005

CHAPTER 5

Sophia's Point of View

I didn't go to work the next day.

By eight in the morning, the light through the curtains felt too bright, too mocking. I stayed in bed until my phone started buzzing, the vibration rattling against the nightstand like an accusation.

"Clara," I said, my voice thick and dry.

"Ma'am? Are you on your way? The production team from the Houston plant is already in the conference room—"

"Handle it," I cut her off, staring at the ceiling molding. "Handle everything today. Cancel my afternoon sessions. I'm not coming in."

A long pause. Clara had been my assistant for three years; she knew I didn't miss days. I'd worked through the flu, through my grandmother's funeral, once through a fever of a hundred and two. "Are you sick? Do you need me to call the family doctor?"

"No. Just take care of the office. Please."

I hung up before she could ask anything else. I wasn't sane enough to sit in a boardroom today, to negotiate delivery margins with clients while my marriage lay in pieces on our kitchen floor. If I went in, I would come apart in front of people who depended on me to be the calmest person in the room.

Instead, I spent the entire afternoon in the backyard garden, pulling weeds with my bare hands until the dirt wedged deep under my fingernails and blisters rose on my palms. I didn't wear gloves. I needed to feel something sharp and real, something I could control, when everything else in my life was spinning loose.

Each weed I pulled was a small, manageable victory. It didn't fix anything. But it gave my hands something to do besides shake.

Somewhere around noon my phone had buzzed twice with texts from Daniel — nothing about last night, just a line asking if I'd looked over the Houston shipment numbers, as if the last twelve hours hadn't happened, as if we were still just two people running a company and a household together. I didn't answer either one. Let him wonder, for once, whether I was still going to be there when he decided to come home.

Somewhere in those hours, between the roses and the ache in my knees, my mind kept circling back to something I hadn't let myself think about in years: Jaxx. Daniel's younger brother, the one the family didn't bring up at dinner, the one whose name alone used to make Matilda's mouth pinch into a thin, disapproving line. I hadn't spoken to him in over a year. I wondered, absently, cruelly, what Daniel's face would look like if I did.

I pushed the thought away. It felt like reaching for a lit match in a room full of gas. But it stayed lodged somewhere in the back of my mind anyway, quiet and patient, the way dangerous ideas always do when you're too tired to keep fighting them off.

By dusk, the Texas heat had left me coated in sweat and dust. I showered, changed into sweatpants, and moved through the house like a ghost in my own life, every room echoing with a version of my marriage I could no longer trust.

I came downstairs around six for my phone, and that's when I heard the front door click open down the hall.

My heart did a stupid, hopeful leap. Maybe Daniel had come to his senses. Maybe the night apart had cracked that terrifying logic of his.

"Daniel?" I called, stepping into the foyer.

The name died in my throat.

A woman walked in behind him, shaking out a light cardigan, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders. It was Lillian — his cousin, the quiet one from the East Coast branch of the family, the one who'd always asked about my work like she actually cared. The one I'd genuinely liked.

And she was heavily, unmistakably pregnant. At least five or six months along, the roundness of her belly straining against her dress.

I stopped dead, the air leaving my lungs. Everything else in the room — the chandelier, the fresh flowers I'd arranged that morning — faded into nothing but that curve.

"What is going on here, Daniel?" I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm, pointing a hand that wouldn't stop shaking toward the woman in our hallway.

Daniel didn't look guilty. He settled his hand against the small of Lillian's back, guiding her forward as if she belonged there, as if I were the one standing somewhere I shouldn't be.

"Sophia, this is Lillian," he said, his eyes flat and cold, delivering it like a line from a business report. "And she's carrying my child."

The world tilted on its axis. "What?!" I choked out, a wild, disbelieving laugh tearing from my throat as I stumbled back against the wall. "You're — you're fucking your cousin, Daniel?"

Lillian had the decency to flinch. Daniel didn't. He stood there in our foyer with his hand still resting on another woman's back, waiting for me to catch up to a decision he'd clearly made months ago, back when he was still calling me his wife and meaning something else entirely.

For five years, I had been perfect. I had been patient, devoted, endlessly understanding. I had followed him overseas to clinics that spoke in a language I didn't understand, I had smiled through his mother's cruelty, I had built a company good enough to make his family proud to say my name at their galas. And it had gotten me a ruined birthday cake, an ultimatum, and my husband's cousin standing pregnant in my marble foyer, looking at me like she expected me to simply understand.

I was done being patient. Whatever came next — the divorce, the fallout, the whispers at every Hawthorne dinner table from here to Austin — I was done trying to earn my way back into a marriage that had alr

eady decided I wasn't enough.