Semua Bab The Governor’s Wife, His beautiful ruin: Bab 1 - Bab 10

Evelyn’s POV The campaign office went silent when I threw the coffee in Julia’s face. Very hot black coffee still steaming. She gasped, her hands flying up too late while brown liquid dripped down her cheeks, stained her white blouse, pooled on the desk where Alfred’s phone sat unlocked. “What the hell…” someone said outside the room The office door burst open. Three staffers crowded in the doorway, eyes wide, mouths open. Sarah from communications. Two volunteers whose names I’d never learned. They stared at Julia dripping coffee, at me standing there with the empty cup still in my hand, at Alfred’s phone on the desk. “Mrs. Cole…” Lawson badged in after he had been chasing me since he saw me walked into the office. His face pale. “What’s going on?” More people appeared behind Lawson. Someone pulled out their phone. I heard a camera click. “Put that away,” Lawson snapped at whoever it was. “Everyone back to your desks… and you , you’re fired “ He said pointing at the girl who

Evelyn I woke up to the sound of my father’s voice in my head. ‘Evelyn, you’re going to be a brilliant lawyer. Better than I ever was.’ He’d said that the day I got accepted to law school, the same day he found out the cancer had spread. He never lived to see me graduate, never saw me argue my first case. But he would’ve been proud. For those first ten years, at least. Before I gave it all up. That sweet memory was interrupted when my head pounded from the too much wine I had. My mouth tasted like regret and something bitter. I reached for my phone on the nightstand, turned it on for the first time since yesterday afternoon. Three hundred notifications. My stomach dropped. I opened the first social app. The anonymous account I’d created yesterday had forty thousand followers overnight. The photos I’d uploaded had been retweeted thousands of times. The videos had hundreds of thousands of views. “#AlfredColeScandal” was trending number two nationwide. I scrolled through the comm

Evelyn The burner phone felt strange in my hand. I’d bought it that morning at a convenience store three towns over, paid cash, because I woke up with a plan . I kept my sunglasses on the whole time. The clerk didn’t look up from his magazine. Now I sat in my car in an empty parking lot, staring at the number I’d written on a scrap of paper. Patrick Mane’s campaign office. His opponent. Alfred’s rival for the governorship. My hands were shaking again but I made the call anyway. It rang twice before someone answered. “Mane for Governor, this is Jessica speaking.” I disguised my voice slightly, made it lower, flatter. “I need to speak with Mr. Mane.” “May I ask what this is regarding?” “Tell him I have information about Alfred Cole. Information that will help him win the election.” Pause on the other end. “Can I get your name?” “Tell him I have proof of campaign finance fraud, affairs, and connections he doesn’t want the public to know about. If he wants Alfred Cole out of the

Evelyn The shower water was as hot as I could stand it. I stood under the spray and scrubbed my skin until it turned red. Tried to wash him off, wash last night off, wash away the feeling of his hands on me, his mouth on me, his body inside me. But I couldn’t. Because it wasn’t just on my skin. It was under it. In my bones. In my muscle memory. My chest felt tight. Not from sadness but rage. From disgust at myself. I’d let him touch me. Let him whisper lies in my ear while he moved inside me. Let him make me feel safe when twenty-four hours earlier he’d had his hands around someone else. I pressed my palms against the tile and forced myself to breathe. Years of him knowing exactly how to break me down, exactly what buttons to push, exactly how to make me forget every reason I had to hate him. I’d been so stupid. So weak. He’d walked into that kitchen smelling like another woman and I’d let him make me coffee. Let him touch me. Let him take me to bed. And I’d liked it. That was

Evelyn I did not plan fireworks. I did not want the messy thrill of a headline that screamed betrayal. What I wanted was a cut that would ache in exactly the places he cared about his donors, the neat pile of reputation he slept on. I wanted him to feel the same slow unravel he’d given me, only measured, surgical, unavoidable. The study door was unlocked. He left it unlocked because he trusted the world to be as obliging as he was, and because men like him lived by an economy of assumed loyalty. I had lived inside that assumption for twenty-two years and learned its geography but tonight I moved through it like someone reclaiming a map. His laptop woke under my hand, the screen a polite glow. I did not need passwords I had watched him enter them enough times that his patterns felt like easy rhythm under my thumb. I did not think about the ethics of it. Ethics had been spent long ago on polite smiles while I stitched other people’s scandals into seamless excuses. Tonight the stit