Chapter 4: What I Want

What do I want?

Nobody has asked me that in a very long time.

Derek used to ask, in the beginning. What do you want for dinner, what do you want to do this weekend, where do you want to go for our anniversary. Small questions. The kind that feel like love when someone is asking them and feel like performance when you look back and realize they stopped somewhere around month eight and you did not even notice.

I type back to Rhys: Can we meet?

Three dots.

When?

Saturday. Somewhere public.

There is a place called Archer's on Clement Street. Noon.

I save the address. Then I put my phone down and lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling and do something I have not let myself do in three weeks.

I cry

Not the ugly kind. Not the falling-apart kind. Just quiet tears running sideways into my hair while I breathe steadily and let myself feel the full weight of what this is. Two years. I gave this man two years of my life, my body, my loyalty, my future plans, the name I legally changed, the side of the bed I gave up because he said he slept better near the window.

The side of the bed I gave up.

Ugh.

I press my palms against my eyes and breathe until it passes.

Five minutes. That is all I allow.

Then I get up, wash my face, and sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and a glass of water and I start making a list.

Not of feelings. Of actions.

Step one is already done. Evidence gathered, backed up, secured.

Step two is Saturday. Meet Rhys. Confirm we are aligned. Decide together how this lands.

Step three is Derek coming home. I have to be completely normal when he walks through that door. No coldness, no distance, no anything that tells him I know. I need him comfortable. Off-guard. I need him to believe he got away with it.

Step four is the one that makes me feel something I am not entirely proud of but also not sorry about. Step four is the part where Vivienne Callahan finds out that consequences exist.

I close the laptop at midnight and go back to bed.

I sleep better than I have in weeks.

Derek comes home Friday evening with flowers.

Pink peonies, my favourite, which means his guilt is substantial because he only remembers my favourite flower when he has done something worth feeling guilty about. The last time he brought me peonies was after he forgot our first anniversary and spent two days overcorrecting.

"Hey beautiful," he says, handing them over with that smile. The good one. The one I fell for.

"These are gorgeous," I say, and I kiss him on the cheek and take them to the kitchen to find a vase, and I am so calm it almost frightens me.

"Good trip?" I call from the kitchen.

"Productive," he says, dropping onto the couch. "Tiring. Glad to be home."

Glad to be home. After spending two nights with his ex in a four star hotel.

I arrange the peonies in the vase and I think, you have no idea what is coming, and something about that thought is the most settled I have felt in weeks.

We eat dinner together. He talks about the project. I ask questions. I laugh at the right moments. I refill his glass. I am the perfect wife, attentive and warm and completely present, and not once does Derek Vann look across the table at me and see the woman who has twenty-three screenshots saved in two cloud accounts and a meeting tomorrow at noon.

After dinner he reaches across the table and takes my hand.

"I feel like we have not had a real night together in a while," he says, thumb moving across my knuckles.

I look at him. At this man I married. At the face I know so well, every line, every expression, the way his eyes do that soft thing when he wants something.

"You are right," I say. "We should fix that."

He smiles.

Later, when the lights are off and he is asleep beside me, breathing slow and even, I lie in the dark and think about tomorrow.

Archer's on Clement Street. Noon.

I have never met Rhys Callahan in person. I know his face from photos, know his voice is probably low from the economy of his texts, know he is the kind of man who asks what you want instead of telling you what is going to happen.

I also know that in every photo I have seen of him, he looks like the kind of man you do not forget.

I tell myself that is irrelevant.

I tell myself this is strategy. Purely strategy. Two people with a shared problem finding a shared solution.

My phone lights up on the nightstand. I grab it fast before it wakes Derek.

A message from Rhys.

I looked her up tonight. Her whole social media. Going back two years.

I type back quietly in the dark: And?

They never stopped. This has been going on since before he married you.

I read that twice.

Before he married me.

Not during. Before. Which means Derek walked down the aisle already knowing. Already choosing. Already lying.

My chest does something complicated and painful and I breathe through it and type one word back.

Okay.

Rhys replies immediately.

Are you okay?

And honestly, the fact that he asks, this stranger, this man I have never been in the same room with, the fact that he thinks to ask that in this moment, does something to me I was not expecting.

My eyes sting.

I will be, I tell him.

Yeah, he writes back. Me too.

I put the phone down. Derek shifts beside me, sighs in his sleep, reaches an arm toward me without waking.

I do not move away.

But I do not move closer either.

Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow everything starts moving.