One night,his forever

Everything She Trusted, Gone” The mug caught Corwin in the shoulder before he could duck all the way. Ceramic exploded against the wall behind him, chamomile tea running in a dark line down the paint, and he swore, grabbing at his arm like it had actually hurt him. “Rue, what the hell” “You tell me.” My hand was shaking around his phone. I didn’t remember grabbing it off the counter. I didn’t remember standing up either, but I was standing now, chest heaving, watching him back into the doorframe like I was something dangerous. Maybe I was. Thirty minutes ago I’d been in my socks, cross-legged on the couch, waiting for him to get out of the shower so we could argue about whose turn it was to pick the takeout. Two years of nights exactly like that one. Then his phone lit up on the counter, face down, buzzing against the wood like it wanted to be caught. Can’t stop thinking about last night. When are you telling her? I read it four times before my hands moved on their own. Six weeks. Six weeks of messages under a name saved as Dara — gym, six weeks of I miss you and she doesn’t have to know, six weeks of a whole second life running under mine while I made dinner reservations and picked up his dry cleaning and told my mother he was “the one.” He walked out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, laughing at something on his own phone in his head, and then he saw my face and the laugh died. That was when I threw the mug. “How long,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Rue, just let me” “How long, Corwin.” He dragged a hand down his face, already building the version of this he could live with. “Two months. Maybe a little more.” Two months. Our anniversary dinner was six weeks ago. He’d held my hand across the table and said I got lucky with you. I’d believed every word of it, chewed on it happily for days afterward like a kid with candy. “Who is she.” “That’s not” “Who.” I stepped toward him and he actually flinched back, bare feet slipping slightly on the hardwood. “Is. She.” “Dara. She’s in my building.” His jaw worked. “It just happened.” Six weeks doesn’t just happen. Six weeks is a decision you make every single day and keep making. “Get out.” “Rue, please, if you’d just” “Get out of my apartment.” He came toward me anyway, hands up, using the voice he used on his mother when she was upset, the one that meant calm down, you’re being dramatic, and something in my chest went cold and very still. I picked the ceramic bowl off the counter without thinking about it. “Put that down.” “Then stop walking toward me.” We stood there. Him in a towel with tea drying down the wall behind him. Me holding a bowl like a weapon I had no intention of using, just needed him to believe I might. He talked for a long time after that. About stress. About feeling invisible. About how I’d been so wrapped up in my own life lately that he’d just needed something. There it was. His hands, somehow ending up back on me. “So this is mine too,” I said. Flat. His eyes went glassy, which used to work on me and now just looked like a performance I’d already seen the end of. “It makes you someone I hurt. I don’t want to lose you. I love” “Don’t.” The word came out of me like a slap. “Don’t say that to me right now.” I walked to the door and opened it and stood beside it and waited. He gathered what he could carry in one trip, cologne I’d bought him for his birthday clinging to his skin on the way past me, eyes red, jaw tight with something that almost looked like grief and mostly looked like getting caught. “I’ll come back for the rest,” he said at the threshold. “I’ll leave it in the hall.” He left. I put the chain on the door with hands that had finally stopped shaking, then slid down the wall until I was sitting in broken ceramic and cold tea, and let myself have exactly ten minutes to fall apart. Three years. Turned down a job in Atlanta for him. Skipped Bree’s Miami trip because he said he needed me that weekend. Needed me, apparently, while texting someone else from our bathroom. Ten minutes. Then I stood, swept the pieces into the trash, and called Bree. “He was cheating.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “Six weeks. I threw a mug at him and put him out.” Silence, then, “I’m coming. Don’t move.” Wren answered on the second ring, quieter. “I’ll bring wine.” They showed up in under twenty minutes, Bree first, storming through the door already scanning for damage like she expected a crime scene, stopping cold at the tea stain drying into the wallpaper. “You threw something at him.” “A mug.” “Should’ve been the whole cabinet.” She dropped her bag and pointed at the couch. “Sit. Talk.” So I did. All of it, timestamps included. Bree cycled through fury so fast it looped back around to something with no name. Wren sat at the end of the couch with her wine untouched, watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite place, something careful, like she was waiting to see how much of this I could actually carry before she said whatever it was she wasn’t saying. “Six weeks,” Bree repeated. “And he had the nerve to cry about it.” “He said it just happened.” “Nothing happens for six weeks straight, Rue. That’s a choice he made every single day.” I knew she was right. Knowing and feeling it were two very different animals, and right now this apartment felt too big and too quiet and entirely too full of his fingerprints. Bree caught the look on my face and made her decision before I’d finished having the thought. “We’re going to Phantom.” “Bree, it’s almost midnight.” “Perfect. Get dressed.” She was already pulling me off the couch. “You are not sitting here memorizing that stain all night.” I looked at Wren, hoping for backup that would let me stay home. She just looked back at me, something unreadable moving behind her eyes. “She’s right,” Wren said. “You need to be somewhere loud tonight.” Something about the way she said it made the hair rise on my arms, but I didn’t have the energy left to ask why. An hour later I stood in front of my mirror in the red dress Corwin used to call too much, watching a version of myself I didn’t fully recognize yet. “That’s the one,” Bree said, not even turning around. I grabbed my bag. “Let’s go.” Behind me, Wren was still scrolling her phone, and something crossed her face fast, gone before I could name it. Not excitement. Something closer to dread.