Chapter 5

ISLA pov

Julian's text came in at 11:40. ‘Left the Ferris contract on the kitchen counter, need it before noon, can you run it over? Sorry, I know it's a pain.’

I stood in the kitchen holding my phone, staring at that message a beat longer than it deserved. He had a courier service on retainer for exactly this kind of thing. I could've called them, had the folder picked up in fifteen minutes, and never left the house. Instead I grabbed my keys off the hook, and I didn't examine too closely why some part of me had been waiting for a reason to walk back through those doors.

I hadn't set foot in Cross Developments in years. I used to tell people it just never came up anymore, which was true and also not the reason. The reason was that walking into a building with my own fingerprints all over its bones, and having no actual claim to any of it, felt like visiting a house I used to live in after someone else moved in and repainted every wall.

The lobby had changed since I'd been gone. New couches, gray instead of the deep blue I picked out originally. The reception desk sat dead center under the atrium now, instead of pushed against the east window where I put it myself, back when I still cared whether the first thing a client saw was good light. Somebody had decided the center looked more impressive. It probably did. It also meant the desk faced away from the window entirely, which was a design mistake I'd have argued against for an hour if anyone had still been asking me.

Nobody was asking me anything anymore. That was sort of the whole point of the last decade.

The girl behind the desk looked barely older than the interns we used to hire. Headset on, name tag that said DENISE in careful cursive, pleasant in that trained, rehearsed way. "Hi, welcome to Cross Developments, how can I help you?"

"I've got a contract for Julian Cross. He's expecting it."

"Oh, sure, I can have someone run that right up." She held her hand out for the folder, already reaching for a visitor pass. "Can I get your name for the log?"

"Isla Cross."

She typed it in without any change at all in her expression. Not recognition. Not even the polite half-second pause people give a name that sounds familiar. Just a name, typed into a system, meaning absolutely nothing to the person typing it.

Something in my chest went very still.

"Got it," she said, sliding the visitor sticker across the counter. "And you're dropping this off for…"

"I'm his wife."

"Oh!" A short laugh, more startled than warm, the kind of laugh people give when they realize they've just made a small, harmless mistake. "Sorry, I've only been here about two months, I don't actually know most of the…. hang on, let me check if he's up there, he might already be headed into his noon."

She picked up the desk phone, dialed an extension, and said a few words I didn't catch. I stood there with the visitor sticker still in my hand, unpeeled, watching a woman young enough to be one of Mabel's future babysitters try to locate my husband inside a company that used to answer to me before it answered to anyone.

An older woman walked past just then, laptop bag over one shoulder, and glanced at me the way you glance at anyone standing in a lobby briefly, politely, no recognition at all before disappearing through the badge-access doors I used to have a key card for. I used to know that woman's name. I was almost positive I used to know her name.

Denise hung up the phone with an apologetic wince. "So sorry, you actually just missed him….Mr. Cross just left with his wife, they went to grab lunch before his one o'clock meeting. If you want, I can have someone hold the contract at the desk until he's back?"

I stood there in the lobby of a company I had once mortgaged my parents' house to help build, holding my own car keys, being told, cheerfully, that my husband had just left for lunch with his wife.

"I'm sorry," I said, very evenly, "he left with who?"

"His wife, I think? That's what they said upstairs." Denise frowned slightly, like she was replaying the message and finding it as odd as I did, though for entirely different reasons. "Denise on his floor…. sorry, funny, same name as me,she said they walked out together maybe ten minutes ago."

What in God's name was happening in this building.

I heard myself ask, like the question could break something if I said it too fast, "Are you sure that's what she said? His wife?"

"That's what she said." Denise glanced at her screen, at nothing in particular, the small helpless shrug of someone who's just repeating information and has no idea it means anything at all. "Maybe I've got it wrong, honestly, it's been a morning."

Except I already knew, standing there, that this wasn't the kind of thing you got wrong twice.

For ten years, I had been Julian Cross's wife. I had built the bones of this company with my own hands, before daughters and dinners and everyone forgetting my name at the front desk. I had spent weeks now collecting one thing after another that didn't add up, a photo, a text, a friend gone quiet, a condom that had no business existing and every single time, I'd let myself believe there was a version of the truth where none of it meant what it looked like it meant.

But this wasn't a blurry photo from a stranger's phone. This was a receptionist at his own company, using the words "his wife" the way you'd use them about someone she actually met. Someone she could put a face to.

Someone who apparently walked these halls often enough that nobody here thought twice about the label.

The question I'd been asking myself for weeks is that my husband cheating on me suddenly felt small. Almost beside the point. Because if there really was a woman walking through this building being called his wife, in front of employees, in the middle of a workday, then the question was never just whether he was cheating.

The real question was who exactly had been standing in my place this whole time, and how long she'd been doing it.

"Actually," Denise said, glancing past my shoulder, her whole face brightening in the particular way people's faces do when someone they genuinely know and like walks through a door, "oh…Mrs. Cross, you're here!"

I turned around slowly…