CHAPTER TWELVE MAREN
The weeks before the photographs surfaced had settled into something almost peaceful, a rhythm I hadn’t expected to find inside a crisis, mornings spent on my notebook and the rose bush I’d claimed as my own, afternoons with Cal exploring the property’s grounds or driving into the nearby town for groceries neither of us strictly needed, evenings spent cooking together in Renata’s kitchen while she supervised with visible amusement at our combined incompetence.
I had started, without quite admitting it to myself, to feel something like contentment, a strange, guilty contentment given the circumstances that had brought me there.
Cal noticed it too, I think, and I wonder now how much that noticing shaped what came next, whether some part of him understood that the peace I’d found in his company was precisely the thing he needed to protect, and that any development threatening it, including the possibility of genuine reconciliation with Rhodes, represented a threat to something he’d quietly begun building for himself.
Cal found the photograph before I did, which should have told me something, though at the time I only registered gratitude that he’d been the one to soften the blow before the headline could deliver it raw.
He came to find me on the back terrace where I’d been reading, his phone already in his hand, his expression carefully neutral in a way that somehow communicated more concern than an openly worried face would have.
“Mare. I don’t want to upset you, but I think you should see this before someone else shows you.”
Rhodes and Delphine at the Kestrel gala, his hand resting at the small of her back in a photograph a tabloid had captioned with a question mark instead of a fact, because a question mark let them speculate without the burden of proof.
A second photograph beneath it, grainier, taken from across the street at night: Delphine leaving our house well past midnight, coat pulled close against the cold, her expression unreadable in the poor light.
I stared at the images for a long time, my chest tight, my mind already constructing and discarding a dozen possible explanations before I’d even finished processing what I was looking at.
“Can I see the article itself,” I asked, and Cal handed the phone over without argument, watching my face while I scrolled through it.
The piece itself was thin, mostly speculation dressed up as reporting, quotes from an unnamed source close to the family who described Rhodes and Delphine as inseparable in recent weeks, an assertion that could have meant almost anything and had been stretched, by the writer, into something considerably more suggestive.
There was a photograph from years earlier included as well, the two of them at some childhood event, Delphine’s arm looped through Rhodes’s, both of them laughing at something outside the frame, offered up as evidence of history rather than context for it.
“I’m not saying anything happened,” Cal said carefully, watching my face rather than the phone, his voice pitched low and gentle.
“I don’t know that it did.” He paused, exactly long enough for the pause to do its work, exactly long enough for the silence to fill itself in with whatever fear I brought to it.
“But maybe there’s more to why he wanted you gone than he told you. ”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m not saying he would. I’m saying you’ve told me yourself he wouldn’t fully explain his reasoning. That’s the part that bothers me, Mare. Not the photograph. The pattern.”
“The pattern is that he’s scared and he’s bad at managing it. That’s not the same as a pattern of hiding an affair.”
“You’re probably right,” Cal said, easily, backing off just enough to seem reasonable rather than insistent, a retreat I would only later understand was itself a kind of tactic. “I just don’t want you sitting out here alone with something like this and no one to talk it through with. That’s all.”
We sat together on the terrace as the light faded, and he asked careful, gentle questions about the timeline, when the fence breach happened, when Rhodes first mentioned increasing security, when the gala had taken place, questions that felt, in the moment, like the natural curiosity of a concerned friend trying to help me make sense of a confusing situation.
Looking back, I can see how each question guided me toward assembling the facts in a particular order, an order that made Rhodes’s urgency about sending me away look less like fear about a genuine external threat and more like a convenient excuse arriving at a suspiciously convenient time.
“When exactly did Delphine start showing up more?” he asked. “Before or after he told you about Fenwick?”
I thought about it, tracing the weeks backward. “Around the same time, I think. Maybe a little after.”
“Interesting timing,” he said, and left it there, a small seed planted in soil I hadn’t known was ready to receive it.
I didn’t sleep that night. I lay in an unfamiliar bed running the timeline backward, the fence breach, the sudden urgency, the plain flat yes in my study, and I began, for the first time, to wonder whether the danger Rhodes described had been the whole truth or only the truth he’d found most convenient to tell me, a question that felt, once it had taken root, almost impossible to uproot again.
I thought about calling him. I picked up my phone twice that night and set it down both times, unable to decide whether I wanted the truth or wanted, more selfishly, simply to avoid hearing an answer that might confirm the worst version of the story already forming in my mind.
By morning I had convinced myself the silence between us had already told me everything I needed to know, a conclusion I would spend the following weeks discovering had been built on considerably less solid ground than it felt like at the time.
I called my mother the next morning instead, needing a voice outside the house to help me sort through the tangle of it, and Sabine listened patiently while I described the photographs, the article, Cal’s careful, escalating questions.
“What does your gut tell you,” she asked, “when you strip away everything anyone else has said about it, including Cal?”
I thought about it honestly, sitting on the edge of the guest bed with the phone pressed to my ear.
“My gut tells me Rhodes wouldn’t cheat. But my gut also told me, two weeks ago, that he’d never send me away without a real conversation first, and it was wrong about that.
I don’t know how much I trust my gut anymore, Mom. ”
“That’s a fair thing to be uncertain about,” she said. “But be careful about handing that uncertainty to someone else to manage for you. That’s a dangerous trade, especially with someone who benefits from you staying uncertain.”
I didn’t fully understand what she meant by that until much later, though I turned the comment over for days afterward, unable to shake the feeling that she’d seen something in the situation I hadn’t yet let myself see clearly.