After the miscarriage, I stopped clinging to Ethan. I stopped sharing the little joys of my day, stopped caring what time he came home, or who he’d been with. So when I found a first-grade English workbook in his briefcase, I didn’t even ask. He offered an explanation anyway, his voice tight with forced patience. “It’s for Chloe’s son. He has a spelling bee coming up, and I picked him up from school. That’s all.” I just nodded. That’s when his eyes reddened, his composure finally snapping. His hands shot out, closing around my throat. “Why aren’t you fighting me about seeing Chloe?” he rasped, forcing me to look at him. “I’m your husband! Don’t you care about me at all anymore?” My face flushed, starved for air, but I managed a small, empty smile. Because you’ll never know, Ethan. In all those years you called me crazy… that was when I loved you the most. 1 The moment before my vision started to blur, he let go. I collapsed onto the sofa, gasping, my lungs burning. I was the one who had been choked, yet he was the one who looked utterly wrecked, his voice hoarse with a pain I no longer recognized. “I’m going to say this one last time. It’s over between me and Chloe.” He ran a hand through his hair, his shoulders slumped in exhaustion. “Can you please just stop all this drama?” Drama? The word was so absurd I almost laughed. A year ago, when I was on my knees, sobbing, begging him to leave Chloe, he called it drama. Now, a year later, when I asked nothing and said nothing about them, he still called it drama. “Whatever you say.” I pushed myself up, my limbs feeling heavy. I offered him a vacant smile. “I’m going to bed.” My indifference seemed to hit him harder than any scream ever had. Ethan froze, a statue carved from disbelief. All his anger, his prepared speeches, were like punches thrown at a pillow. Useless. Later that night, he pushed open the door to the guest room. He slid into the bed behind me, wrapping his arms around me, pulling my back against his chest. The familiar scent of cedar and expensive cologne filled my senses, a scent that used to mean home. “Can we go back to how things were?” he whispered into my hair, his voice thick with a desperate, fragile hope. “Please, Ava?” Moonlight streamed through the window, tracing the anguish on his handsome face. Gently, I unclasped my watch and slid it off. I turned my arm over, exposing the ugly, twisted scar that snaked across the delicate skin of my wrist. He went rigid. I had a whole arm full of scars like that one, souvenirs from the depressive episode that nearly claimed me a few years ago. And where was Ethan then? He was busy trying to find any way possible to divorce me, to abandon me and our unborn child, so he could play the role of devoted partner to another woman and her son. So now, I smiled. I looked him right in the eye, my voice quiet but firm. “No.” We could never, ever go back. Because I could never, ever forget the feeling of my world collapsing, the moment I saw my best friend and my husband tangled together in my own kitchen. 2 This year marks the seventh anniversary of my marriage to Ethan. We’ve known each other for twenty years. College sweethearts, from the right families, the golden couple. That’s what everyone called us. I never imagined marrying anyone else. In the beginning, it was a fairytale. Until Chloe’s divorce shattered the calm. She was my best friend, my maid of honor. She’d married earlier than me, a pampered princess in her own love story. None of us saw the betrayal coming, the revelation that her mild-mannered husband was cheating. The day she found out, she sobbed in my arms for hours, and all I wanted to do was drive to her house and punch that bastard in the face. It was me who begged Ethan to let her stay with us for a while. It was me who begged Ethan to pull some strings and get her son, Leo, into a good preschool. And it was me who begged Ethan to give Chloe a job at his firm so she could get back on her feet. I remember how annoyed he was at first. He’d always found Chloe’s delicate, damsel-in-distress act grating. “All that pink and green she wears,” he’d grumble to me in private. “She looks like a goddamn Christmas ornament.” So later, after I’d gotten pregnant and quit my job, when a junior associate at his firm quietly warned me, “Ava, the way Mr. Prescott looks out for his new assistant… it seems like a little much. Someone saw them kissing in the parking garage,” my first instinct was to dismiss it as malicious gossip. The three of us had known each other for over a decade. They’d bickered for just as long, a mutual annoyance that dated back to our college days. They could barely get through a conversation without sniping at each other. Kissing? Impossible. But the warning planted a sliver of glass in my heart. I couldn’t ignore it, and I couldn’t swallow it down. So one night at dinner, I brought it up jokingly. I said it was time to find Chloe a new husband, maybe set her up on a few dates. Ethan was the first to put down his fork. His brow furrowed. “Just eat your dinner, Ava. Stop worrying about things that aren't your business.” He added, with a dismissive wave of his hand, “It’s not like I can’t afford to take care of two women.” A cold dread washed over me. I looked at Chloe. She just stared down at her plate, refusing to meet my eyes. And that’s when I noticed it. The choicest cuts of steak in her bowl, the perfectly roasted asparagus—all put there by Ethan. He and Chloe were sitting so close, with only her little boy squeezed between them. They looked like a happy family of three. The rest of the meal was tasteless. In a fog of rising panic, I was starting to grasp the edge of the truth, still desperately unwilling to face the blade being held by the two people I trusted most in the world. 3 Throughout my pregnancy, I watched them. I watched them leave for work together and come home together. Every morning, Ethan would make Chloe a coffee, just the way she liked it, before gently knocking on her door to wake her up. In the evenings, they’d go pick up her son from school and then eat out at a restaurant. I was left at home with the housekeeper. It felt like a boulder was sitting on my chest, but I didn’t know how to speak the words, how to give voice to the suffocating dread. The days bled into one another in a haze of quiet misery. Finally, the day Ethan skipped my prenatal ultrasound to attend a parent-teacher conference for Chloe’s son, I broke. “Anyone would think Leo was your actual son,” I spat out, my voice dripping with a bitterness that choked me. I was breathing hard, a sharp, twisting pain starting in my abdomen. “What are you two doing?” My voice rose to a shriek. “What the hell are you doing to me!” I screamed, swiping everything off the dining table, my vision blurred by a flood of hot tears. Chloe started crying too, grabbing her son and fleeing to a hotel. Ethan stood on the balcony and smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. The next day, he rented an apartment for Chloe and her son. I thought the nightmare was finally over. But Ethan’s nights at the “office” got longer and longer. His voice on the phone grew colder, more distant. One evening, after waiting until dark, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I drove to Chloe’s new apartment. I just needed the truth. I had a key. I let myself in. And there they were. Chloe was perched on the kitchen counter, naked from the waist down, a long, soft sound that was something between a sob and a moan escaping her lips. Ethan was half-embracing her, his lips pressed to her hair, their bodies moving together in a sickening rhythm. I stood there for a full minute before the two lovers, lost in their world, finally noticed me. Chloe shrieked, scrambling to grab her clothes from the floor. Ethan just looked at me, his brow furrowed in annoyance. The executioner’s axe had finally fallen.
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