Chapter 1- STARVING

I am lying underneath my husband.

He is moving. I am pretending.

That is the summary of my marriage in two sentences.

Michael Thomas, wealthy, handsome, completely clueless who finishes in four minutes flat, rolls off me like I am a hotel pillow he has rearranged for comfort, and falls asleep before I can exhale. No asking if I got there. No checking if I am still breathing. Just the soft, satisfied grunt of a man who believes he has just done something impressive and the immediate, offensive sound of his snoring filling the room.

I lie there.

Eyes open. Body humming with a frustration so deep it has become its own kind of grief. The ceiling is twelve feet high and completely blank, and I have memorized every inch of it because this; lying here, wanting more, getting nothing has become the most consistent part of my marriage.

Two years.

Two years of four-minute performances and rolled-over backs and lying in the dark with my thighs pressed together trying to finish what my husband started and never bothered to complete. Two years of dropping hints he never picked up, redirecting hands that went to the wrong places, and one devastating conversation where I sat across from him at this very bed and told him — plainly, vulnerably, with my entire heart exposed and what exactly what I needed from him.

He laughed, called it cute.

Went to sleep.

I have not tried again.

What I have done instead is become very, very good at pretending. Pretending marriage is fine. Pretending the bedroom is fine. Pretending I am a satisfied woman living a full life in a Manhattan penthouse with a man who loves me, in the only language he knows, money, appearances, and absolutely nothing else.

My name is Khloe David-Thomas. I am twenty-eight years old. I am a corporate attorney, a Thomas family wife, and a woman who hasn’t been properly touched in so long she has started dreaming about it.

Vivid, shameless, wake-up-gasping dreams.

About hands that know where to go. About a mouth that takes its time. About a man who looks at me like I am something worth looking at really looks, the kind that sees through the pencil skirt and the perfect smile and the carefully maintained composure all the way down to the woman underneath who is absolutely, desperately starving.

Those dreams have a face.

I am not ready to talk about that yet.

*****

My phone lights up at twelve forty-seven.

I have been lying awake for forty minutes. Michael is a warm, indifferent wall beside me. The city bleeds amber through the windows. I reach for the phone expecting a work notification, something from the New York bar association, or a client in a different time zone.

The name on the screen makes my heart stop.

“Samuel Thomas.”

I sit up slowly.

Samuel Thomas. Michael’s younger brother. The black sheep. The one who walked out of this family three years ago after a fight so ugly it left scorch marks on everything, walked straight out the front door of this penthouse into a December night without his coat and got on a plane to Paris and did not look back.

I have met him twice. Once at my wedding, when he looked at me with those dark, dangerous eyes and said, “Welcome to the family”, as if he were warning me about something I was too in love to hear. Once at Christmas dinner a year into the marriage, where he sat across from me and asked what I actually thought about the world, not small talk, not Thomas family theatre, but real questions that required real answers and I found myself saying things I hadn’t said out loud to anyone, including myself.

Michael didn’t notice we were talking.

That should have told me everything.

I opened the message.

Samuel: Flight lands at JFK tomorrow morning. Tell Michael if you see him before I do. Dad doesn’t have much time.

I read it three times.

Gerald Thomas, the patriarch, the empire builder, the man whose name is on half the buildings in this city has been in Mount Sinai for two weeks. Aggressive diagnosis. No good options. The kind of ending that happens fast and leaves no room for unfinished business.

Samuel is coming home.

My pulse is doing something it absolutely should not be doing right now.

I type back: “I’ll tell him. Safe travels.” Send it. Put the phone face down.

Lie back against my pillow.

Stare at the ceiling.

The wanting that has been living in my body for two years shifts rearranges itself around something new and dangerous, and I press my lips together and close my eyes and tell myself very firmly that I am a married woman and Samuel Thomas is my husband’s brother and whatever I am feeling right now is simply the product of loneliness and frustration and four-minute performances and absolutely nothing else.

I almost believe it.

The phone buzzes again.

Samuel: I remember you, Khloe. More than you probably know.”

I stop breathing.

I read those eight words over and over in the dark of my bedroom with my heart hammering and my sleeping husband three feet away and the city blazing beyond the glass.

I do not respond.

I lie awake until four in the morning instead.

*****

Michael finds out about Samuel over coffee the next morning.

He processes it the way he processes everything efficiently, without feeling, already moving to solutions before the information has fully landed. “I’ll have Mercy put him in the Langham. Good suite.” He scrolls his phone. “Can you liaise with the hospital about Dad’s afternoon visit? I have back-to-back calls until six.”

I look at my husband across the kitchen island.

This man. This beautiful, hollow man, who just learned his estranged brother is flying home because their father is dying, and his first response is to assign it to his assistant and squeeze a hospital visit between calls.

“Of course,” I say. My voice is smooth. My face is smooth. I am an excellent surface.

He leaves at six twenty without looking back.

I sit in the silence of the penthouse for a long moment.

Then I pick up my phone and call Samuel.

He answers on the first ring like he was already holding it. Like he was waiting.

“Khloe.” Just my name. Low and unhurried, and the sound of it moves through me in a way that makes me grip the phone tighter.

