"Wait." The word scraped out of him. "Wait, where are you going?"
I picked up my keys and coat. Didn't look back at him.
"Home," I said.
"But this… this is home. We?—"
"No." I turned to face him one last time and let him see exactly what he'd lost. "This was home. Before you fucked her on that damn exam table. Before you brought condoms to the clinic while we were trying for a baby. Before you spent three months texting another woman and telling her how lonely you were."
His eyes were wet, the muscles in his jaw working like he was holding back more than he could manage. "Please don't go. Please. We can fix this."
"We can't fix this, Matt. Because I don't want to. I don't want to go to counseling. I don't want to work through it. I don't wantto hear about how sorry you are or how it didn't mean anything or how you'll never do it again."
I opened the door, stopped.
"Eight years," I said quietly. "You threw away eight years for three fucks and some text messages. I hope it was worth it."
He said something behind me, a strained sound that might’ve been my name, but it barely brushed the air. I was already moving, stepping out of that room and through a house that suddenly felt too small, too borrowed, too full of echoes I no longer recognized. The cool air outside hit my skin like truth, and I held onto it because it was the only honest thing I had left.
I reached the car without really registering the walk, only the night air clinging to my skin. I got in and started the engine, keeping my eyes on the road ahead instead of the windows or the doorway or the shape I knew was standing there, trying to understand a consequence he’d created himself.
I put the car in drive and pulled away from the place we’d shared—whatever it had been, whatever it had meant—letting it slide behind me along with the marriage I’d trusted and the man I’d loved for eight years who now felt like a stranger wearing something familiar.
My phone buzzed with Matt’s name, then lit again, then again, each vibration a faint echo of a life already receding. I switched it off and let the quiet settle as the road opened in front of me, dark and uninviting but honest in a way nothing else had been all night. And for the first time since watching that footage, my lungs eased enough to let a breath in.
CHAPTER 6: ELENA
The highway stretched out ahead of me, empty and dark.
Three hours to Millbrook. Three hours of nothing but white lines and my own thoughts. I cranked the heat up even though I wasn't cold, gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white, and drove.
My phone sat dark on the passenger seat. I'd turned it off somewhere around the first red light, when the buzzing wouldn't stop. Matt. Matt. Matt. Probably Angela too by now, panicking, wondering what I'd told him, what he'd told me, whether their little house of cards had finally collapsed.
It had.
I thought about the last time we'd been together. Really together. Five nights ago, maybe six. The way he'd touched me, slow and tender. The way he'd brushed my hair back from my face and looked at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
"I love you," he'd whispered. "I love you so much."
And I'd believed him. I'd believed every word, never knowing he’d already been with her by then.
Had he touched her the same way? Whispered the same things in her ear while she arched against him on the exam table? Had he told her he loved her too, or was that reserved for me? The wife at home, the consolation prize, the woman he came back to after he was done?
The questions came and went. I let them pass through me like weather.
I turned up the radio, some country station bleeding in and out of static. I let the noise fill the car so I didn't have to sit in silence with the memory of his hands, his mouth, and the way he'd talked about baby names and nursery colors while he was fucking someone else.
The same hands. The same mouth. The same lies.
Mile markers smeared into one another. An hour behind me, two still ahead.
Somewhere along the way, the road blurred into a kind of numb tunnel, and then—finally—the sign for Millbrook appeared in my headlights. Green and white, reflective letters catching the beam. Population 4,200. Same as it had been when I left for college. Same as it had been when Matt and I used to park out by the reservoir and talk about all the places we'd go, all the things we'd do once we got out of this town.
We’d been seventeen, sprawled on a blanket in the bed of his dad’s truck, the kind of night where the stars were so bright you could see the Milky Way if you stared long enough.
"I'm gonna marry you someday," he'd said. Not a question. Just a fact, like the sky was blue and the grass was green and Matt loved me.
I'd laughed, told him he was crazy. But I'd believed him then too.
