“So what, this is your revenge now? You and Jackson playing house to upset me?”
Carissa shrugged. “Interesting theory.”
Then he minimized it.
“You don’t even like him like that.”
“Do I not?”
Then he turned suspicious in the way unfaithful people so often do when they realize other people are also capable of keeping secrets.
He started checking the location history on the shared iPad. Started asking neighbors if they had seen her car. Started standing in the kitchen when she got home with the expression of a man convinced he had been wronged by being treated as he treated others.
One night, after Carissa came back from a gallery opening Jackson had invited her to, she found Nikki in the house.
Not visiting. Installed.
Shoes off by the door. Wineglass in hand. Curled into the corner of the couch while Damen sat too close beside her with the remote, both of them looking up at Carissa like they had spent the evening deciding how much of the truth they could force her to witness before she broke.
“What is she doing here?” Carissa asked.
Nikki crossed one leg over the other. “Spending time with someone who isn’t ashamed of wanting me around.”
Carissa looked at Damen. “You let her in.”
“This is my house too,” he said.
“No,” Carissa replied. “It’s the house you live in because I bought it.”
His face darkened.
Nikki laughed softly, but there was tension in it. Even she knew property records were less emotional than whatever story she had been telling herself about destiny.
“Get out,” Carissa said.
Nikki set the glass down. “You don’t get to talk to me like some random woman.”
Carissa held her gaze. “Random women generally have more dignity.”
Damen stood then, moving half a step in front of Nikki like a man protecting the person he wanted from the one who had funded him.
“Don’t do this.”
Carissa’s voice sharpened. “How long?”
Neither answered.
She looked at Nikki. “How long?”
Nikki stared back with her chin high, the tears absent this time, stripped away because maybe she was too tired or maybe she had finally decided that shame was harder than cruelty.
“Since spring,” Nikki said.
Damen snapped, “Nikki—”
She turned on him. “What? She already knows.”
Carissa felt something inside her go completely still.
Since spring.
It was November.
Seven months.