Chapter 2 - Shattered

Elara's POV

The streetlight above the driveway kept flickering, throwing broken shadows across the gravel, and I stood under it gripping the divorce papers as if they were the only thing holding me upright. My hands shook so badly that the pages rustled in the night air. I couldn't remember driving home. I remembered headlights smeared by rain, the wipers dragging back and forth, and a woman in the rearview mirror with ruined makeup who looked like she'd lost everything in a single evening, because she had.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and unlocked the front door. My heels clicked across the marble, and the sound came back at me from every corner of the house, too loud for how empty it felt. Somewhere in the kitchen a tap was running.

Karen came out of the hallway with a dish towel in her hands. She had worked for us since the week I moved in, and in three years I had never once seen her stop moving to simply stand and stare at me.

"Ma'am. You're home early."

"Early?" My voice came out hoarse from crying in the car. It sounded like it belonged to someone else. "Why do you look so surprised to see me, Karen?"

"I didn't expect you, that's all." She was twisting the towel so tightly around her knuckles that her fingers had gone pale, and her eyes kept sliding to the staircase and back to me. "It's late. You must be tired. Maybe I should make you some tea in the kitchen."

"Is Ian home?"

"Doña." She lowered her voice until I could barely hear it. "Maybe you should go back out for a while. He'll come back soon, I'm sure of it."

Something cold slid down my spine. Karen had never in her life told me to leave my own house.

I opened my mouth to ask her what she meant, and that was when I heard it from upstairs. It was a soft, breathy sound, a woman's, followed by a low laugh and then the slow creak of a bedframe. I knew that creak. I had fallen asleep to it settling every night for three years. It was my bed.

The hallway went completely silent around me, and all I could hear was my own pulse hammering behind my ears.

"Please, Doña," Karen said, and her eyes had filled with tears. "Please don't go up there."

But I was already walking. My legs moved without asking me, one stair and then the next, my hand sliding along the banister so I wouldn't fall. The closer I got, the clearer it became. Murmuring. A laugh I almost recognized. A man's voice, low and lazy, saying something I couldn't make out, in a tone I hadn't heard directed at me since before our wedding.

The bedroom door was half open, with a strip of lamplight falling across the carpet. I put my palm flat against the wood and pushed.

Our bed looked like something had torn through it. The sheets were twisted off the mattress, two pillows lay on the floor, and the air smelled of sweat and a perfume that wasn't mine. A woman's red dress was draped over the armchair I used to read in. Ian was there, and he wasn't alone.

Camila.

She was on my side of the bed with her hair loose over my pillow, the woman I'd called my sister in everything but blood. She had stood next to me at my wedding holding my flowers and crying harder than I had. She had held my hair back the night I got sick from nerves. She'd been the one I trusted with Ian's schedule, his dinners, his secrets, and with me, all of me. She was saying his name as he moved over her, softly, the way you say a name you've said many times before, and Ian was answering with a tenderness I had begged for and never been given.

I didn't scream. I didn't move. My fingers stayed pressed against the door, and I watched them the way you'd watch a car crash from the sidewalk, unable to look away, unable to make my body do anything. I think it was the tenderness that broke me. If it had only been lust I could have hated him cleanly. But I heard how gently he said her name, and I understood that the man who couldn't find an hour for my birthday had found plenty of hours for her.

A small sound escaped my throat, not quite a sob and not quite a word, just the noise a person makes when something inside them gives way.

They froze. Ian turned his head slowly, with no hurry at all, and when he saw me there was no shock in his face, no guilt, nothing I could have clung to. His mouth curved into a small, lazy, satisfied smile. He didn't reach for the sheet. He didn't even bother to sit up straight.

Camila looked at me next, and this was the part I would see every night afterward. She didn't gasp. She didn't flinch or cry or start apologizing. She just looked, calm and unbothered, as if I had walked in on her reading.

"Oh," Ian said. "You're home."

That was all. Three years of marriage, and that was all he had.

Camila pulled the sheet over her chest with exaggerated modesty, though the smirk never left her face. "Guess the party ended early," she murmured.

