My Husband Asked Me to Give His Mistress My Skin

I drove to the hospital with the sweater folded on the passenger seat.

It was navy blue. I'd knitted it during the long nights when the only sound in Lian's room was the slow beep of the monitor. My fingers had cramped sometimes. I didn't care. I wanted him to wake up to something warm. Something I made.

Three months. That's how long I'd been at his bedside. I knew every nurse by name. I knew which floor tiles squeaked. I knew the exact tilt of his jaw in the gray morning light.

Today he was coming home.

I took the elevator up. My reflection in the metal doors looked thin and tired, but I was smiling. I couldn't help it. I pressed the sweater against my chest like a warm animal.

The door to his room was open.

I stopped.

A woman was standing beside Lian's wheelchair. Mid-twenties. Nurse's scrubs, pressed neat. Her hand rested on his forearm in a way that wasn't medical. Her thumb moved a little, slow circles, like she was soothing him.

Lian was looking up at her. Not at the door. At her.

"Lian," I said.

He turned his head. I waited for it. The shift. The light. The look he gave me when I walked into a room.

It didn't come.

His eyes moved over me the way they would move over a stranger asking for directions. Polite. Empty.

"Mrs. Ward," he said.

Mrs. Ward. Not Ev. Not baby. Mrs. Ward.

My stomach dropped through the floor.

"It's me," I said. I took a step forward. "It's Everly. I brought you—" I lifted the sweater. My hands were shaking. "I made this for you. While you were—"

"Greg." Lian didn't even look at me again. He looked at his assistant, who was standing by the window pretending not to watch. "Draw up a settlement figure. Whatever's standard. Have her sign before she leaves the building."

The nurse's hand stayed on his arm.

The room got very quiet. A doctor in the doorway cleared his throat and looked down at his clipboard. Two nurses by the supply cart turned their backs in unison, like they'd practiced.

I heard myself laugh. A small, broken sound.

"Lian. Honey. Look at me."

He did. For one second. His eyes were the color I had memorized over three months. They didn't know me.

"I don't know what you think this is," he said. Calm. Tired. "But I'd like you to leave with some dignity."

Dignity.

The nurse leaned down and whispered something in his ear. He nodded. She wheeled him forward, past me, close enough that I smelled her perfume — something soft, expensive, nothing like a hospital. Her eyes flicked up to mine as she passed.

She smiled. Just the corner of her mouth.

Then they were gone down the corridor and I was standing there with a sweater in my arms and a settlement waiting at the front desk.

---

I don't remember driving back to the penthouse. I remember the elevator. The brass doors. The little chime when I reached the fortieth floor.

The foyer smelled different. Lighter. Like she had already been spraying something.

Reese Hoffman was sitting in the living room with her hands folded in her lap. My mother-in-law. She wore navy, always navy, and she always sat the way old money sits — like the chair was lucky to have her.

She looked up when I came in.

She didn't say anything. But her eyes moved from my face to the sweater still pressed against my chest, and something in them tightened. Not pity. Worse. Recognition. Like she had seen this scene before, in some other life, and she already knew the ending.

"Everly," she said softly.

"Where is she sleeping?" I asked.

Reese closed her eyes for one beat. "The guest wing. She's continuing his recovery care."

I nodded. I kept nodding. I couldn't seem to stop.

"His memory will come back," I said. To her. To myself. "The doctors said it might take weeks. Months, even. I just have to be patient. I just have to—"

Reese did not answer.

That was the part that scared me most.

---

I tried. God, I tried.

The next morning I brought the wedding album to the breakfast table and opened it beside his coffee. He glanced down. Closed it. "I don't remember that."

The next day I told him about the trip we took to Big Sur. The flat tire. The diner that only served pie. "My doctors have advised me not to force memory recovery, Everly."

The day after that I tried to take his hand. He pulled it away.

"Stop pressuring me."

And Paislee — that was her name, I'd learned it from the staff — was always there. Just at the edge. Refilling his water. Touching his shoulder. Steering him gently out of the room with that same soft, performed concern, as if I was a draft she was closing the door against.

She was so good at it. That's what made my hands cold.

---

On the fourth night I came down to the kitchen for water and he was standing there with a pill bottle in his hand.

"Where was this, Everly?"

"What?"

"My afternoon dose. Paislee found it in your things."

"That's not—" My throat closed. "Lian, I haven't even touched—"

"If you can't be trusted to manage something this simple," he said, voice flat as a closed door, "stay away from my care entirely."

He set the bottle down between us like evidence and walked out.

I stood very still in the kitchen.

Upstairs, faintly, I heard her laugh.

And I understood, finally, that the war had already started — and I had walked into it carrying nothing but a sweater.