couldn't follow. Maybe she was already meeting with divorce lawyers, dividing up our life into neat little boxes while I sat here drowning in the wreckage.
And then, in the middle of another sleepless night, I remembered.
The cottage. Her grandmother's cottage on the coast. The one she'd refused to sell no matter how many times I suggested it was impractical, a waste of money, a property we never used. She'd gotten so upset when I pushed, and I'd never understood why.
Now I did.
It was her escape hatch. Her sanctuary. The one piece of her life that existed completely outside of me.
Of course that's where she'd gone.
I left at dawn, driving north as the sun rose over the highway. The traffic was light, the road stretching empty ahead of me, and I had nothing to do but think. About what I'd say. About what I'd do. About whether she'd even open the door.
I rehearsed apologies in my head, each one more inadequate than the last. I'm sorry I didn't listen.
I'm sorry I made you feel crazy. I'm sorry I chose my ego over you.
The words felt hollow, meaningless. How do you apologize for months of sustained cruelty?
How do you make up for systematically destroying someone's faith in you?
I didn't know. But I had to try.
The coastal road wound through hills dotted with windswept trees, the ocean appearing and disappearing around each curve. I could smell the salt through my cracked window, could hear the distant crash of waves against rock. It was beautiful here. Peaceful. I understood why she'd come.
I almost missed the turnoff. The gravel road was overgrown, barely visible from the highway, and I only recognized it at the last second from a half-remembered trip years ago. Her grandmother's funeral. Julianne had cried in my arms that night, and I'd promised I'd always be there for her.
What a joke that promise had turned out to be.
The cottage appeared at the end of the road, small and weathered, tucked into a hollow between the hills and the sea. Her car was parked out front. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it hurt.
She was here. She was really here.
I parked behind her and sat there for a long moment, my hands trembling on the steering wheel. I'd imagined this moment a hundred times over the past three days. Showing up at her door. Falling to my knees. Begging her to come home.
Now that I was here, I couldn't move.
What if she wouldn't see me? What if she called the police? What if she looked at me with that cold contempt I'd seen at the gala and told me to get the fuck off her property?
I would deserve it. I would deserve all of it.
But I hadn't driven an hour to sit in my car like a coward. I'd come here to fight for my marriage. To fight for her.
I got out of the car.
The wind off the ocean was cold and sharp, cutting through my jacket like it wasn't there.
I walked up the path to the front door, my footsteps crunching on the gravel, my breath fogging in the morning air.
The cottage looked different than I remembered.
Smaller, maybe. Or maybe I was just different.
I raised my hand and knocked.
The sound echoed through the quiet morning. I waited, my heart pounding, my palms slick with nervous sweat. Seconds stretched into eternities. I was about to knock again when I heard footsteps inside.
The door opened.
And there she was.
Julianne stood in the doorway wearing faded jeans and a chunky sweater I didn't recognize, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, her face bare of makeup. She looked... different. Not older, not tired, just different. Like someone I was meeting for the first time.
Her eyes met mine, and I searched them desperately for something. Anger. Hurt. Love. Anything.
I found nothing.
Just a calm, quiet emptiness that made my stomach drop through the floor.
"Lewis." She said my name like it belonged to a stranger. No emotion. No inflection. Just a flat acknowledgment of my presence. "How did you find me?"
"I remembered the cottage." My voice came out rough, scraped raw by three days of barely speaking. "Jules, I... can we talk? Please?"
She looked at me for a long moment, her expression unchanging. Then she stepped back slightly, not inviting me in, just creating space. "Talk, then."
I'd prepared speeches. Rehearsed apologies. Planned exactly what I would say to make her understand how sorry I was, how much I loved her, how desperately I wanted her to come home.
All of it evaporated the moment I looked into her empty eyes.
"I fired Chloe." The words tumbled out before I could stop them. "Sunday morning. I called her into the office and terminated her on the spot. She's gone. Out of my life. Forever."
Julianne nodded slowly. "Okay."
That was it. No relief. No satisfaction. Just that single, neutral word.
"I know I fucked up," I continued, my voice cracking.
"I know I hurt you. For months, I let that woman insert herself into our lives, and I blamed you for being upset about it.
I called you paranoid. I called you jealous.
I told you there was something wrong with you when the only thing wrong was me. "
"Yes." Still no emotion. "You did."
"I'm sorry." The words felt pathetically inadequate. "Jules, I'm so fucking sorry. I was vain and stupid and I let my ego destroy everything that mattered. But I love you. I've always loved you. And I want to fix this. I want to come home and work on our marriage and be the husband you deserve."
I paused, waiting for her response. Hoping for tears or anger or anything that would tell me she still felt something for me.
She just looked at me. Calm. Serene. Utterly indifferent.
"Are you finished?" she asked.
The question knocked the wind out of me. "What?"
"Are you finished talking? Because I have things to do this morning, and I'd like to get back to them."
I stared at her, trying to reconcile this woman with the Julianne I knew. My wife was passionate, emotional, quick to anger and quick to forgive. She cried at commercials and laughed at terrible jokes and felt everything so deeply it sometimes scared me.
This woman felt nothing.
"Jules, please." I stepped forward, reaching for her hand, and she stepped back smoothly, avoiding my touch without any visible reaction. "Just... tell me what you need. Tell me what I can do. I'll do anything."
