This Time, I Remember Every Lie He Told Me

The Second Call

Callan excused himself twenty minutes later, murmuring something about the caterer needing him. I watched him cross the ballroom, weaving between tables draped in white linen, until he slipped through the side door near the kitchens.

I gave it thirty seconds. Then I followed.

Nobody stops the bride. That was one thing I'd learned even the first time around: a woman in a wedding dress can walk through any room in the world and no one will ask where she's going. I kept my chin up and my pace slow, like I was searching for the ladies' room, until I reached the same door and pushed it open into a narrow service hallway lined with folded banquet chairs.

Callan stood at the far end, phone pressed to his ear, one hand braced against the wall like the conversation was taking something out of him.

"I told you not to call this number," he said, voice low and clipped. "Not tonight."

I pressed myself against the cold brick just inside the doorway, heart slamming so hard I was sure he'd hear it over the music bleeding through the walls.

A pause. Then his voice again, quieter now, almost gentle in a way I hadn't heard directed at anyone but me and only ever as a performance.

"I know what I promised you. That hasn't changed. I just need time."

My throat went tight. In my other life, I never heard this. I never followed him anywhere, never questioned the late nights or the sudden trips to the Zurich office, because I trusted him the way you trust the ground under your feet without ever once checking if it was solid.

It wasn't Delphine's voice on the other end. I was almost certain of that. Delphine wasn't even supposed to be in the picture yet. This was someone else. Someone earlier. Someone I hadn't accounted for.

That single thought cracked something open in my chest cold and sharp, like ice breaking underfoot. I had assumed I knew the whole shape of his betrayal. I had assumed Delphine was where the rot started.

I was wrong. The rot went back further than that. Maybe further than I could see at all.

Callan's shoulders dropped, some of the tension leaving his frame. "I have to go," he said. "She's right outside."

I nearly gasped. I caught it in my throat just in time, swallowing the sound down hard enough to hurt.

He hadn't seen me. Not yet. But he'd known, somehow, that I was close.

I turned and walked fast, my heels clicking too loud against the tile, and slipped back through the ballroom doors just as the string quartet shifted into something slower. I found the nearest chair and sat, hands folded in my lap, arranging my face into the practiced calm I'd worn for three years without ever knowing I was performing it.

Callan reappeared four minutes later, jacket straightened, expression smoothed back into the charming stranger the whole room adored. He crossed to me and took my hand like nothing had happened.

"Sorry," he said. "Business. You know how it is."

"I do," I said, and meant it in a way he couldn't possibly understand.

He led me back onto the floor for the final dance of the night, one palm warm against the small of my back, the other holding my hand like I was something precious instead of something he'd already decided to discard. I let him spin me under the chandelier light, let the room clap and sigh at the sight of us, and the entire time my mind turned over one single, ice-cold question.

Who was on the other end of that call?

I ran through every name I remembered from the divorce papers I'd never gotten the chance to file, every woman whose face had ever crossed his path in the timeline I'd already lived. None of them fit. None of them explained a voice that made him drop his guard, made him speak with something that sounded almost like tenderness.

Almost like guilt.

Whoever she was, she existed before Delphine. Before the affair I thought everything had started. Which meant the story I remembered the story I'd died inside of might not be the true one at all. I might have only ever seen the second betrayal, the obvious one, the one that was easy enough for even a grieving, trusting wife to notice.

There could be a first betrayal underneath it. Older. Deeper. Something he'd buried so well that I never found it, not even with a coffin already closing over me.

The music ended. Guests began drifting toward the doors, calling out their congratulations, tossing rice that caught in my hair and stuck to the beading on my dress. Callan smiled and waved and thanked them all by name, the perfect groom, the perfect son of the Voss family fortune.

I smiled too. I let him lead me to the car waiting outside, its windows tinted dark, a driver already holding the door.

Just before I ducked inside, I glanced back toward the service hallway one last time.

A woman stood in the shadow of the doorway, half-hidden behind a stack of folded chairs, watching us with an expression I recognized instantly — because I had worn that same expression myself, once, watching someone else's happiness from the outside.

She caught my eye.

And smiled.