Chapter 1
One
Things I remember about the night before the world changed forever:
The marble-shaped knot in my calf Wells coaxed with his thumbs, digging into the muscle like the way I used to mine the sand
for clay. The last photo I uploaded to my social media, Wells and me with our arms wrapped around one another, tanned and
freckled and salt-swept. A riotous field of wildflowers on the strip of highway between the Hamptons and Manhattan, as if
someone’s oil painting had been dropped in the center of a stream of clanking traffic. It was gorgeous and efficient all at
once, beauty and boredom dosed together.
Before the emails came, if someone had told me the catalyst to my breakup would be two cups of Sleepytime Tea and a forgotten
bottle of melatonin at my fiancé’s family home in Sagaponack, I would’ve laughed. The concept that tea and a tiny bladder
plus the absence of a synthetic hormone being the x and y variables that led to the discovery of my imploded relationship
will never not be absurd. But they weren’t responsible for the demise of our six years together. That was all him. The distinction
is important because facts are facts, and having to pee didn’t bomb things for Wells Stratton and me.
I missed the first notification, the one sent around the world. Wells had fallen asleep with his phone clutched in his hand, the same way he did every night, even after I’d mentioned the proven link to sleep disruption I’d storyboarded for my job at Per Diem news.
Our bedroom was an ode to my insomnia. Sixty-six degrees, fan on, blackout curtains, soundproofing panel inserts meant to
block the New York night sounds. A recent addition was the luxury mattress and coordinating pillows Wells had purchased when
I’d said not to, because I couldn’t stomach the price. When he’d had everything delivered and referred to me as the princess
and the pea, I’d wrinkled my nose and retorted that I’d spent my whole life figuring out how to sleep before him. From my
bedroom in Cape Cod, where spiders arrived in the corners every June, to the double dorm room I had shared with my best friend
Natalie, to the roach-infested studio I’d inhabited for eight months before we moved in together. I could live just fine without
that mattress.
And then he’d play-tackled me and whispered that he liked me just fine on that mattress, and we’d been very happy on it for the next twenty minutes. Maybe fifteen.
Most nights, if I’d been bothered by a phone light shining red behind my closed lids, I probably would’ve rolled toward the
blackout shades, slipping back into a melatonin-soaked slumber until my 4:00 a.m. work alarm. But not this night—the one the
world changed forever.
When Wells’s phone lit again, the liquid pressure in my abdomen won. I cracked one eye, squinting at the man I loved, trying
to muster the energy to slip from beneath the duvet and into our bathroom. Instead, I came face to face with something I was
most certainly not supposed to see. A message from a familiar contact.
Cambrey Coyle
If she’s working this morning, I can come over again ??
A thunderclap of dread hit the center of my chest. I recoiled so fast my cheek landed on a cooler spot of the pillow. The
message captioned a blurry thumbnail of what first appeared to be desert mountains against a black night, but of course, sleep
clouds vision. When I zeroed in, a pair of breasts were unmistakable. The stray thought so that’s why they’re called mounds fluttered into my mind and vanished just as quickly.
Cambrey. Wells had been lifelong best friends with her brother before Charley had died in a snowmobiling accident out in California
after their junior year of college. It was something we’d trauma-bonded over.
And now she was sending him this. In the middle of the night.
Adrenaline squeezed my throat. Wells. My Wells? He was the friend-of-a-friend who had lifted me in the air the second night we met for our paired bridesmaid/groomsman
entrance. The date who kissed my hips the first time we had sex—the hips I had grown up resenting thanks to early aughts magazine
culture, and now loved. The boyfriend who brought me fresh flowers every Sunday from various farmers markets or the Whole
Foods on the corner in the winter; the live-in partner who cooked swordfish even when he preferred steak, the fiancé who arranged
my bacon in the shape of a heart when he made Saturday breakfast so I could sleep in after a full week of pre-dawn wakeups.
His screen darkened.
I was generally ignorant of my heart with the exception of exercise or tragedy, so clocking it now felt monumental. My vision
pixelated. In the effort to clear it, I bolted upright, gasping for air, my hands pressed to my chest.
