After His Mistress Broke My Hands

I put on my mother's pearl earrings the morning Theo was supposed to come home.

Three years. That's how long I had practiced the shape of this day in my head. The drive to LAX. The parking. The walk to Arrivals. The moment his eyes would find me in the crowd.

I had not written a speech. I had not chosen a dress. I had only imagined his face.

The pearls were cold against my earlobes. I checked the mirror once. My mother had worn them the last time I saw her alive.

"For luck," I whispered.

Then I picked up my keys.

The terminal smelled like coffee and jet fuel and other people's reunions. I stood near the barrier, my hands folded, my pulse steady. I watched the double doors slide open and closed. Open and closed.

He came through on the third opening.

I saw him before he saw me. He was taller than I remembered, or maybe just leaner. London had done something to his jaw. He was laughing at something the woman next to him had said, and his arm was around her waist as if it had always lived there.

She was loud in a way you could see before you could hear. Bright red mouth. A cream coat that fell open over designer denim. A carry-on she was dragging with the wrist that wasn't wrapped around him.

"Excuse me, excuse me," she was saying, laughing, to no one in particular. "Sorry, coming through, my soulmate needs coffee."

Soulmate.

The word landed somewhere below my ribs and stayed there.

Theo's eyes swept the crowd and found mine. For half a second, something flickered across his face — recognition, maybe guilt, maybe just calculation. Then it smoothed into the smile I had been picturing for three years.

He did not take his arm off her.

"Isabelle," he said, walking toward me. He said it the way you'd say the name of a college roommate you hadn't seen in a while. "Hey."

The woman looked up at me then. Her eyes flicked from my earrings to my shoes and back. She smiled without moving her mouth much.

"Oh," she said. "You must be —"

"Dior," Theo said quickly, still smiling. "This is Dior. Dior, Isabelle."

"Right," Dior said. She tilted her head. "The wife."

She let the word sit there like a plate she had set down too hard.

Theo cleared his throat. His fingers rose to the collar of his shirt. I watched them touch the fabric, then fall away.

"Babe," he said — and I didn't know which of us he was talking to until he tilted his head toward Dior — "give us a second, yeah?"

She kissed his cheek. She took her time about it.

Then she wandered three steps away and pretended to look at her phone.

Theo turned back to me. His eyes were the same warm brown I had memorized at nineteen. He lowered his voice.

"Iz," he said. "We need to talk. Not here. But — soon. Tonight. Tomorrow. There's a lot I want to explain."

I looked at him.

I looked at him for a long time.

He waited. He had the patient, gentle expression of a man who had rehearsed this on the plane.

"Okay," I said.

That was all. Just okay.

I turned and walked back toward the parking garage.

I did not cry in the car. I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the radio off, and I watched the freeway signs slide past like they belonged to someone else's life.

I made it inside. I closed the door. I took two steps into the kitchen and my knees gave.

I sat down on the tile in my coat.

I cried for exactly one hour. I know because I watched the clock on the microwave. When the second digit changed for the sixtieth time, I stood up. I washed my face at the sink. The pearls swung against my jaw. I dried my hands on a dish towel and I opened my laptop.

By sunrise, the documents were finished.

Every account. Every card. Every capital channel I had quietly threaded through the Richards family's life over the last seven years, like veins under the skin of a body that had forgotten it was borrowing my blood. All of it, drafted into instructions my attorneys could deploy with a single sentence from me.

I saved the file. I named the folder with today's date. I did not press send.

Not yet.

***

The welcome dinner at Bel Air was two nights later.

Marleigh had set seven places. She had put Dior in my chair.

"Darling, sit, sit," Marleigh said, touching Dior's elbow. "You must be exhausted from the flight."

Dior smiled and slid into my seat as if she had been measured for it.

Spencer refilled her wine before she asked.

Theo sat beside her. When I took the chair to his left, he leaned toward Dior instead, murmuring something that made her laugh into her napkin.

"Iz," he said over her shoulder, "give us some space tonight, yeah? She's meeting everyone. Let her have it."

Someone asked, politely, what I had been up to while Theo was in London.

"Oh, Isabelle helps with some of the office paperwork," Theo said, waving a hand. "Clerical stuff. Keeps her busy."

Dior lifted her glass. "To family," she said. "I've never felt more at home."

I smiled. I raised my glass. I sipped.

Then I set the napkin on the table.

"Excuse me," I said. "Just a moment."

I walked to Spencer's study. I closed the door. I opened my phone.

One message to Celeste. Three words.

*Deploy the file.*

I came back for coffee.

I did not mention it.