At two in the morning, I woke to cold sheets and the faint sound of my husband's voice drifting under the bedroom door like smoke. For a few seconds, I thought it was just a dream, the kind that makes your heart race before your mind can process it all.
Then I heard him clearly from the study down the hall, speaking in a low, amused voice to someone on speakerphone. "She has no idea what's going on, she's naive, always has been."
I jumped up, the room tilted around me, and the digital clock, with its bright red numbers, read 2:03 a.m. The space next to me, where Julian Mercer should have been, was empty and cold, and that frightened me more than his words.
It meant that the betrayal was already there before I even realized it.
I walked barefoot down the hallway, wrapped in my pale pink robe, pressing one hand against the wall because my knees suddenly refused to trust me. The study door was almost closed, but not close enough to hide what was about to happen.
Another male voice asked, "And when will he sign the papers?"
Julian gave a low chuckle that I had once mistaken for warmth and said, "Then it will be too late for her to understand anything."
There are moments when life doesn't shatter all at once, but silently transforms into something unrecognizable. I stood there with my back against the cold wall, listening to the man I'd spent thirty-three years with talk about me as a burden rather than a companion.
When he returned to bed, I was already still, my eyes closed and my breathing regular. He slipped under the covers and put his arm around my waist, as he always did, as if affection were a habit he could practice without believing in it.
