Chapter Two: Don't You Dare Cry

POV: Roza

I knew her perfume before anything else.

Chanel No. 5. Gemma had worn it since we were twenty-one, since she had saved for two months to buy the first bottle and spritzed it on her wrists in the university toilets before a night out, grinning at me in the mirror. I had borrowed it once. She had pretended to be annoyed. That was twelve years ago and I could still smell it in my sleep.

She was on the study sofa. Callum was beside her. They did not pull apart when the door opened.

The room sorted itself into details the way a room does when you are in shock, when the mind refuses the whole picture and starts collecting pieces instead. The lamp on the desk throwing warm light. Callum's jacket folded over the back of the chair. Gemma's heels on the floor beside the sofa, placed neatly, side by side. Her hair loose. His shirt untucked. The two of them looking at me across the room with completely different expressions, Callum with the flat, unsurprised look of a man who had been caught doing something he intended to do, and Gemma with something that chilled me far more, because it was not guilt and it was not shame. It was satisfaction.

"Roza." Callum's voice was even, the board-meeting voice, the one that closed arguments before they started. "You should have knocked."

Nothing came out of my mouth. I was standing in my own home, in the doorway of a room I had dusted and arranged and filled with his books, holding a pregnancy test wrapped in tissue and staring at my husband and my best friend, and not a single word was available to me.

Gemma reached for the glass of wine on the side table. She crossed her ankles. She looked at me over the rim of the glass the way you look at someone whose visit you have been expecting.

"Honestly, sweetheart," she said, "you really should have called ahead."

"She is my best friend." My voice came out wrong, scraped thin, barely mine. I was not even talking to Gemma. I was still looking at Callum. Only at Callum. "She is my best friend, Callum."

"Was," Gemma said, simply, the way you correct a factual error.

Callum stood. He reached for his shirt from the back of the chair and began buttoning it without hurry, starting at the bottom, working upward, not looking at me. There was something about the unhurriedness that was worse than anything he could have said. He was not even bothering to perform regret.

"Don't make a scene," he said.

Something snapped open in my chest.

"Don't make a scene." The words came back out of me before I could stop them. "Seven years, Callum. Seven years I woke up in this house and cooked in this kitchen and sat across from you at dinner and tried to be what you needed, and you told me I was too fat, that I was an embarrassment, that you were ashamed every time I walked into a room with you. You told me I was barren. You said it like it was my fault. Like I had failed at the one basic thing a woman is supposed to do." My voice was shaking and I hated it for shaking. "And the whole time it was this."

He picked up his watch from the desk and fastened it around his wrist.

"I never loved you." He said it the same way he said everything, flat and precise and without cruelty, which somehow made it land harder than cruelty would have. "I married you because two families expected it and I was twenty-six and not paying attention. I should have ended it years ago. I did not, and that was my mistake, and I am sorry for it." He met my eyes then, briefly. "But this is not something I did to you. This is something that was already over."

"She was my friend," I said again, because it was the thing I could not get past. The betrayal that sat behind the betrayal.

Gemma stood up from the sofa. She smoothed her skirt with both hands, unhurried, and looked at me with her head tilted slightly, the way she used to look at other women at parties, the ones she had already decided were not competition.

"I have loved him since before you married him," she said. "You were always the placeholder, Roza. I think somewhere you always knew that." She paused. "And before you say anything else, there is something you need to know."

She put her hand on her stomach.

"I am three months pregnant. It is his."

The room went absolutely still.

Three months, I counted backwards without meaning to, the way my mind always worked with dates. Three months ago she had sat in my kitchen on a Sunday afternoon eating the soup I made, asking me with her wide careful eyes how the marriage was going, whether Callum seemed any warmer lately, whether I had considered that perhaps I was asking too much of him. She had held my hand across the table. She had said, "He does love you, in his way. Some men just need time."

Three months ago.

"I gave him what you never could," Gemma said. Not unkindly. That was the worst part. She said it almost gently, the way you deliver a truth you have been sitting on for a while. "You could not give him a family. You could not even hold his interest. And I know that is a terrible thing to hear, but I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve comfort right now."

I looked down at my hand. The tissue was still there. The test still inside it, still warm from my palm, two pink lines behind the thin white paper.

I thought about opening my hand. Showing them both. Watching Gemma's certainty crack. Watching Callum's face do something it had not done in years.

I thought about it for exactly four seconds.

Then I closed my fingers tighter.

"Fine," I said.

I said it quietly, and I meant every part of it, the word and the silence underneath the word and everything I had already decided in those four seconds, and I turned around and I walked out of the study and I pulled the door shut behind me without slamming it, because I was not going to give either of them the sound of my anger. That was mine. Everything from this moment was mine.

At the bottom of the stairs I stopped. I pressed my back against the wall. I pressed my hand over my mouth.

And I let myself feel it, all of it, the grief and the humiliation and the specific, shattering pain of realising that the person who was supposed to be your safe place was the one who had been sharpening the knife. I let it move through me in the dark of the hallway, quickly, thoroughly, the way you treat a wound before you bandage it.

Then I breathed in. I looked down at the test in my hand.

He did not know.

That thought arrived the way the most important thoughts always do, quietly, almost gently, in the middle of the noise.

He did not know. And he was never going to.