CHAPTER THREE: The Guest Room

Emma's POV

The guest room door is slightly open.

It is always slightly open. Liam never fully closes doors he considers temporarily his, like he is leaving himself an exit route in every room he occupies, which honestly tracks.

I push it open and stand in the doorway.

It smells like his cologne in here. That expensive, understated scent that I once found attractive and have spent the last six months finding quietly maddening, the way you feel about a song that was playing during a bad experience.

I am not sure what I have come in here for.

Something to do, maybe. Somewhere to put the restlessness while I wait for my mother and try not to think about the divorce or Talia's key or the three things sitting on my nightstand like exhibits at a trial nobody invited me to.

I start opening drawers.

Not snooping, exactly. Just looking around. In fourteen months I have never once come in here searching through his things because I have always been the kind of woman who would rather not look too closely when she already knows she is not going to like what she finds.

That approach has worked out great for me, clearly.

The first two drawers have nothing interesting. Cufflinks. A spare charger. A hotel key card from somewhere he has apparently forgotten to return.

The third drawer has a phone.

Not his regular phone. An older model. Smaller. The screen cracked in the upper right corner. The kind of phone that exists for one reason and one reason only, which is to be a phone that his regular phone does not know about.

I pick it up.

It is not locked.

I sit down on the edge of the guest bed and think about the kind of person I want to be.

A person who puts it back? A person who respects privacy? A person who takes the high road and leaves this room with her dignity fully intact?

I open the messages.

One contact. Saved as T.

I scroll to the very beginning.

The first message is dated fourteen months ago.

Two weeks before our wedding.

"She has no idea, does she?"

Talia's message. I can hear the smile in it from here.

"None," Liam had replied. "My father's arrangement. Six months and then I end it cleanly."

I read that line three times.

Six months.

He walked into our marriage with a six-month exit plan already in his back pocket. Which means every dinner I made and every event I attended and every night I lay awake listening to him sleep down the hall, every single one of those things happened inside a timeline he had already decided on before we even started.

My hands shake.

Just once. Just for a second. The phone trembling in my grip like something alive that wants to be put down, and I watch it happen from a slight distance, watch my own hands betray me for one full second, and then I close them tighter around the phone and it stops.

I keep scrolling.

Month seven.

"The board is watching. A divorce this early looks unstable. Another six months."

"You keep saying another six months," Talia had replied.

"I know. I'm sorry. It's business."

"Is it still just business?"

A long pause before his reply.

"Yes."

Her response came back immediately.

"Liar."

I sit with that for a moment.

Then I keep scrolling and I find something that sits differently from all the rest, something I have not expected and am not prepared for.

Around month eleven, Talia's messages change register.

"She's been asking questions," she had written. "About the Harrington account. About the Singapore money. Liam, she's not as unaware as you think."

I stop.

I have never asked about the Harrington account.

I do not even know what the Harrington account is.

I scroll back and find more. Three or four messages over the following weeks, each one Talia reporting something I have apparently said or done. Observations made. Concerns noted. All delivered with the reluctant care of someone who hates to be the bearer of bad news.

None of it happened.

I have spent the last eight months talking to Cara Whitfield about kitchen renovations and talking to the other board wives about schools and dry cleaners and whether the new restaurant on Fifth is actually as good as everyone says it is.

That is it.

That is the full extent of my scheming.

I stand up.

The room is too small.

I walk to the window with the phone in my hand and I keep reading and I can feel the space around me tightening, the guest room contracting into something I need to be out of, air I need to be somewhere else in, and I stand at the window with my back to the room and I keep reading because I have to know all of it now, every word, every observation, every carefully constructed lie handed to a man who never once thought to check the source.

Talia has taken my ordinary life and built an entirely different woman out of it and handed her to Liam piece by piece.

And Liam has taken every piece and noted it and never once come to me and said Emma, is this true?

I stand at the window and I go very still.

The Los Angeles morning does whatever Los Angeles mornings do outside the glass, indifferent and bright, and I stand there holding a phone full of my own erasure and I do not move.

I do not move for a long time.

Then I hear the front door.

Footsteps in the hallway.

I look up.

Liam is in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, jacket off, and he looks at me standing at the guest room window with his second phone in my hand and the color leaves his face in a way that answers every question I have not yet finished asking.

We look at each other.

"Emma..."

"Six months," I say. "That was the plan. Before you even married me."

He does not deny it. He does not say anything.

"The things Talia told you I said." I look down at the phone. "The Harrington account. The board wives. All of it." I look back up at him. "Did you ever ask me? Even once?"

The silence is its own answer.

"I'd like you to leave," I say. "I'm still packing."

"Let me explain..."

"Liam." My voice is completely even. "I genuinely do not have the capacity for your explanation today. Send the lawyer."

I walk to him and hold the phone out.

He takes it.

His hand is not entirely steady.

I walk past him to my bedroom and close the door and stand on the other side of it with both hands pressed flat against the wood.

I breathe.

In.

Out.

Fourteen months.

He married me with an exit plan already written.

And Talia spent those fourteen months making sure he stayed angry enough at a woman who did not exist to never look too closely at the one who did.

I stand at the door.

I do not cry.

Somewhere underneath everything, underneath the cold clarity and the six months and the phone in his unsteady hand, something else is sitting quietly and persistently that has nothing to do with Liam or Talia or any of it.

Something that has been sitting there for seventeen days.

Something my mother is stopping at two pharmacies for.

I press my forehead against the door.

And I make the decision I have been avoiding making for months, the one that arrives now not with weight but with the strange, clean lightness of something inevitable.

Whatever is happening inside my body right now, whatever those pharmacy tests are going to say when my mother gets here.

He is never going to know.

I push off from the door.

I go back to packing.

Fold a sweater.

Put it in the suitcase.

Fold another.