Chapter 20
TWENTY
JUDY
Present Day
“Gabriel and I had an affair for three months.”
That’s what Scarlett said, and after hearing it, I walked straight out on them.
I didn’t shout, didn’t ask questions, didn’t demand timelines, details, or explanations wrapped in careful words that won’t make it hurt any less. I didn’t stay long enough to hear apologies that would never be enough.
I simply turned, walked past them, and shut myself inside the bedroom like my body knew before my mind did that I needed walls to protect me, to keep me from breaking apart completely.
That was hours ago. Now it’s past midnight, and I’m sitting on the edge of the bed—while Gabriel is spending the night in the second guestroom—fully clothed and unmoving.
I’ve been here so long my legs have gone numb, a prickling ache creeping up my calves, my feet tingling.
My fingers are numb too, curled into the edge of the mattress so tightly my knuckles ache.
If I let go, I’m afraid everything inside me will spill out.
I keep replaying the moment she said it, her words dropped between sobs like something she could no longer carry alone. Like she wanted me to share her burden, while Gabriel just stood there like a statue.
I didn’t see it coming. Even now, my mind tries to reject it, tries to rearrange the words into something else, something less devastating that could be erased or dismissed as a lie. But there it is out in the open, echoing around in my head, ugly and sharp and entirely true.
I feel like such a fool.
All this time, I thought whatever they were hiding had to do with Sadie. Evidence they didn’t want to share, a detail they were afraid would destroy me. Some piece of the puzzle they thought I wasn’t ready to see just yet. Or that they were sabotaging my search efforts again.
Not this. Not an affair. Not the knowledge that my best friend and my husband were betraying me while standing beside me in my darkest moments. While holding me as I cried. While telling me they were there for me. While promising, again and again, that we would survive this together.
I could never have imagined that the woman who helped me get through Sadie’s disappearance was also helping tear my marriage apart.
A few minutes after I entered the room, I did cry. The tears came in a rush, hot and unstoppable. I wept until my chest ached, my head throbbed, and my throat burned raw.
Now the tears are gone, leaving behind something worse. A numbness that makes the world feel blurred and distorted, like I’m watching everything through a smudged, thick pane of glass.
Unable to breathe anymore, I stand and cross the room, throwing open the balcony door. Cool night air rushes in, salty and sharp as it fills my lungs. I breathe it in deeply, again and again, until the pressure in my chest eases just enough that I don’t feel like I’m about to suffocate.
Sadie is still my priority, and I cannot allow any distractions, not even something as devastating and ugly as this one.
But a single, unwelcome thought slips through the wall I’m trying to put up.
That’s why Gabriel didn’t protest when I suggested we divorce, four months after Sadie disappeared.
I told myself I was doing him a favor, that my grief had turned me into someone he deserved to be free from.
I believed I was holding him back, anchoring him to a life filled with sorrow and unanswered questions.
My grief was too great that I feared it would drown both of us.
But he didn’t put up a fight. Not the way I thought he would, not the way a man who wants to stay married does. It all makes sense. Leaving me would mean he would be free to be with Scarlett.
In the end, I changed my mind and we continued on. Was he disappointed?
Maybe he’s still with her.
The thought drives a sharp, twisting pain straight through my stomach.
Leaving the balcony door open, I step out of the room and into the hallway.
The bedroom is too small now, too suffocating.
In fact the entire apartment is. I can’t bear to be in here.
Everything I see feels like a traitor to me.
Did these very walls know what was going on before I did?
Did they see their displays of affection?
I suddenly hate the furniture too. The couch where we used to cuddle up together watching a film. The kitchen island where we shared meals, laughed, planned our future together. All of it feels contaminated now, like I don’t belong here anymore.
Gabriel and Scarlett went to bed about an hour ago. But before they did, one after the other, they knocked on the door, asking to talk, to explain. Saying they made a mistake.