I ripped the phone from Wells’s hand. He didn’t wake up. My hair glossed over my face, and I swiped it aside with a clammy
palm.
I tapped the screen, the text still there. It was 3:01. The proverbial princess would not be going back to sleep that night. Not with this pea. I’d possibly never sleep again.
If she’s working this morning, I can come over again ??
She. I was the she, of course. The one who was supposed to be working this morning. Nausea curled in my stomach. Possibly the worst word was
again, though the worst character was the winking emoji, and the worst content was definitely the naked picture.
Cambrey had been here before. Probably on this bed. I stared past the smudged phone in the dim night, trying to strategize.
After the horror that edged my childhood, my path had been so clear. I’d made it to stability, to love, to work I enjoyed.
But now I had the sickening hunch this would be one of those life pivots, the kind everyone has, but being wrenched from sleep
to experience something so enormous was a very rude way to have your life changed forever.
I tilted my head and scrolled. My fiancé was brazen enough to not change the setting to show a simple notification instead
of the message content. This seemed foolish to me, but I was a person whose phone was programmed to ring only if someone called
me three times straight. The only people who knew this were Wells, Natalie, and my parents.
I wondered if Cambrey had lain on my side of the bed, if Wells had the gall to leave the sheets unchanged, or if both of us
have had bare asses on this fabric. Below her text was a notification for an email from an unknown sender, but I paid next
to no attention to that. For now.
“Hey.” I shook his shoulder, thinking, Wow, I have never sounded like this before. “Wells?”
“Mmm,” he murmured, his face pressing into the pillow. His hair was perfectly soft, perfectly sleep-mussed, perfectly Wells.
A wave of numbness slipped over me, with one exception: my screaming bladder. I was equal parts grateful and resentful of
it. What if I hadn’t had that extra cup of tea? Biology dictated that the human body was a complex machine, and I couldn’t
ignore mine any longer.
I placed Wells’s phone on the mattress, then thought better of it. I flung it across the room, where it landed with an unsatisfying
thud on the soft faux-sheepskin rug he loved and I despised because it was impossible to vacuum.
In the winter, our black-and-white hexagon-tiled bathroom floor was heated; in the summer, the tiles were borderline unmanageably
hot. They seemed to suck heat directly from the sunbaked bricks outside. No matter how high we cranked the central air, the
floor was toasty, and hot feet keep me up at night.
I debated turning on the lights—I was up now, my alarm was an hour away—but there was no reason to examine my shocked face
in the bathroom mirror. When I was done, the sting of peppermint soap was clean and comforting in my nose. I paused with my
fingertips against the chipped crystal doorknob, a relic from the 1890s.
I didn’t know what to do.
It wasn’t a choice of if I’d confront him. It was when. I didn’t care about appearances the way Wells’s family did; I couldn’t be bothered to sacrifice the one life I had for the
sake of maintaining the status quo.
But once I landed the first words, there would be no turning back.
I steeled myself. I’d go to work. Seethe.
Plan my next steps. Call Natalie, see if I could stay with her a while.
I’d figure out how to disentangle our accounts, our mutual utility log-ins, our shared passwords.
My pulse marched higher then: the wedding.
I pressed my lips together to suppress a groan.
The amount of time, energy, and money we’d kicked toward the event over the last year-plus was like a part-time job. Wells
(his mom) had wanted a winter wedding, so all our focus (well, mine) had been on this coming New Year’s Eve, less than six
months away.
My mind splintered. I should probably consider hiring a lawyer, or at least googling if I needed one. You’ll be like Gwen Stefani after No Doubt dissolved, I imagined Natalie saying to me. Bright side: no divorce.
I turned the doorknob, resolved. Right now, I’d crawl back into bed beside the man I thought I’d grow old with, wait for my
alarm, strategize or stew, and—
I smacked the bedroom light switch. The ridiculous chandelier above our bed (a converted one-bedroom brownstone, very New
York) sent light sprawling in all corners of the room. “Wells, what the hell?”
