Claimed By Rival

ChapterTwo

Harriet's POV

Adrian's text came at exactly four in the afternoon, and I should have deleted it.

"Meet me at the café on East 5th Street. Six o'clock. Come alone."

I stared at the screen for a long time before I put the phone down. After what he had shown me the day before, part of me wanted to pretend none of it was real. The other part needed to see the truth with my own eyes, even if it destroyed me.

I left home at five forty and arrived ten minutes early, then parked across from the café. It was one of those expensive places with white tables and yellow lights, and couples sat outside laughing over their drinks. Everything looked normal except my life.

At six exactly Adrian opened my passenger door without a word of greeting. His face was harder than it had been the day before and his eyes stayed fixed on the street.

"Look," he said.

I got out and followed him onto the pavement, and he pointed across the road. "There."

I followed his hand and felt my heart stop. Wilbert and Claire sat at a table under a white umbrella. Her head rested on his chest as if it had always belonged there, and his fingers played with the ends of her hair while the two of them laughed at something. It was the same soft laugh he used to save for me on quiet nights at home. Then he leaned down and kissed her neck like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I could not move. My husband was kissing my sister in public without a trace of fear.

My hands began to shake. I wanted to run across the street and scream until my voice broke, and I wanted to drag Claire away from him. But Adrian's hand closed around my wrist.

"Not yet," he said quietly. "Watch."

Tears were already burning behind my eyes, and I hated him for saying it, but I stayed.

"How much more am I supposed to watch?"

He did not answer. Across the road Claire fed Wilbert a piece of cake from her fingers, and he caught her hand and licked the cream from her thumb. There was no guilt anywhere on his face. He looked happy.

At that moment my phone buzzed in my hand. It was a message from Wilbert. Stuck in a meeting again. Don't wait up. Love you.

I looked up and watched him put his own phone face down on the table and go back to kissing my sister.

I had spent five years loving that man. I had defended him when people questioned our marriage and I had blamed myself when he stopped touching me. Now he sat there feeding my sister cake as if I had never existed, and I memorised every detail so I would never trust either of them again.

He looked at Claire the way he had looked at me on our wedding day, when I stood beside him in a white dress and believed every promise he made. That look belonged to someone else now.

"Two years," I whispered, and my voice sounded strange to me. "They have been doing this for two years while I stayed home like a good wife and waited for him."

Adrian's jaw tightened. "I know," he said at last.

After a while Wilbert stood and held out his hand, and Claire took it. They walked toward the car park still touching, as though nobody else in the world could see them. I watched until they disappeared behind a row of cars, and only then did the tears break loose.

They came hard and hot and fast. I covered my face and cried the way a person cries when something inside has broken for good, and I could not stop the sounds I made.

Adrian started the car without a word and drove into the evening traffic. The city lights blurred through my tears while I kept my face turned to the window. Claire was my sister. She was the one who had listened when I told her I felt unwanted, and every week she had told me how lucky I was to have Wilbert. All that time she had looked me in the eyes and lied.

"I gave him everything," I blurted out. "I left my job and stayed home. I tried for a child until the doctors said it might never happen, and I blamed myself every day. Now he is giving the part of himself I needed most to her." I swallowed hard. "I hate them."

"So do I," Adrian said.

For the first time I understood that our pain was not identical but came from the same wound. He had lost the woman he planned to marry and I had lost the husband I thought I knew.

My mind stayed behind at that café. After a while I asked the question I had not meant to ask. "Do you still love her?"

Adrian was quiet for a long moment. "I loved the woman I thought she was," he said in a low and controlled voice. "That woman never existed."

I nodded slowly because I understood.

He parked in front of a small lodge on the edge of the city while the rain poured down harder. "You can stay here tonight," he said. "Or I can take you home if you want."

Home meant the bed I had shared with Wilbert for five years and his cologne on the pillows. Staying here meant admitting that my old life was over.

"I will stay," I said.

He opened my door and the rain soaked me the moment I stepped out. With a hand on the small of my back he guided me inside, paid for a room at the desk, and led me upstairs without a word.

The room was simple and clean, with a large bed and rain against the windows. Adrian shut the door behind us and turned to face me, and water dripped from his hair onto his shoulders. His eyes looked darker.

"You should change into something dry," he said. "You are soaked."

I stood there shaking, and not only from the cold. The picture of Claire's head on Wilbert's chest kept replaying in my mind like a film I could not turn off.

He went into the bathroom and came back with a towel. When I did not take it he stepped closer and began drying my hair himself, carefully, though his eyes held nothing soft.

"They will pay for this," he murmured. "Both of them.

"I looked up at him then with the rain still clinging to his lashes, and I saw the same pain in his face that I carried in mine. For the first time since yesterday I did not feel completely alone in the wreckage.

"How?" I asked.

He looked straight at me with a darkness that made my breath catch. "There is a way. But once we start, none of us walks away the same, and that includes you and me."

Something dangerous and hungry woke me up.

"Tell me," I whispered.