A mistake is forgetting to pick up milk at the store, or missing a birthday because you lost track of the date. A mistake is a single bad decision, made in the heat of the moment and never repeated.
This was three months. Three months of lying to my face, of secrets slotted between the ordinary days of our life. This was a series of choices made in secret, over time, while looking me in the eye and pretending nothing was wrong.
I slip out the front door quietly, careful not to make a sound that might alert them. I can’t face either of them right now.
The moment my feet sink into the cool sand a few minutes later, something inside me loosens.
The water curls around my ankles, and the rhythm of the waves steadies my breathing, reminding me that my body is still here, still intact.
That this pain, as unbearable as it feels, hasn’t killed me and doesn’t have to.
There’s laughter down the beach, distant but loud enough to carry over to me. A party maybe, because there’s music. There are people out there enjoying themselves, untouched by the quiet devastation unfolding inside me. I almost hate them for being happy.
I stand there, staring out at the dark ocean, the same ocean everyone claims took my daughter from me. The same ocean that was meant to explain her disappearance, to close the case, end the search, give me closure.
Even now, I can’t picture it. I can’t feel it at all. If Sadie is dead, and I refuse to believe she is, it didn’t happen like that. She didn’t drown. My body rejects the idea the way it did the other day I stood in this water.
I turn away and head back toward the apartment.
There are only twenty steps to climb, but it feels like more than that.
With each step, my vision swims and sweat trickles down my spine, the rest of my body finally reacting to everything I’ve been holding inside.
It all takes so much effort and my heart pounds so fast, so hard that I feel a wave of dizziness coming on.
Two steps from the top, my legs give out and I collapse. My forehead pressed to my knees, I breathe through the dizziness until the world steadies itself again. But I don’t get up immediately. I don’t know how many minutes I sit there waiting and I don’t care.
Eventually, I force myself upright and enter the apartment to find Gabriel standing in the hallway, like he’s been waiting for me. He must have heard me leave, after all.
“Please leave me alone.” I try to step around him on my way to my room. “I have nothing to say to you.”
He tries to reach for my arm, but I wrench it free. “Don’t ever touch me!” That’s all it takes to break the damn of words I could not say earlier. “How could you do this to me?” The question bursts out of me, raw and sharp, before I can stop it.
“I’m sorry.” Tears fill his eyes. I wish I could care that he’s crying for me. I wish I even believed it’s for me and not because his secret is out in the open. “It was a stupid mistake,” he says again.
“And how many times did that mistake happen?”
He shrinks back, his chest shuddering again and again with sobs, his fingers trembling at his sides.
From the corner of my eye, I see Scarlett’s door crack open, then she’s standing there, half-hidden, as if she’s unsure whether to step forward or retreat back into the room.
“Three months?” I say quietly, both to him and his lover.
Gabriel doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
“There’s one thing I need to know,” I continue, my voice eerily calm. “Is it still happening?” It doesn’t really matter since this marriage is probably already over, but a part of me needs to know.
“No.” He meets my gaze head on. “It ended after Sadie disappeared. I swear. It was three months and that’s it.”
I let out a chuckle. “How can I ever trust anything you say again?”
“You don’t have to. But I’m telling you the truth. I will live with this guilt for the rest of my life. I’m so sorry.”
As I recall, he didn’t even want Scarlett to tell me.
Tears continue to slide down his face, and the sight does nothing for me. I don’t feel one shred of sympathy for him.
“You can’t undo this, Gabriel, not with words.” I turn toward my bedroom, ready to shut the door on this conversation. Then I stop and face him again in the hallway, remembering broken pieces of Scarlett’s words.
What if she finds her and—?
“What does this have to do with me going to the camp and finding Sadie?”
Gabriel shuts his eyes before delivering the next blow. “I was there that night.”
I freeze, every muscle locking. “What… what do you—?”
“The night Sadie disappeared, I was at the beach close to the camp…,” he explains, his head dropping. “I went to see Scarlett. Sadie was there.”