“Olivia? What is it?” He bolted upright, panic trickling into his sleepy voice.
“You tell me.” I paced the foot of our bed.
He kicked the covers tangled around his legs. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”
I stabbed my fingers along my collarbone. “Me? I’m great.” Instead of punching the wall, or smacking him, I raised my hands
as high as I could and slammed them on the bed. A judge with dual gavels.
Wells stared at me.
“Why,” I said, my voice remarkably even, “would Cambrey Coyle be texting you at three in the morning, wondering if I was working,
so she could come over here?”
Spots of color streaked Wells’s face. “I can expl—”
“Precisely why is she sending you naked pictures?”
A List of Clichéd Excuses Wells Gave Me
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I don’t know why she’d do that.
It only happened once.
I don’t know how many times it happened.
It’ll never happen again.
It didn’t mean anything to me.
I was drunk.
It hasn’t been going on that long.
I’m not in love with her.
I’ll never do it again.
As Wells proverbially rewrote the musical score to Fatal Attraction, sensations ran through me in a way that was heightened and new, but not entirely unwelcome. Fury, sadness, betrayal, an
ounce of something else I’d someday be able to name. But that was for another time, because after a lifetime of being a resourceful
voice of reason, they all proved I was one thing. Alive.
“I’m telling you,” Wells was saying. “It meant nothing to me.”
“I don’t care that it meant nothing,” I said, which was at least partially a lie. “I care about you lying to me.” That part
was true. My lip curled. “You had sex with someone else, Wells. Someone who, by the way, you’ve referred to as an obligation. To honor your best friend.”
His exhale was extended. “I know.”
“How could you do this to me? To us?”
He crossed his arms and leaned against his propped pillows. “I’m not like you. I’m not perfect.”
A strangled sound of fury started low, somewhere near my belly button, and landed directly between us. I’d never snarled at
something before. “Perfect? Perfect? Everyone on earth is flawed, Wells. Not being perfect doesn’t give you license to have secret sex with your dead best friend’s sister in what was supposed to become our marital bed.”
Wells pulled a T-shirt over his head, grimacing when he stretched its cotton neck. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that. It’s—we
both miss Charley. One thing led to another. It was a moment of incredible weakness, and I regretted risking everything you
and I have the second it happened.”
Past tense. Everything we had. Stability. Love. A future. I blinked against rage tears. “How could you throw away our lives like this?”
He stared at me. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Want. I wanted him to say this was all a huge misunderstanding. That it was a spam text. That Cambrey had been hacked. I was
a champion of truth, of research, of information. Wells always said that even though we lived in a brownstone, my real home
was in an internet rabbit hole. When I was a kid, I asked Santa for the discarded library microfiche. Real-life learning was
the brain equivalent of sucking the juice from a wax bottle of candy my grandmother used to have: a jolt, a zing, the insatiable
need for more. But right now, I wanted to unlearn everything. “Nothing. There’s nothing I want from you anymore,” I said.
He shook his head. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”
“All the time.” I clenched my teeth. I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes. You learn more from them than you do from good decisions.
But I made easy mistakes, not ones that led me to a place I couldn’t come back from, because you only get one life. I intended
to wring mine dry. Unlike my sister, for example, whose experiment with ketamine led to her death. Ketamine, of all things, that lost-and-found trend of a drug. “Does her husband know?”
Wells hesitated. “No.”
My nostrils flared. “What about her toddler?” An obscenely adorable baby whose name—Julep—I’d diplomatically pretended to like. We’d watched her one afternoon last summer so Cambrey and her husband could go on a date in the city. I growled under my breath again.
“How can we move past this?” Wells pleaded.
There was no coming back from this. Natalie always said you don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you, and that was one of the biggest truisms I’ve experienced, from friends to jobs to apartments to now, unbelievably, Wells.
I opened my mouth to say that we most certainly would not, could not move past this. But a strange jangling sliced through
the air. At first, I figured it was the fire alarm, which was more likely than what was actually happening. My phone, ringing.
For a shared second, we were both stunned into silence.