Her face changed.
I watched whatever sadness remained turn into anger.
“Seven months wasn’t serious?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“No,” she said. “I think that’s exactly what you meant.”
She removed a thin bracelet from her wrist.
I recognized it immediately.
I had seen the charge for it on our credit-card statement three months earlier.
Evan had told me it was a client gift.
Paige dropped it into his hand.
“We’re done.”
Then she walked off the stage.
Evan called her name.
Grant stepped into his path.
“Don’t.”
Evan looked at him.
“Sir—”
“Monday. Eight a.m. Human Resources.”
“Grant, please.”
“Mr. Holloway.”
The correction landed harder than a shout.
Evan looked toward me.
“Brooke.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t come home tonight.”
His face collapsed.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
That question almost made me laugh.
For months, he had apparently maintained enough separate lives to require a calendar.
Now suddenly he had nowhere to sleep.
“You figured out where to go all those nights you were ‘working late.’ I’m confident you’ll solve it.”
“Think about Sophie.”
“I am.”
“Brooke, don’t destroy our family over this.”
That was when something inside me finally snapped.
I stepped close enough that only the people nearest us could hear.
“You don’t get to set fire to the house and then accuse me of destroying it because I refuse to stand inside.”
He stared at me.
I walked away.
And for the first time in eleven years, I didn’t look back to see whether my husband was following.
When I arrived home that night, I didn’t cry.
Not immediately.
I walked into our bedroom, opened the closet, and stared at Evan’s clothes.
Then I laughed.
It was a strange, exhausted sound.
Eleven years of marriage.
Seven months of lies that I knew about.
Maybe more that I didn’t.
And there were his shirts, hanging exactly where they had hung that morning.
His shoes beneath them.
His watch box.
His old college sweatshirt.
Evidence of an ordinary life that had apparently existed only for one of us.
I packed two suitcases.
Everything else could wait.
At 1:12 a.m., Evan called.
I declined it.
