Another.
YOU RUINED EVERYTHING. YOU’RE SICK.
Then, contradictorily:
I’M SO SORRY PLEASE CAN WE TALK I DIDN’T KNOW
I set the phone down. Turned it face-down. The silence returned, soothing and complete.
I woke the next morning to pale sunlight spilling through the curtains and the faint ache of a tension headache blooming behind my eyes. For the first few seconds, I forgot. Then the images came back in a rush, and I stared at the ceiling, exhaling slowly.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes after you finally set down a weight you’ve been carrying for too long. Your arms still feel the phantom strain. Your shoulders remember the burden. But if you wait, very still, you realize—oh. I’m not holding it anymore.
I swung my legs out of bed and padded into the bathroom. My reflection in the mirror looked… like me. Slightly puffy-eyed, hair flattened in strange directions from sleep, but me. Not the woman from last night, turned into a spectacle by someone else’s drama. Just Olivia, thirty-eight, mother of two, soon-to-be ex-wife.
I brushed my teeth, tied my hair up, and went downstairs to make coffee.
The familiar routine soothed me: the clink of the scoop against the container, the rich smell filling the kitchen, the hiss and gurgle of the machine. The house felt oddly empty without the kids—Emma with her blaring playlists and Josh with his video-game commentary echoing from the living room. They were at summer camp for another week, blissfully unaware that their parents’ marriage was currently hanging by a thread.
Good, I thought, as I leaned against the counter, cradling my mug. Let them have this one last uncomplicated summer memory.
I carried my coffee into the sunroom, the brightest room in the house, with its wall of windows overlooking the backyard. The swing set stood empty, its chains swaying slightly in the breeze. The garden beds I’d planted in the spring were beginning to fill with color—marigolds, hydrangeas, late-blooming roses.
It struck me, not for the first time, how much of this house I’d built with my own hands. Marcus liked to joke that he paid for everything. But it was my weekends spent painting walls, my nights hunting for deals on furniture, my hands in the soil planting bulbs. His money had bought the structure; my work had made it a home.
A car door slammed outside.
I parted the curtain and peered out to see Marcus’s sedan in the driveway. He climbed out slowly, squinting against the morning light. He was still wearing his suit from the night before, the jacket rumpled, the tie loosened and hanging askew around his neck. His hair stuck up on one side, and he moved with the drained heaviness of someone who had spent the night realizing just how far they’d fallen.
Good, I thought again, with a cold, distant satisfaction. Let him feel it.
The front door opened with more force than necessary. “Olivia?” he called, his voice hoarse. “We need to talk.”
“In the sunroom,” I replied, as calmly as if he’d asked where the sugar was.
He appeared in the doorway a moment later, breathless in that way that came more from panic than exertion. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw shadowed with stubble. For a man who prided himself on always being immaculate, he looked… wrecked.
“How long have you known?” he demanded.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said, lifting my mug to my lips. “You look terrible.”
“Olivia.” He ran a hand through his hair, pacing a short, agitated line. “About Jessica. About… everything. How long have you known?”
I gestured to the chair across from me. “Sit down, Marcus. You’re making the rug nervous.”
He dropped into the chair like someone had cut his strings. For a moment, he just stared at me, confusion and desperation warring in his expression.
“Jessica admitted everything last night,” he said finally. “About Brad. About… a lot of things, actually.” A humorless laugh escaped him. “Even now, I’m an idiot.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “You are.”
He winced. “I deserve that.”
“You do.”
We sat in silence for a beat, the hum of the air conditioner filling the space between us.
“I kept thinking,” he said, more quietly, “that you hadn’t noticed. That you were… I don’t know. Distracted. Busy with the kids. With… life.”
“What you mean,” I said, “is that you underestimated me. Again.”
His eyes flicked up to mine. “That’s not what I—”
“It’s exactly what you did,” I cut in. “You assumed I would look the other way because it was easier. Because I wouldn’t want to ruin the family, or the routine, or your reputation. You thought if you kept things just plausible enough, I’d doubt myself.”
His shoulders slumped. “How long?” he asked again.
I set my coffee down and reached into the side table drawer, pulling out the second envelope I’d placed there the night before.
“Long enough,” I said. “Long enough to know that Jessica was never your only secret.”
He stared at the envelope like it might bite him. “What’s that?”
“Open it.”
His hands trembled as he slid a finger under the flap and pulled out the papers inside. I watched his eyes move over the pages—bank statements, transaction records, property documents. The color drained from his face in stages this time: confusion, then horror, then a dull, sick resignation.
“Olivia,” he whispered. “What did you… how did you…?”
“When I hired the investigator to look into your affair,” I said, “I expected to find the usual things. Hotel receipts. Photos at restaurants. Maybe a bar napkin with a phone number on it. Instead, I found something… more interesting.”
He swallowed. “The offshore account.”
“The offshore accounts,” I corrected. “Plural. The shell corporations. The money you moved through them. The condo you put in Jessica’s name. Did you really think you could funnel company funds into your little romantic projects without someone eventually noticing?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” he blurted out automatically.
I raised an eyebrow. “Really? Because what it looks like is fraud.”
He flinched at the word like I’d slapped him. “I wasn’t stealing,” he said quickly. “I was… reallocating.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. A short, sharp sound.
“You should put that on a t-shirt,” I said. “‘I wasn’t stealing, I was reallocating.’ Maybe the IRS will appreciate the nuance.”
His composure cracked further. “The IRS? You… you’ve talked to the IRS?”
“No,” I said. “But my forensic accountant has a very thorough file prepared for them. And for your board.”
The silence that followed was heavy, thick with the weight of everything unsaid. He stared at the papers again, his fingers whitening around the edges.
“How far did you go?” he asked finally, his voice thin. “What do you have?”
