Chapter 2

Dial Tone

Natalie’s POV

I didn’t need to see all of it.

That was the strange mercy buried inside the horror. One glance should have been enough.

But my fingers wouldn’t stop.

The first photo loaded fully. Daniel. My husband. The man whose coffee I still made every morning. The father of my son.

He wasn’t alone.

The woman beneath him had her head tilted back against a hotel pillow I didn’t recognize. Dark hair spilled across the white sheets. His hand was tangled in it, holding her in place. His mouth was at her throat. The angle of the shot was intimate—private—the kind of moment that was never supposed to leave a locked room.

I clicked the next one before I could stop myself.

Then the next.

Her legs were wrapped around his waist. His shirt was gone. The focused expression on his face—the same one I used to know—was locked on her as he moved. One of her hands gripped his shoulder. The other was lost somewhere in the sheets. The low light of the hotel room made everything look softer than it should have. Almost tender.

Almost real.

My vision narrowed. The fluorescent lights above me suddenly felt too sharp, too loud. Somewhere far away, the copier kept whirring like nothing in the world had changed.

But everything had.

I slammed the laptop shut so hard the sound cracked across the open floor like a gunshot.

Priya flinched. So did two people I didn’t even know by name.

For a moment I just sat there, both palms flat on the closed lid, breathing like I’d been running instead of sitting perfectly still. The overhead lights buzzed. The copier finished its cycle with a soft, oblivious chime.

I thought of Noah’s little painted handprint turkey still taped above the fridge from Thanksgiving. Of how normal this morning had felt compared to right now. Of how I was going to have to walk into that same kitchen tonight and be a mother who knew how to make dinner and check homework and not let any of this touch him.

There was a particular kind of math I’d learned to do in moments like this. How much of this would reach Noah’s school. Whether another mother in the pickup line would say something within earshot of him. Whether he’d come home one day repeating a word he didn’t understand the weight of. I’d spent four years doing this math. I was disturbingly good at it by now.

My phone was still buzzing. I’d lost count of how many messages had piled up in the last four minutes. Four minutes. It felt like the entire architecture of my life had shifted in four minutes.

I picked it up with hands that weren’t quite steady and called Daniel.

It rang.

And rang.

No animated dots. No sign he’d even glanced at the screen.

Something in my chest tightened into a fist.

Voicemail. His voice, recorded months ago, breezy and warm in a way that felt like an insult now.

“You’ve reached Daniel Whitmore. Leave a message.”

I didn’t leave one. What was there to say into a recording? I know. I saw. Call me back. As if this were a scheduling conflict instead of my name trending somewhere I hadn’t even had the stomach to check.

I tried texting instead.

Call me now.

One gray checkmark. Unread. Mocking me.

“Natalie.”

I looked up. My supervisor, Gordon, stood at the edge of my desk with the particular expression of a man who’d rehearsed something kind on the way over and lost his nerve halfway.

“You don’t have to be here today. If you want to head out—”

“I’m fine.” The words came out clipped, automatic. Years of practice behind them. “I have the Larkspur deck due by two.”

Gordon’s mouth opened like he wanted to argue, then closed again. “Okay,” he said, and retreated.

I understood with a small, hollow certainty that he’d remember this moment for a long time—the woman who sat perfectly composed at her desk while her marriage detonated in full view of the internet.

I got through forty minutes like that. Forty minutes of staring at a marketing deck without absorbing a single word. Forty minutes of catching sideways glances from every direction. Forty minutes of Priya’s careful silence somehow louder than if she’d said something outright. Forty minutes of my phone sitting face-down because I couldn’t stand to watch the notifications keep coming.

At some point I caught my own reflection in the dark screen of my monitor—jaw set, spine straight, the exact posture I used to walk into board meetings, deployed now just to get through an ordinary Tuesday. I almost admired myself for it, in a distant, clinical way. The way you might admire a building still standing after an earthquake, even as you counted the cracks running up its walls.

When my phone finally rang, I nearly knocked over my coffee reaching for it.

“Daniel.” His name came out of me like something spat rather than spoken.

“Nat.” His voice was maddeningly even—the voice he used in board meetings. The voice that had once made me feel safe and now just made me feel managed. “Look, I know how this looks—”

“How it looks?” I kept my voice low, aware of the open floor around me. “Daniel, there are pictures of you online. With another woman. My cousin texted me. Strangers texted me.”

“It’s being handled.” A pause, and then, worse than anything before it: “It’s not as bad as it probably looks. You’re overreacting.”

Something in me went very quiet and very cold.

“I’m overreacting,” I repeated.

“I mean—Nat, come on. You know how these things get blown out of proportion online. By tonight it’ll be old news. Something else will happen and everyone will move on.”

“Everyone,” I said, “has already moved on to laughing about it in the break room. I’m the one who has to sit here and pretend I don’t hear them.”

A sigh on the other end—the particular sigh of a man being deeply inconvenienced by his own choices. “I have back-to-back meetings until six. Can we not do this over the phone?”

I stared at the deck still glowing on my screen. “When, then. When can we do this.”

“Tonight. I’ll come by the apartment.” Another pause, softer now, the tone he used when he wanted something to land gently. “It’s really not what it looks like, Nat. I promise.”

I almost laughed. It came out instead as something closer to a breath punched out of me.

“You said that the last time. And the time before that.”

The line went quiet in a way that told me he had nothing to say to that—nothing that wouldn’t require an honesty he clearly didn’t have available to him at eleven-forty on a Tuesday morning between meetings.

“Tonight,” he said again, and the call ended before I could decide whether that had been a promise or a dismissal.

I set the phone down slowly, precisely, like it might shatter if I wasn’t careful. Around me the office had resumed its normal hum—keyboards, low conversation, the copier starting up again. The particular cruelty of a workplace that simply continued, indifferent, while my whole life sat cracked open on every screen in the building.

I looked back at my laptop. The Larkspur deck. Numbers and projections that suddenly felt like they belonged to someone else’s life.

My phone buzzed once more. Not Daniel. A new number. The message preview visible without me even needing to open it.

hey I don’t know if you’ve seen the news but marcus is asking if you’re okay. he’s worried.

I went very still.

I hadn’t thought about Marcus once—not through the texts, not through the phone call, not through forty minutes of pretending competence I didn’t feel. And now his name sat there on my screen, gentle and unbearable. The one person in this entire company who’d never once made me feel small, asking after me through a stranger because he hadn’t dared ask me himself.

I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t have room, right now, for anything that felt like kindness. It might undo the last threads holding me together.

My phone buzzed again before I could decide.

This time it wasn’t a text.

It was a call.

And the name on the screen wasn’t Daniel’s.

It was Marcus.