Say Something
1268 Words
The cab driver asked me twice if I wanted him to pull over.
I said no both times, my voice thick, my eyes still burning. I gave him Nina's address instead of my own, because home was an apartment with Julian's name still on the lease and his shirts still hanging in the closet, and I could not walk back into rooms that still smelled like him. Not that night. Maybe not for a long time.
My phone buzzed again before I made it to her building. I made myself look anyway.
Julian: Please call me. Julian: Amara, please. Julian: I can explain everything if you let me.
Three messages and not one of them said anything real. That was the pattern of our whole marriage laid out plainly on a phone screen. Promises to explain, over and over, but never once the explanation itself.
Nina opened her door before I even knocked, which meant Julian had already called her too, looking for me, probably before I'd even reached the lobby downstairs. She took one look at my face, streaked and swollen, and pulled me inside without a single question, sat me down hard on her couch, and put a mug of something hot in my hands that I never once drank.
"Tell me," she said, crouching in front of me, her hands steady on my knees.
So I told her. The suite. The wine bottle is rolling across the carpet. The woman. The way his mouth opened and nothing, nothing at all, came out.
Nina's jaw went tight in that particular way it does right before she says something I don't want to hear but need to. "You need to call a lawyer tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight, Amara."
"Nina, it's almost midnight."
"I don't care if it's three in the morning. Men like Julian Cole don't stumble into divorces by accident. If you wait even a week, his people will already have a story built and ready, and it won't be the true one."
"I don't even know what the true one is." My voice cracked.
"Doesn't matter tonight." She took the mug out of my hands because I was gripping it so hard my knuckles had gone white. "What matters is you catching him before he catches you first. I've watched this happen before. My cousin went through something like it, and it nearly buried her before she found her footing again."
I stared up at the water stain on Nina's ceiling, the one shaped like a rabbit we used to joke about back in college, back when neither of us had a single real problem in the world yet. "I threw my ring at his feet, Nina."
"Good. That's the first good decision you've made all night."
"I don't feel good. I feel like I got hit by a truck and left on the road."
"That's allowed too." Her voice softened, just slightly. "You're allowed to feel like garbage and still protect yourself at the exact same time. Those two things aren't opposites."
I almost laughed, the kind of laugh that comes out more air than sound. "There was a woman in the suite, Nina. She looked like him. I don't mean like his type. I mean she looked like him. Same eyes. Same stubborn jaw."
Nina went quiet for a second, considering. "Like a sister, maybe?"
"He doesn't have a sister. He's told me that a hundred times."
"Everybody's got somebody they never talk about," she said lightly, though her eyes stayed sharp on my face, the way they do when she's turning a puzzle over in her head. "Doesn't mean it's what you're afraid of, but it doesn't mean it isn't, either. You can't build tonight's decision on a guess."
My phone buzzed again on the coffee table between us. Neither of us reached for it right away.
"Who is it?" Nina asked, watching my face.
I turned the screen around so she could see it herself, my hand still trembling slightly.
Unknown number: You don't know the whole story. Don't sign anything yet.
Nina read it twice, her eyebrows pulling together. "Who sent you that?"
"I don't know. It came right after I left the hotel."
"Could be someone trying to help you." She set my phone face down on the table. "Could also be someone trying to stall you long enough for Julian's lawyers to get ahead. Either way, somebody out there already knows more about tonight than you do, and that should scare you more than the woman in the suite did."
I hadn't thought of it that way. I thought of it that way now, and it sat cold in my stomach alongside everything else.
"I'm calling you a lawyer in the morning," Nina said, standing. "You're staying here tonight. No arguments."
I didn't argue. I didn't have the strength left.
I lay on her couch long after she'd gone to bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the hotel door swinging open again and again, searching for the one detail that would make sense of it. I couldn't find it. All I had was Julian's frozen face, a stranger's face that looked too much like his, and a text from a number I didn't know, warning me about a story I hadn't heard yet.
At some point near dawn, my phone lit up again. I checked it anyway, because some stubborn part of me couldn't stop hoping.
Julian: I'm sitting outside Nina's building. I'm not leaving until you talk to me.
I sat straight up on the couch, heart slamming hard against my ribs, and looked toward the window, half expecting to see his car through the gap in the curtains despite the dark. I didn't move to look properly. I was too afraid of what I might do if I actually saw him sitting there in the cold, waiting for me like he had any right to wait.
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