PART 1
“If you pretend you don’t know anything, you can keep being my wife.”
Ethan said it in the dark, with a chilling calm that froze me far more than any confession ever could.
I had just asked him why, after three years of working away in Chicago, he had returned home with the sudden habit of wrapping his arm tightly around my waist while he slept. He had never done that before.
“Who taught you to sleep like that?” I asked softly.
His arm instantly withdrew from my body. He got up, walked out onto the balcony, and lit a cigarette.
“Mabel, there are things I don’t tell you because you don’t need to know them. Chloe isn’t like other women. If you don’t make a scene, she’ll never bother you.”
Just like that. Without a shred of shame. As if I were the intruder in my own marriage.
“Then make a choice,” I told him, stepping onto the balcony. “It’s her or me.”
Ethan set his jaw.
For three long years, I had waited for his return while he spearheaded a major expansion for Vance Global in Illinois. We had talked about having children when he came back, about finally having the large, formal wedding celebration we never had, about making up for lost time.
But from his very first night back, I knew something was deeply off.
Ethan always came home freshly showered. Always. He could wash off another woman’s perfume, but he hadn’t realized I would recognize the sweet, lingering scent of a luxury body wash he had never bought for himself.
And that morning, I had found something far worse.
Chloe Vance, twenty-seven years old—an assistant in his international corporate office.
Ethan had quietly funded her brother’s startup, paid for the renovation of her parents’ home in Ohio, and flown across the country specifically for her mother’s sixtieth birthday party.