“I’m going to the hospital at two,” I say. “I thought you might want to…”

“I’ll be there,” he says. No hesitation. No checking a calendar. Just immediately, certainly: *I’ll be there.*

Exactly the opposite of his brother.

We hung up. I put the phone down. I press both palms flat on the cool kitchen counter and breathe slowly and tell myself what I have been telling myself since twelve forty-seven last night.

This is nothing. He is your brother-in-law. This is nothing.

My phone lights up one more time.

Samuel: “Thank you for calling. Not him.”

Four words. A heat moves through my entire body.

This is nothing.

God help me, this is nothing at all.

*****

He is standing outside Mount Sinai when my car pulls up at two o’clock, and my body betrays me before I am even fully out of the vehicle.

Three years have rebuilt Samuel Thomas into something I was completely unprepared for.

He was attractive before I registered that the way you register weather, a simple fact, no action required. But this man leaning against the hospital entrance with his hands in his pockets and three years of Paris living in the lines of him is something else entirely. Leaner. Darker around the eyes. The kind of quiet that only comes to people who have spent significant time alone with themselves and made peace with what they found there.

He turns when he hears my door close.

His eyes found me immediately.

And the way he looks at me openly, completely, like I am something he has been thinking about on a very long flight, makes me forget every sensible thing I rehearsed in the car.

“You look the same,” he says.

“So do you.” A lie. He looks devastating.

We hug, his arms around me, his jacket cold, his body warm underneath it and I step back before the hug becomes something I have to explain to myself later.

We go inside.

I watch Samuel sit beside his father’s bed and hold the older man’s hand and talk to him like time doesn’t matter and nowhere else exists. I watch Gerald’s face light up with relief when his son walks in. I watch the machines and the tubes and the particular smallness that illness gives to once large people.

I think about Michael’s six o’clock visit squeezed between calls.

I press my lips together and look at the floor.

*****

We went for a coffee after. We walk the same direction and end up across from each other in a small place that smells like espresso and old wood and has no Thomas family connections whatsoever.

Samuel asks me questions. Real ones.

Are you happy, Khloe?

I open my mouth to say “of course! the automatic, well-rehearsed “of course” that I give everyone and instead what comes out is a silence so long and so loud that it answers for me entirely.

Samuel doesn’t push. He doesn’t fill the silence with reassurances or redirect to safer ground. He looks at me with those dark, patient eyes and lets the truth sit between us like something that deserves space.

“No,” I say finally. Quietly. “Not really.”

He nods. Like he already knew. Like he has known since the wedding, when he shook my hand and said “Welcome to the family” with that warning underneath the words.

“Why do you stay?” he asks.

The question hits me somewhere undefended. “Because I made a choice,” I say. “And Thomas women don’t…”

“You’re not a Thomas woman,” he says. Gentle but precise. “You’re Khloe David, who married into a Thomas man’s world. That’s not the same thing.”

I stare at him.

No one has said that to me. Not once. Not in two years of slowly disappearing into this family’s shape.

My phone buzzes on the table. I look at the screen.

Michael Thomas: Skipping hospital visit today, too much on and Send Dad my love.

I set the phone face down without responding.

Samuel watches me do it. He sees everything, the set of my jaw, the thing I swallow before my composure slides back into place and he says nothing. He reaches across the table and covers my hand with his.

Warm. Still. Not demanding anything.

Just there.

I look down at his hand on mine, his compass rose tattoo, his calloused fingers, the simple weight of someone choosing to be present and feel the burn start behind my eyes.

I will not cry in a coffee shop over my husband’s text message.

I blink it back. I look up. Samuel is watching me with an expression that feels like it's in my entire chest.

“You deserve more than this,” he says quietly.

“Samuel”

“I’m not saying it to start something.” His hand is still on mine. “I’m saying it because someone should have said it to you a long time ago.”

The coffee shop hums around us,the afternoon light shifts. Somewhere outside, a cab lies on its horn, and the city continues its magnificent indifference.

I turn my hand over under his.

Just that. Just my palm against his palm.

His fingers curl around mine.

We sit like that for a long, charged, breathless moment, not speaking, not moving, just holding on and I feel it everywhere. Every neglected nerve ending. Every starved, silent, four-minute-performance night.

I feel it all the way down.

I pull my hand back slowly. I pick up my coffee. I perform the reassembly of Khloe David-Thomas with practiced efficiency.

“I should get back,” I say.

He nods. He doesn’t try to stop me. He pays the check before I reach for my bag, and we walk outside into the cold October air and stand on the sidewalk, and I turn to say goodbye.

He looks at me.

Just look at me. Fully. The way he has been looking at me since the hospital entrance is like I am worth every second of his complete attention and I feel my carefully rebuilt composure developing serious structural problems.

“Goodnight, Khloe,” he says.

“Goodnight, Samuel.”

I walk to the corner. I hail a cab. I get in, give the driver my address, sit back, press my fingers against my lips, and feel the electricity still moving through my palm where his hand held mine.

I am in so much trouble.

My phone buzzes.

I look down, expecting Samuel with another eight words that will keep me awake until four in the morning.

It is not Samuel.

It is a number I don’t recognize. And the message attached to it makes every cell in my body go cold.

I saw you two at the coffee shop. Does Michael know his wife is holding hands with his brother? — A Friend.