Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 11 - Chapitre 20

Isla POVOnce I knew to look, I couldn't stop seeing it.Julian's calendar invites, the ones I stopped reading closely for years, always had that same little tag under the location line, booked, confirmed, adjusted, always by "R. Voss." His phone, when it rang during dinner, more often than not had her name flash across the screen before he even had a chance to glance down, and half the time he didn't even pick it up himself. He just handed it to me, or set it face-up on the table, easy as anything, like a man with absolutely nothing to hide would.That should've told me something on its own, honestly. The guilty ones hide their phones. The really good liars don't bother.I started noticing the small stuff. How Renata knew Mabel's school pickup schedule better than the school itself did, mentioning it once when I called Julian's office looking for him, like it was the most natural thing in the world for his assistant to have that memorized. How she sent me a birthday reminder two year

Isla POVJulian left for the airport at six the next morning, an early flight to some site walkthrough he'd been talking about for a week, and I stood in the driveway waving like a woman with nothing on her mind at all until his car turned the corner.Mabel had a half day. I dropped her at her friend Priya's house for a playdate that ran until four, and I came home to an empty house that felt too quiet in a way it hadn't in years, every creak of the floorboards sounding like it belonged to someone else.The laptop was still sitting on the dresser where he left it.I told myself I wasn't going to try again. I told myself that twice, actually, out loud, standing in the doorway of our bedroom like an idiot negotiating with herself. And then I walked over and opened it anyway, because apparently that particular argument with myself had already been decided somewhere I wasn't paying attention.The cursor blinked in that same empty box.I tried Mabel's middle name. Nothing. I tried the addr

Isla POVI told Denise at the front desk I was dropping off flyers for the office break room,Mabel's school fundraiser again, the same excuse that had gotten me into this building once before, except this time I'd actually printed some, sitting in a folder under my arm like a prop I was almost embarrassed to be carrying."Oh, sure, the twelfth floor break room's the biggest one," she said, waving me toward the elevator without a second thought. "You need someone to walk you up?""I know my way." I did. That was the strange, sour joke of it, I probably still knew this building better than half the people working in it now.The twelfth floor hadn't changed much. Same gray carpet, same glass-walled conference rooms lining the west side so anyone walking by could see straight into whatever meeting was happening, a design choice I actually pushed for years ago, back when transparency felt like a value instead of a liability.I found the break room first, dropped the flyers on the counter n

Isla POVI didn't sleep much that night, and around one in the morning I gave up pretending I was going to.Julian was out cold beside me, breathing slowly and even, a man completely at peace with himself in a way that felt almost obscene given what I now knew was sitting in his calendar two words wide. I slipped out from under the blanket, grabbed my laptop off the desk, and went downstairs to the kitchen table, because some part of me still didn't want to do this in the same room where we slept.I opened a blank document and just sat there for a minute, cursor blinking, trying to figure out what this was. Not a diary. God, not that, I wasn't going to sit here writing my feelings out like some teenager. I needed something else. Something I actually knew how to build.I used to run projects for a living. Before Mabel, before I handed all of it over, my whole job had been keeping a hundred moving pieces straight contractors, timelines, change order

Isla POVI didn't sleep at all. Somewhere around six, with the sky just starting to go gray outside the kitchen window, my phone buzzed with a text from Nora.‘Can I call you back? I hate how last night ended. I want to actually tell you everything, not just the pieces.’I called her instead of texting back, phone against my ear, still sitting in the same chair I'd been in most of the night, laptop screen dimmed but not closed."Hey." Her voice was rough, like she hadn't slept much either. "I've been up since you hung up. I keep thinking of things I should've said.""Tell me now.""Okay." A breath, steadying herself. "There was this fundraiser, maybe eight months ago. The one for the children's hospital, you skipped it because Mabel had that stomach bug. Julian's phone went off at our table, and I saw the screen before he grabbed it.""And?""It wasn't just a name lighting up. It was a photo. His contact picture for whoever was calling…. it was the two of them. Him and her, some selfi