Broke CEO's Wife

The cashier's name tag said PRIYA.

I remember staring at it while she ran my card the first time, the way you fixed your eyes on something small and manageable when the rest of the world was threatening to come apart. The store was too bright. It was always too bright in places like this, the kind of fluorescent lighting that left nowhere to hide.

The machine beeped.

Priya looked at the screen the way people looked at things they didn't want to have to say out loud. "It's declined."

"I'm sorry?"

"Your card." She turned the reader toward me. "Declined."

The woman behind me in the queue shifted her weight. I heard it. I heard everything. The squeak of a cart wheel, a child asking his mother something, and the low hum of the refrigerators along the back wall, because my brain had gone very quiet in the way it did right before something bad arrived.

"Try it again," I said.

She tried it again.

Same beep. Same flat, indifferent sound.

"I have another one." I was already digging through my bag for my personal card, not the joint account. The one with only my name on it, the one I hadn't touched in years because I had never needed to. My fingers found it and I held it out and I was aware, distantly, that my hand was not entirely steady.

Priya swiped it.

Beep.

"That one's declined too. Do you have cash?"

Cash. Tyler's voice came back to me the way it always did, casual and certain. *I don't want you carrying cash, Sarah. It's unnecessary. Everything goes on the card.* And I had nodded and thought nothing of it because I had been twenty-one and in love and it had seemed like devotion then — him wanting to handle everything, wanting me to never have to worry.

What a magnificent trap that had been.

"I don't have cash," I said quietly.

Priya reached out and drew the groceries back across the counter. The milk. The bread. The eggs. The small block of cheese I had argued with myself about for five minutes in the aisle. She stacked them neatly to one side, and the sight of it — the casual finality of those items moving out of my reach hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for.

I picked up my empty bag.

"Isn't that Tyler Rider's ex-wife?"

The voice came from somewhere in the queue behind me. Not even bothering to whisper.

I kept walking.

"The one who was sleeping around? He talked about it in that interview. She was cheating with multiple men, while he was working himself to the bone—"

I pushed through the glass door and the October air hit my face cold and sharp. My two useless cards in my wallet. My empty bag hanging from my hand. Tyler's voice on a loop in the back of my skull, composed and heartbroken on national television, breaking me in front of the whole city with the calm accuracy of a man who had planned it long before he walked through that bedroom door.

*Multiple men.*

I pressed my fingers hard against my eyes. I would not cry in front of a grocery store.

I started walking.

---

Mandy was sitting on the kitchen counter when I came in, still in her scrubs, a cup of coffee gone cold beside her. She looked at my empty hands first. Then at my face.

"Again?" she said.

"Tyler cut me off. Both cards." I set my empty bag by the door. "I'll call the bank tomorrow and—"

"Sarah." Her voice was quiet in a way that scared me more than anger would have. "This is the second time this week you've walked through that door with nothing."

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm going to fix it, I just need a little more—"

"I've been feeding you for three weeks." She wasn't yelling. She hadn't raised her voice once since I'd shown up at her door with one bag and swollen eyes, and somehow that made everything land harder. "Three weeks. My fridge, my electricity, my couch. I did it because you had nowhere to go and I couldn't close the door on you. But I'm one person, Sarah. I have my own bills."

She paused. "You never called me once when things were good. When you were Mrs. Tyler Rider with the penthouse and the dinners — I didn't exist. You had Lucy for all of that."

The name dropped heavy between us.

"Tyler didn't like me seeing people he didn't know."

"Then you should have seen them anyway." Her eyes were sad, not angry, which was worse. "You let that man shrink your whole world down to him and Lucy, and look where that left you. They have each other and you have my couch." She slid off the counter. "I need you gone before I get back from my shift."

"Mandy." My voice cracked. "I have nowhere to go. You know that. Please—"

"I'm sure one of those men Tyler caught you with, can help you out." Her voice had gone somewhere harder now. "You gave them enough fucks for free. The least they can do is return the favour."

I opened my mouth. But nothing came out. Six years of friendship sat in the space between us. I had stood in the front row at her mother's funeral. I had sent money for her sister's surgery without making her ask twice. I had shown up. I had always shown up.

I wanted to say all of that. I wanted to say how dare you and you know me and that is not who I am. But then my stomach rose up fast and awful and I had to move.

I dropped my bag and ran towards the bathroom.

Mandy's bathroom was small and I barely made the toilet before everything came up, my whole body folding forward, one hand slapping against the cold wall to keep myself upright.

"Whatever you have, I don't want it in my house!" Mandy's voice shot through the thin door like she wanted the whole building to hear it. "I have a life to protect! I can't be getting sick because of you!"

I squeezed my eyes shut and vomited again.

"And I meant what I said. I want you gone before I get back! I have tried for you, God knows I have tried, but I am done!"

And then footsteps.

"Lock up when you leave!"

The front door slammed hard enough to shake the walls. Then complete, terrible silence, broken only by the drip of the bathroom tap.

I stayed on the cold tile floor and pressed both hands flat against my stomach.

It was barely there yet. No swell. Just something small and real and entirely dependent on a woman who had two declined cards and nowhere to sleep tonight.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, because it was all I had. "I'm so sorry. I thought by now I would have figured something out." My voice broke and I let it.

My phone lit up on the floor beside me, where it had slid from my pocket. I almost ignored it — But I looked.

Unknown number. A text message.

[ *We've been trying to reach you. It's urgent. Please where can we find you?*]

I read it once. Then again.

Every sensible instinct I had left told me to put the phone down. But I had nothing left to lose.

I typed back.

*Who is this?*