The room seemed to tip around her. Not because she hadn’t already known, but because he had finally chosen the lie so completely that he no longer needed to protect even the outline of decency around it.
“You’re saying the marriage is dead,” she said.
“I’m saying if you can’t trust me, maybe we shouldn’t be married.”
It was a line he had probably imagined as powerful. It landed like a child threatening to run away from a house he didn’t own.
Carissa stepped aside from the doorway.
“Then don’t sleep here tonight.”
He stared. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He laughed under his breath. “You cannot kick me out of my own bedroom.”
“Watch me.”
For a moment, he looked like he might challenge her physically. Then something in her face made him think better of it. He grabbed a pillow from the bed, muttered something about her being unbelievable, and went downstairs.
Carissa stood alone in the bedroom they had once painted together on a weekend in June, the room where he had promised her a family “someday, when timing makes sense,” the room where she had stayed up through the night after her father died and listened to him breathe while she understood that grief was lonelier beside a sleeping person than it was alone.
She sat on the edge of the bed and did not cry.
Instead, she called her office, left a message canceling her eight-thirty meeting, and then she grabbed her coat and keys.
Nikki lived in a one-bedroom walk-up in Lakeview that Carissa was paying for.
The drive there took twenty-two minutes and all of Carissa’s remaining restraint.
She climbed the stairs fast enough to wake half the building and knocked so hard the cheap brass numbers on Nikki’s door rattled.
No answer.
Carissa knocked again.
“Nikki,” she said. “Open the door.”
“It’s late,” Nikki called through the wood. “Can we do this tomorrow?”
“No.”
Silence.
Then, “You’re scaring me.”
The sentence almost made Carissa laugh.
“Open the door or I keep knocking until the neighbors call the police.”
The lock clicked.
Nikki opened it barely four inches and tried to keep her face arranged in wounded innocence. It had always been her best look.
Carissa pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The apartment smelled like vanilla spray, takeout containers, and money Carissa had earned.
“How long?” Carissa asked.
Nikki folded her arms. “How long what?”
“How long have you been sleeping with Damen?”