After His Mistress Faked a Pregnancy, He Tried to Drown Me

I practiced what I would say the whole drive home.

I'd been doing that for three days — playing it out in my head like a movie. I would walk through the front door. Damien would be in the kitchen, or on the couch, or standing at the window the way he sometimes did, watching the Seattle skyline like it owed him something. I would come up behind him. I would say his name. He would turn around, and I would hold out the velvet box, and his face — that face I had memorized in seventeen different kinds of light — would do something it hadn't done in a long time.

It would soften.

Three years of marriage. Two years of treatments before that, of cold clinic rooms and blood draws and the specific loneliness of hope that keeps failing. Doctors who said things like "challenging" and "unlikely" in careful voices. Me, nodding and scheduling the next appointment, then driving home alone and sitting in the parking garage for ten minutes before I trusted myself to walk through the door without Damien seeing it on my face.

I hadn't told him about most of it. I didn't want to burden him. I told myself that was love.

The test was in a small velvet box I'd bought from a jewelry store on Fifth — deep burgundy, the kind that closes with a soft click. Inside: the test, and a pair of baby booties I'd found at a market stall, impossibly small, cream-colored with a yellow duck on each toe. I'd held them in the store for a full minute before I could make myself buy them. My hands were shaking.

They were still shaking now, in the elevator up to our penthouse floor.

I pressed the velvet box against my chest and breathed. New Year's Eve. The city was already celebrating somewhere below us — I could feel it more than hear it, a low pulse in the building's bones. I thought: this is the best night. I thought: he's going to be so happy. I thought: everything that has been hard is going to mean something now.

The elevator opened.

Our door was unlocked. I noticed that and filed it away without thinking about it.

The penthouse was dark except for the bedroom light — a warm strip of gold under the closed door at the end of the hall. The city glittered through the floor-to-ceiling windows, indifferent and gorgeous. I set my bag down quietly. I wanted to surprise him.

I heard his voice first.

Low. A sound I recognized but had no context for, not at that distance, not at that hour. I stopped walking. The velvet box was in both my hands.

Then another sound. Softer. Not his.

I opened the bedroom door.

I don't remember deciding to. My hand just moved.

Damien was in our bed. Our bed — the one with the gray linen headboard I'd chosen, the one where I slept on the left side because he ran warm and I liked the window. He was there, and he was not alone, and the woman beside him turned her head at the sound of the door and looked directly at me.

Giana Ramirez.

The housekeeper's daughter. Twenty-three years old. She had been living in the east-wing guest room for four months because her mother had asked, and I had said yes, because that was the kind of person I thought I was.

She looked at me over Damien's shoulder.

She did not look afraid. That was the thing I would remember later, the detail that would come back to me at 3 a.m. on the island when the wind was loud and I couldn't sleep. She did not look caught. She looked like someone watching a scene she had already rehearsed — a faint, private satisfaction, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it.

I didn't imagine it.

The velvet box hit the floor. I didn't drop it on purpose. My hands just stopped working.

Damien sat up.

And then — God, and then — he looked at me, and something moved across his face, and I thought for one raw, awful second that it was going to be remorse. That he was going to say my name. That the next few minutes would be terrible and true.

"Really, Sutton."

His voice was calm. That particular calm he used when he'd already decided the argument was beneath him.

"You're going to stand there and make this into a whole thing."

Giana pulled the sheet up and pressed her face into her hands. Her shoulders shook. I stood in the doorway of my own bedroom and watched her cry, and I understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that this was not the first time. The performance was too comfortable. She knew exactly where to put her face.

"You're being dramatic," Damien said. "This is exactly — " He exhaled. "This is exactly why we're here, Sutton. You make everything so difficult."

I didn't say anything.

I picked up the velvet box. I walked to the guest room. I locked the door.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with the box in my lap and didn't move for a long time. At some point I pressed my thumb against the inside of my ring finger, where the band usually sat. I'd taken it off for a fitting that afternoon.

By morning, I had called the clinic.

I stood at the kitchen counter while Damien poured coffee like nothing had happened, like New Year's Eve was just New Year's Eve. I waited until he looked at me.

"I want a divorce."

He laughed. A short sound, almost fond, the way you laugh at something a little absurd. He shook his head and turned back to the counter.

I didn't say anything else. There was nothing else to say. The decision was already made — had been made somewhere in the dark of the guest room while the city celebrated below us and I sat completely still, holding a box full of something that was no longer going to happen.

I called Rylee from the guest room at 9 a.m.

She picked up on the second ring.

"It's over," I said. "The marriage. It's done."

A pause. Just one. Then: "Tell me where you need me."

"I'll let you know."

"Sutton."

"I'm okay."

She didn't believe me. I knew she didn't believe me because she said "okay" in the voice she used when she was choosing not to push. That was its own kind of love — knowing when to hold the door and when to let you close it.

I hung up and set the phone on the bed.

My hand was in my lap. Still. Not pressing against my ring finger, not fidgeting, not reaching for anything.

Outside the window, the city looked exactly the same as it always did.

I looked at the velvet box on the nightstand. Then I opened the drawer and put it inside. I closed the drawer. I stood up.

I had a lot to do.