My throat burned. I could feel my knees starting to give, and I locked them and made myself stand straight, because I'd already been on my knees in front of three hundred people this evening and I would not do it again. I stepped into the room and threw the divorce papers at him. They hit his chest and slid onto the sheets.

"Was this what you wanted?" My voice cracked and I forced it steady. "To humiliate me twice in one night, Ian? Once in front of the whole city wasn't enough?"

He got out of the bed and pulled on his trousers without hurrying, like a man finishing a meeting and not ending a marriage. "I didn't plan for you to see this. But I'm not going to pretend I'm sorry that you did."

"We were married for three years."

"We were never really married." He fastened his belt. "I only went through with it because of my grandmother. She wanted me settled, so I settled. I never wanted you, Elara. Not for one day."

Every word was said in the same level voice he used to order dinner. It hit harder than a slap would have.

"Look at yourself," he went on, and now there was contempt in it. "Honestly. If you were me, would you want you?"

"You used me." Something hot rose in my chest, finally. "For your image, your grandmother, your convenience. I kept your house and your bed warm and your schedule straight, and now you stand there like I'm the one who's done something wrong?"

"You were never enough." He said it almost gently, which was worse. "Not in this house, not at my table, not in my bed. Even there, you made it feel like a duty I had to get through. With Camila I don't have to pretend. She's easy. She's what I actually want."

Camila slid out of the bed with the sheet wrapped around her, took her time crossing the floor, and draped herself against his arm. He looked down at her and she kissed him, slowly, with her eyes open and fixed on mine the whole time. It wasn't passion. It was a signature.

"I think she finally gets it," Camila said against his jaw, tracing a nail down his chest. "Maybe now you can stop pretending you ever mattered here, Elara."

My nails dug crescents into my palms. Every breath felt like swallowing broken glass.

"Very soon I'll be the next Mrs. Vance," she added, her voice sweet as syrup. "The only woman who knows what he really needs." She nodded toward the dresser, where a small suitcase sat by the wall with its zipper half closed. "I even packed a few things for you. Since you'll be leaving tonight."

I looked at the suitcase, and then at the dress on my armchair, and then at her, and the anger came up so fast it burned off the shaking.

"So this is what you did with your life," I said. "You waited until I was gone and then you stole someone else's used husband."

Her face changed. The smirk dropped off it. "How dare you, you bitch!" She lunged and raised her hand to slap me—

Ian caught her wrist and pulled her back, and for half a second I actually thought he was going to protect me. Then he turned and hit me himself, an open-handed blow that snapped my head sideways into the wall. White light burst behind my eyes. When I touched my temple my fingers came away warm and wet, and a thin line of blood ran down toward my jaw.

He watched it happen without so much as a flinch. "Don't talk to her like that," he said. "Not in my house."

The room swayed. My eyes stung, but I wouldn't let the tears fall in front of them, so I blinked them back and stood there bleeding on the carpet we'd picked out together.

"You'll regret this," I said quietly. My voice shook, but underneath it was something close to steel. "I promise you that."

Ian laughed, and then he walked up close enough that I could smell her perfume on his skin. "My grandmother isn't here to protect you anymore. Get out before I lose my temper."

His fingers closed around my arm hard enough to leave bruises, and he shoved me toward the door. I stumbled against the frame, caught myself on the wood, and stayed on my feet. I had fallen on that stage and in that hall and in every room of that house for three years, and I wasn't going to fall now.

I took the suitcase from beside the dresser myself, so that she wouldn't have the satisfaction of handing it to me. Nobody said another word. I walked down the stairs with blood drying at my hairline and the suitcase bumping against my leg, and at the bottom Karen was waiting with her hands pressed over her mouth, whispering my name over and over like a prayer she didn't know how to finish. I didn't stop. If I had, I wouldn't have been able to start again.

The night air outside was cold and merciless against my wet face. I got as far as the edge of the driveway before I heard it drifting down from the open bedroom window, thin and bright and unmistakable. Camila was laughing.

I stood under the broken streetlight with the suitcase in one hand and my own blood on the other, and I made myself a promise, quietly, so quietly that the wind almost took it.

They would both pay.