Chapter 5: Archer's

I get there first.

Deliberately.

I want to see him walk in before he sees me. I want that five seconds of observing without being observed, the small advantage of knowing what I am dealing with before the interaction starts. Old habit. My mother called it paranoia. I call it preparation.

Archer's is a corner cafe with exposed brick and good lighting and the kind of background noise that makes private conversations possible. He chose well. I pick a table near the window, order a black coffee, and sit with my back to the wall facing the door.

Twelve minutes later, Rhys Callahan walks in.

Okay.

So the photos did not lie, they just undersold.

He is tall, broader than I expected, wearing a dark jacket over a grey shirt, no tie, sleeves pushed to the elbows. He scans the room with the kind of practiced quiet efficiency that tells me he also wanted to get here first and he is mildly annoyed that he did not. His jaw is doing something tight and controlled and his eyes find me in about four seconds flat.

He walks over without hesitating.

"Camille," he says. It was not a question.

"Rhys," I say back.

He sits down across from me and for a moment we just look at each other, two people who have been talking through screens for a week and are now sitting three feet apart in a coffee shop because our spouses decided fidelity was optional.

"You look calmer than I expected," he says.

"You look angrier than you sound over text," I say.

Something shifts in his expression. Not quite a smile. Close though.

The waiter comes. He orders black coffee too, which I note for no reason whatsoever.

"So," he says when the waiter leaves. "Tell me everything."

I tell him.

Not emotionally. Clearly, chronologically, the way you present a case rather than a grievance. The password, the cloned W******p, the hotel screenshots, the timeline going back two years. I slide my phone across the table with the evidence folder open and I watch his face while he scrolls.

He is very still while he looks.

The kind of still that is not calm. The kind that is held together by sheer force of will.

"They were together before your wedding," he says without looking up.

"Yes."

"And mine." His voice is flat.

"Based on the timestamps, yes."

He sets the phone down. Looks out the window. A muscle works in his jaw and I give him a moment because that is not information a person absorbs quickly. Finding out your marriage started as someone's backup plan is a specific kind of devastation.

I know because I felt it Thursday night, sideways, into my hair, for five minutes.

"I knew something was wrong," he says quietly. "Six months ago I asked her directly. She cried. Told me I was paranoid, that I was punishing her for a past relationship she had ended before we got together." He pauses. "I believed her."

"Of course you did," I say. "She is good at it."

He looks back at me then. Something in his eyes that I recognize because I have seen it in my own mirror this week. The particular look of a smart person processing the fact that they were fooled.

"What do you want to do?" he asks. Second time he has asked me that. I am starting to think it is just how he operates, leading with what the other person needs rather than what he has already decided.

Interesting.

"I want her to face a consequence," I say. "I want Derek to face a consequence. And I want it to be undeniable and permanent and something neither of them can talk their way out of."

"Meaning you want me to confront her."

"I want you to have the full picture first. What you do with it is your choice."

He is quiet for a moment. "And you? What is your move after?"

"I leave," I say simply. "But on my timeline. Not his."

He nods slowly, like that makes complete sense to him, like he has already figured out I am not the type to flip a table before I am ready to walk away from it.

"We should do it the same day," he says. "So neither of them can warn the other."

Smart. I had already thought this but the fact that he arrived at it independently tells me something useful about how his mind works.

"Agreed," I say.

We spend the next forty minutes working out the details. It is the strangest planning meeting I have ever been part of, sitting across from a man I met a week ago, dismantling two marriages over coffee with the efficiency of people organizing a work project. At one point he makes a dry comment about the irony of us being better partners in ten days than our actual partners managed in years and I laugh before I can stop myself.

Genuine. Caught off guard.

He looks at me when I laugh. Just for a second. Like he filed something away.

"Next Friday," I say, pulling myself back. "Derek has a work dinner. He will be out by seven. That gives you a window to go home and confront Vivienne before he can reach her."

"And you?"

"I will be ready when he gets back."

He picks up his coffee. Studies me over the rim. "You are not scared?"

"Of Derek?" I almost laugh again. "No."

"Not of him," Rhys says. "Of all of it. Blowing everything up."

I think about that honestly for a second. About the house. The peonies. The side of the bed I gave up. The two years I spent being a good wife to a man who was managing two women at once like it was a scheduling problem.

"What is there to be scared of losing," I say, "when it was never really mine?"

Something moves across his face. Fast. Gone before I can name it.

He puts his cup down and looks at me steadily.

"Friday," he says.

"Friday," I confirm.

I drive home twenty minutes later, window down, city noise filling the car, and I tell myself the warmth sitting in my chest is just the coffee.

I am almost convincing.