"What I need is space." Her voice was patient, like she was explaining something to a child. "What I need is time to figure out who I am without you constantly telling me who I should be. What I need is for you to respect my boundaries for once in our marriage."
"I can do that. I can give you space. But can't we at least talk about this? Can't we try to work things out?"
"Work what out, Lewis?" She tilted her head, studying me with that unnerving calm. "You spent months humiliating me. You took another woman's side over mine, again and again. You made me feel like I was losing my mind. And now you want to work things out?"
"Yes." My voice broke on the word. "Because I love you. Because our marriage is worth fighting for."
"Our marriage." She repeated the words like they tasted strange in her mouth. "Is that what we had? Because from where I was standing, it felt more like a performance. Me playing the supportive wife while you chased validation from anyone who would give it to you."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" Her eyes met mine, and for just a second, I thought I saw something flicker in their depths.
Pain, maybe. Or exhaustion. "I gave you everything, Lewis.
My career. My independence. My entire adult life.
And in return, you let a twenty-four-year-old make me feel like a stranger in my own home. "
"I know. And I'm sorry."
"You keep saying that." She wrapped her arms around herself, a small, self-protective gesture. "But sorry doesn't fix anything. Sorry doesn't undo the damage. Sorry is just a word you say to make yourself feel better while I'm left picking up the pieces."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to defend myself, to explain that I really did mean it, that my apology was sincere and heartfelt and different from all the hollow apologies that had come before.
But looking at her face, at that terrible calm emptiness, I realized it wouldn't matter. Words were meaningless. I'd said I loved her a thousand times while treating her like she didn't matter. Why would she believe me now?
"What do you want me to do?" I asked quietly. "Just tell me, and I'll do it."
"I want you to leave." Her voice was gentle but firm. "I want you to go back home and give me the space I asked for. I want you to stop trying to fix this on your timeline and start respecting mine."
"For how long?"
"I don't know." She shrugged, a small, tired movement. "Maybe weeks. Maybe months. Maybe forever. I haven't decided yet."
The word forever hit me like a punch to the chest. "Jules, please. Don't say that."
"I'm not saying anything definite. I'm saying I don't know.
" She met my eyes, and for just a moment, the mask slipped.
I saw the pain underneath, the grief, the bone-deep exhaustion of a woman who had been fighting for her marriage alone for far too long.
"I need time to figure out what I want. And I can't do that with you standing on my porch begging me to come home. "
I wanted to argue. Wanted to fall to my knees and plead with her to give me another chance. But I could see in her eyes that it wouldn't work. She'd made up her mind, at least for now, and nothing I said was going to change it.
"Okay." The word came out rough. "I'll go. But Jules... can I ask you one thing?"
She waited.
"Is there any chance? Any chance at all that we can fix this?"
She was quiet for a long moment. The wind whipped around us, cold and salt-tinged, and somewhere in the distance I could hear the cry of seagulls.
"I don't know," she finally said. "A week ago, I would have said yes.
I would have said we could survive anything because that's what I believed.
That's what I had to believe to stay." She paused, her eyes meeting mine.
"But you broke something, Lewis. Something fundamental.
And I don't know if it can be repaired. I don't know if I want it to be. "
The honesty in her voice was devastating. More devastating than anger would have been, more painful than tears. She wasn't punishing me. She wasn't being cruel. She was just telling me the truth.
And the truth was that I might have destroyed my marriage beyond repair.
"I understand." I stepped back, giving her space. "I'll go. But Jules... I'm not giving up. I know words don't mean anything right now. I know I have to prove myself with actions. And I will. However long it takes, whatever I have to do, I will earn back your trust."
She looked at me for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she nodded, a small, tired movement.
"Goodbye, Lewis."
The door closed.
I stood on the porch, staring at the weathered wood, listening to the sound of her footsteps fading inside. The wind cut through my jacket, but I barely felt it. I was too numb. Too hollowed out by the reality of what had just happened.
She hadn't screamed at me. Hadn't cried. Hadn't thrown things or demanded explanations or done any of the things I'd expected.
She'd just looked at me like I was a stranger. Like twenty-two years of marriage had been erased, leaving nothing but polite indifference in their wake.
That was worse. God, that was so much worse.
I walked back to my car on shaking legs. Got behind the wheel. Sat there for a long moment, staring at the cottage where my wife was living without me.
An apology wasn't going to fix this. Grand gestures weren't going to fix this. The playbook I'd always relied on, say sorry, buy flowers, wait for her to forgive me, was useless.
I had to change. Really, fundamentally change. Not just my behavior, but who I was as a person. The vain, selfish man who'd let his ego destroy his marriage had to die. Someone better had to take his place.
And even then, it might not be enough.
I started the car and pulled away, watching the cottage shrink in my rearview mirror until it disappeared around a bend in the road.
The drive home was silent. No radio. No phone calls. Just me and the highway and the crushing weight of everything I'd lost.
But underneath the grief, underneath the despair, something new was taking root.
Determination.
She'd said she didn't know if we could be fixed. She hadn't said we couldn't.
That sliver of uncertainty was all I had. And I was going to hold onto it with everything I had left.
I was going to become the man she deserved. Not for my sake, but for hers.
And if she still didn't want me after that, at least I'd know I tried.
At least I'd know I finally did something right.