CHAPTER TWO: Before I Could Leave

VALERIE

One second I was running through the lobby, past the receptionist who was pretending very hard not to stare, and the next I was behind the wheel with my hands shaking too badly to get the key into the ignition.

The anniversary card was still crushed in my fist, corners digging into my palm. I didn’t remember grabbing it. I didn’t remember much of anything except the sound of that door opening and Zoey’s face on the other side of it.

I finally got the car started and pulled out of the parking garage too fast, tires screeching against concrete in a way that would have terrified me on any other night. Tonight I barely heard it.

The city blurred past the windows, streetlights smearing into long gold streaks. I didn’t have a destination. I just needed to be moving, needed the distance between me and that conference room to keep growing, because some part of me was convinced that if I stopped, if I sat still for even a second, the weight of it would finally catch up and crush me.

Why did it hurt more that it was Zoey?

That was the question that kept looping through my mind, over and over, until it didn’t sound like words anymore, just noise.

Getting cheated on should have been the worst of it. That should have been enough on its own to break something in me.

But somehow the betrayal had a second layer to it, a deeper one, and that layer had Zoey’s face stitched into it.

Zoey, who had known me since we were fourteen. Zoey, who had sat with me in the hospital waiting room the night my father died, who had shown up at my house with grocery bags full of food when my mother stopped being able to leave her bed. Zoey, who had watched me become smaller and smaller over the years and never once told me to take up more space.

I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white and let myself remember, because apparently my brain had decided that was the only place it wanted to go tonight.

I met Roman in college.

Freshman year.

I was nineteen, drowning under the weight of tuition I couldn’t afford and a home that had stopped feeling like one. My father had died the year before and my mother completely unraveled after that. The grief turned into something darker…severe depression that made her stop eating, stop speaking for days at a time, stop recognizing when she needed to bathe or take her medication. Some days she would sit in the same chair from morning until night staring at nothing. Other days she would cry so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. The doctors finally said she was a danger to herself and couldn’t live alone anymore. She was moved into a care home just outside the city. Even then, everything still fell on me. The bills for her care, the bus rides out to visit her every weekend, making sure the staff actually paid attention to her, somehow keeping myself afloat at the same time. I worked two part-time jobs and still barely made rent.

And then there were my eyes.

One hazel. One blue. Heterochromia. Something that should have been interesting, maybe even pretty, but to eighteen-year-olds looking for an easy target it was just another reason to laugh. “Freak eyes.” That’s what they called me. Roman was the first person who never looked at me like that. He was the golden heir of Ashford Industries even back then, already trailed by that quiet, expensive kind of attention that followed people who were born into money and power. He couldn’t have wanted for anything. He definitely didn’t need to notice a scholarship student with mismatched eyes and secondhand clothes sitting alone in the campus library at midnight.

But he did.

He was kind to me in a way I hadn’t let myself expect from anyone. I fell in love with him slowly and by senior year I was gone for him. Completely.

So when he asked me to marry him three years later, the week after I’d been offered a position at one of the top financial firms in the city, an opportunity I had worked myself half to death for, I didn’t hesitate.

I turned down the job offer two days later. Roman never asked me to. But being Mrs. Ashford came with its own gravity, its own expectations, a calendar quietly filling up with events and galas and appearances that left no real room for an entry-level career trying to find its footing. I told myself I was choosing us. I told myself there would be time later, that I could always go back, that love was supposed to require sacrifice and this was mine to give.

I gave up the version of my life that belonged only to me. And for a long time, I believed it was worth it, because he made me feel like I mattered more than any job ever could.

I was so stupid.

The worst part wasn’t even that he’d done it. Some distant, exhausted part of me had almost expected that, somewhere underneath the denial. Men who disappeared into work the way Roman had didn’t always disappear alone. What I hadn’t expected, what I don’t think I could have ever braced myself for, was that he’d done it with her.

Zoey worked at Ashford Industries. She had been there for a couple of years already, somewhere in the marketing department. I used to hear her talk about the long hours, the demanding projects, the occasional late nights. I never thought twice about it. I never imagined it was anything more than a job.

And somewhere in the years since, while I was busy shrinking myself into the shape of a good wife, she had been in his office. In his arms. Underneath him in a conference room with the door unlocked, like it hadn’t even occurred to either of them that they might get caught, because why would it? I was the wife who waited at home. I was the wife who left the porch light on. I was never supposed to walk through that door.

I didn’t realize I was crying until I had to blink hard to see the road.

By the time I pulled into the parking garage beneath our building, my hands had stopped shaking, but only because I had gone somewhere quieter inside myself, somewhere past the panic and into something colder. I sat in the car for a long moment after I cut the engine, staring at the elevator doors across the garage, at the life waiting for me upstairs that didn’t feel like mine anymore.

The apartment was dark when I let myself in. Of course it was. He was still at the office, probably smoothing things over with Zoey, probably rehearsing whatever apology he thought might work on me the way it always had before.

I didn’t turn on the lights.

I walked straight to the bedroom, still in the deep green dress he’d chosen for our anniversary, and stood in front of the same mirror he’d stood behind that morning. My reflection stared back at me. Two different colored eyes, red-rimmed now, mascara tracked down both cheeks.

Freak eyes.

It was the first thing I’d thought of, standing there in the ruins of my marriage, an old wound from fifteen years ago surfacing like it had been waiting the whole time for the right moment to remind me it was still there.

I reached up and unclasped the necklace with hands that had finally stopped shaking. The chain slid off and I set it down on the dresser without looking at it again.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed…exactly where I had been sitting two hours earlier, waiting for a husband who never came and finally let myself do the thing I had been thinking about since the moment that conference room door swung open.

I was going to divorce him.

I had the papers ready for weeks. I got them a month ago, right after the miscarriage. After we lost the baby, Roman had grown even more distant. I needed him more than I ever had in my life but he had thrown himself into Ashford Industries like work was the only thing that could keep him standing. I had sat in this same bedroom night after night with the unsigned divorce papers in the bottom drawer of my nightstand, telling myself I still loved him too much to leave. That maybe he would change. That maybe if I just waited a little longer, the man who used to look at me like I mattered would come back.

Maybe had been nothing but a slow, quiet hope that never arrived.

I pulled the papers out now. My hand was steady as I signed my name at the bottom of the last page. I placed them carefully on his side of the bed, right where he would see them the moment he finally walked through the door.

Tomorrow, I was leaving him.

I was still sitting there, staring at the signed papers, when my phone rang.

An unfamiliar number. I almost ignored it, but something made me answer.

“Mrs. Ashford?” a calm female voice said. “This is the care home. I’m calling about your mother.”

My stomach dropped.

“She’s taken a turn,” the woman continued. “Her vitals are unstable and she’s been asking for you. We think it would be best if you came as soon as you can.”

I was already on my feet.

“I’m on my way,” I said, my voice sounding strange and thin even to my own ears.

I grabbed my keys off the dresser, not bothering to change out of the green dress, and ran.

No.

Nothing could happen to her.

Not tonight. Not after everything else.

I drove faster than I should have. The city lights streaked past the windows in long white blurs. My hands were tight on the steering wheel, my mind split between the signed papers on the bed and the thought of my mother lying in that quiet room asking for me.

I didn’t see the truck until it was already too late to matter.

It came from the intersection on my right, running the red light the same way I was running from everything behind me.

There was a sharp, white flash of headlights, the scream of brakes that wasn’t mine, and then the world slammed sideways.

Glass shattered.

Metal folded in on itself.

Pain exploded through my body so fast I couldn’t even scream.

The last thing I felt was the seatbelt cutting into my chest as the car kept spinning.

Then everything went black.