Chapter 2

AURORA

Kieran was waiting at the end of my driveway at four.

I slid into the passenger seat without a word and he pulled away from the curb without one either. There wasn't anything to say. In an hour we would either prove him a liar or watch my whole life catch fire.

The drive out of the city took us past vineyards and down a two-lane road that curved along a river. The Hartwell Estate sat at the top of a wooded hill, all white stone and black shutters and a long gravel driveway lined with lanterns. It was a boutique inn, the kind that only took one booking at a time. Rhett had told me he was closing a deal in a downtown office tower.

The sky above us had been grey all day. By the time Kieran killed the engine, the first fat drops were hitting the windshield.

"We don't have long," he said. "Housekeeping leaves at five."

A woman in a crisp apron met us at the service door around the back. Kieran handed her an envelope. She didn't count it. She just nodded and led us through a service hallway that smelled like fresh linen, then unlocked a door that opened onto a stone terrace framed with climbing roses.

"They're on the lower lawn," she murmured. "Through the hedge." Then she was gone.

I followed Kieran across the wet stones. The rain was picking up now, cold against the back of my neck. He pushed aside a gap in the hedge and stepped through.

Then he stopped.

He didn't look at me. He just stood very still and let me catch up.

I pushed past the branches and lifted my eyes.

Rhett.

My husband stood at the edge of the lawn with his back to the river. He wasn't in a suit. He was in jeans and a cream sweater I had never seen before, with his sleeves pushed up and his hair tousled by the breeze.

Noelle was wrapped around him. Her arms around his neck. His hand low on her back. They were swaying to music only they could hear.

My feet forgot how to work.

Please no. Please God no.

I felt Kieran glance at me. Fast. The way you check on something fragile without wanting to be caught looking. He didn't say anything.

I pulled out my phone with hands that didn't belong to me and dialed Rhett.

Across the lawn I watched my husband reach into his pocket. I watched Noelle lean up and whisper something into his ear that made him smile. I watched him lift the phone, see my name, and answer.

"Hey, beautiful." His voice came through warm as sunlight. "I was just thinking about you."

My throat closed. I pushed the words through anyway. "Where are you right now?"

"Still at the office." He sighed like a man wearing himself out for his family. "Hamilton pushed the meeting back again. I might be here late. I'm sorry, babe."

"That's okay," I heard myself say.

"You eat something, alright? Don't skip dinner because I'm not there. Promise me."

"I promise."

"I love you so much, Aurora."

"I love you too, Rhett."

He hung up.

Across the lawn my husband slipped the phone back into his jeans and turned to my sister. She tipped her face up to his. He kissed her the way he used to kiss me when we were nineteen and stupid and sure the whole world belonged to us.

Then the sky opened.

Rain crashed down in sheets. In seconds I was soaked through. My blouse clung to my ribs. My hair stuck to my cheeks. I didn't move. I didn't try to find shelter. I just stood in that gap in the hedge and let it drown me.

Rhett laughed. He threw his head back and laughed and spun Noelle in a slow circle like they were in a movie.

Then he pressed her back against the trunk of a willow tree and the kind of kiss that followed wasn't a first kiss or a second kiss or a hundredth. It was the kiss of a man who had every inch of her mapped already. The kiss of a man who had been coming home from "late meetings" to this for months.

His hand slid up under the hem of her dress.

Mine clenched into fists at my sides.

What happened next in the rain shattered something in me I knew would never knit back together. I watched my husband take my little sister against a tree while the sky poured down on them, and I couldn't tear my eyes away.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream. I couldn't do anything except stand there in borrowed rain and feel every single thing I believed about my life crumble into mud at my feet.

Kieran's hand closed around my elbow.

"Enough," he said, close to my ear. "Aurora. You've seen enough."

I let him pull me back through the hedge, back across the terrace, back into the warm, cedar-scented hallway where I could still hear the rain hammering the roof.

He was right. I had seen enough.

Enough to know that every "I love you" was a line he'd rehearsed. Every bouquet was a bribe. Every goodnight kiss had been the kind of kiss a man gives a woman he is successfully fooling.

Four years of my life.

Thrown away.

I didn't scream. I didn't collapse. I walked beside a man I had met one time in my life, soaked to the bone, hollowed out, and the only sentence my brain could form was one that looped itself in a cruel little circle.

What's wrong with me?

What did I do?