Chapter 2: What Diana Wanted

Serena's POV

The envelope hung in the air between us, and I just stood there, staring at it like it might explain itself if I looked hard enough.

"Say something," Ethan said.

I couldn't. My body had gone strange and far away, like I was watching this happen to someone else from a slight distance, through glass. The wine I'd picked out twenty minutes ago was still downstairs on the counter, the receipt probably still in the bag, and some absurd part of my brain was stuck on that, on the fact that I'd been standing in a checkout line being “happy” while this was apparently already decided.

"Ethan." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "What is this?"

"You know what this is."

"I genuinely don't." I looked past him to Diana, who hadn't moved, who hadn't even reached for the sheet to cover herself properly, who was watching me with an expression I couldn't immediately name. "Diana?"

She said nothing. She just held my gaze, steady and unbothered, and something about that stillness was wrong in a way I didn't have words for yet. People who get caught flinch. People who get caught reach for excuses, or tears, or at least the decency of looking away. Diana did none of those things — she watched me the way you watch the final scene of a movie you already know the ending to.

"You don't get to look at me like that," Ethan said, and his voice had an edge I'd never heard him use with me before. "Not after everything you've put me through."

"What I've put you through?" The words finally found their footing, sharp and disbelieving. "I just walked in and found you in our bed with my cousin and you're telling me I don't get to look a certain way?"

"Don't make this about tonight."

"What else would it be about?"

He laughed, but there was no humor in it, just something tired and bitter that had clearly been building for a long time without my knowledge. "I think you know exactly what this is about, Serena. I just didn't expect to actually catch you in it. I figured you'd keep it cleaner than that."

"Catch me in what?"

"The affair." He said it flatly, like it was a fact we'd both already agreed on. "Adrian Cole. The messages. I've known for months."

The name landed somewhere in my chest like a dropped weight. Adrian Cole was a colleague — a perfectly pleasant, perfectly unremarkable colleague I'd shared maybe a dozen professional lunches with over two years, always with other people at the table, never once alone. I opened my mouth to say so and found I couldn't even get the sentence out before he kept going.

"I saw the texts, Serena. I saw the test."

"What test?"

"Don't." His jaw tightened. "Don't do that.”

I looked at Diana again, and this time something in her expression shifted — just barely, just for a fraction of a second, a flicker of something that might have been satisfaction if I'd let myself name it. She reached over and put her hand on Ethan's arm, gentle, proprietary, the gesture of someone settling into a space she'd already decided belonged to her.

"Maybe I should go," she said softly, to him, not to me.

"No," I said, before I could stop myself. "No, please, stay. I'd love to hear what test he's talking about, since apparently I'm the only person in this room who doesn't know."

Nobody answered me.

That silence told me more than anything either of them could have said out loud. I stood there in the doorway of my own bedroom, the envelope still extended toward me in Ethan's outstretched hand, and I felt the shape of something enormous and ugly assembling itself just outside my line of sight — something I couldn't see clearly yet but could feel, the way you feel a storm pressing against a window before it breaks.

"I'm not signing anything tonight," I said.

"You don't have to sign it tonight. Just take it." His voice had gone flat again, businesslike, like we were finalizing a contract instead of ending a marriage. "My lawyer drew it up. You'll want your own counsel to review it."

My lawyer. Not a lawyer. His. Already retained. Already drafting documents days before I'd even walked through that door, which meant this hadn't been a decision made in the heat of tonight at all.

This had been decided before I ever got home.

I took the envelope because my hand reached out and took it before the rest of me had agreed to. The paper felt heavier than it should have, dense with everything I didn't understand yet. I looked at Ethan one more time, searching his face for some trace of the man I'd spent three years loving, and found only the careful, rehearsed stillness of someone who'd already grieved this and moved on without me.

I turned and walked out of the room without another word.

The hallway felt impossibly long. I passed the framed photo from our wedding without looking at it, passed the closed door of what would have been a nursery if things had gone differently for us this past year, and made it down the stairs on legs that didn't feel entirely like mine.

The wine bottle was still on the counter exactly where I'd left it, the little gift bag beside it, both of them obscene reminders of the woman I'd been forty-five minutes ago — a woman who'd had something wonderful to share, who'd thought tonight might crack something open between us instead of shattering it completely.

I picked up my keys. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped them once before I managed to close my fingers around them properly.

I didn't look back up the stairs. I didn't call out. I just walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped out into the cool evening air like a woman walking out of a building that was already on fire behind her.

I got into my car and sat there for a long moment, both hands on the wheel, staring at nothing.

I still hadn't told him about Calloway.

I never would now — that thought arrived with a strange, hollow clarity, the first clear thought I'd had since opening that door. Whatever I'd been planning to say to him tonight didn't exist anymore. That version of this evening was gone, erased the second I'd seen Diana's hand on his arm like she already belonged there.

I pulled out of the driveway with my vision blurred, and as I did, something made me glance up at the house one last time.

A light switched on in the bedroom window — my bedroom window — and through the gap in the curtains I hadn't gotten around to closing properly that morning, I caught a flash of movement. Diana, walking toward the closet. Toward my side of it.

She wasn't hiding anymore.

She wasn't even pretending to.