TEA FOR THE MISTRESS

Chapter 3: I won’t be signing those

Rebecca’s POV

It was 11 p.m. and Edmund still wasn’t home.

I had stopped pacing twenty minutes ago because pacing wasn’t doing anything except wearing a path in my own composure, and I needed that intact. I sat on the living room sofa instead with my phone face up on the cushion beside me and watched the screen not light up with the same focused attention I usually reserved for things that actually deserved it.

I had called him twice. Both times it rang out that particular sequence that goes on just long enough to feel like a decision rather than a coincidence. I sent one message. Simple, without accusation.

Are you alright? It’s getting late. The kind that gives a person every opportunity to respond without feeling cornered. The kind I had been sending variations of for three months.

I tried the office line next. It rang out too. Of course it did, 11 p.m. on a weekday. I had known that before I dialed. I dialed anyway because sometimes you need to feel like you are doing something rather than simply sitting in a beautiful room waiting for a man who may not be coming.

I set the phone down and looked around.

Everything was exactly where it should be. Cushions arranged. Fresh flowers. Lamps on their evening setting. The house was immaculate and silent and somehow, despite all of that, suffocating in the way that only a space with too much room and not enough people can be.

I needed air.

I picked up my shawl and went outside.

Taylor was near the gate, standing the way he always did quietly, attentively, present without announcing it. He straightened slightly when he saw me.

“Ma. Can I help you with something?”

I exhaled. Long and slow, the kind of breath that tells you just how long you have been holding it. I lowered myself into the outdoor chair.

“Taylor,” I said, keeping my voice easy. “My husband isn’t home yet. Did he mention anything this morning? Whether he had somewhere to be tonight?”

Taylor looked at me. And in that look was everything he was not going to say. A flicker of something behind his eyes, conflict, or the discomfort of a man holding information he had decided he wasn’t prepared to deliver. It was gone as quickly as it appeared.

“I’m sorry ma,” he said carefully. “I don’t know his whereabouts.” A brief pause. “I stopped driving him about three months ago.”

“Three months ago.”

I held that quietly without letting anything show. Three months ago Edmund stopped using Taylor, the driver who knew our routines, our restaurants, our life together. The driver who would have noticed the wrong building, the wrong hour, the wrong person in the passenger seat, he stopped him from driving for a reason that I am yet to figure out.

“Taylor,” I said, in the same easy tone. “Have you noticed anything unusual about my husband lately? Anything at all?”

He met my eyes. The careful blankness reassembled itself just a fraction too slowly.

Long enough for me to understand that the answer was yes. That whatever Taylor knew was sitting right behind that composed expression and he had made a decision about it that didn’t include telling me tonight.

“No ma,” he said.

I nodded. I didn’t push. People tell you things when they are ready. Pressure only teaches them to lock the door more firmly.

“Alright,” I said, standing. “When my husband gets back, let him know I waited up.”

“I will ma.”

I went back inside. Up to my room. Changed into my nightdress and lay down and did what I had been doing most nights, stared at the ceiling in the dark and waited for my mind to slow down.

It didn’t.

I reached for the sleeping pills in the bedside drawer. I hated that I needed them. Not dramatically just in the quiet honest way of a woman who understood what it meant that she had come to rely on them. A beautiful home. A marriage that looked flawless from the outside. A husband the world considered a great success. And I could not fall asleep without chemical help. Something about that felt like a confession my mouth had never made but my body had been making quietly for months.

I swallowed the pill. Lay back. Waited.

Thirty minutes later the dark pulled me under.

I never heard Edmund come home.

Morning arrived the way it always did light through the curtains, the sounds of the kitchen coming alive, the ordinary rhythm of a household that kept its schedule regardless of what was happening inside the people who lived within it.

My first thought, before anything else settled into focus, was Edmund’s birthday.

Next week.

I turned it over slowly. A party. Something warm, the kind of gathering that fills a house with voices and reminds two people what they looked like when they were standing on the same side of something. Maybe that was what we needed. Or maybe and this thought arrived quieter and sat down more firmly the party was something else entirely. Something with a guest list I could control and a room I could read.

I was still turning that over when a knock pulled me out of it.

“Come in.”

My chef appeared in the doorway. “Good morning ma. Breakfast is ready. Your husband is downstairs and he’s asked for your presence.”

“Thank you. I’ll be right down.”

She turned to leave. I stopped her.

“Chef, what time did my husband come in last night?”

A hesitation. Fraction of a second. Barely perceptible.

“Very late ma. Around 3 a.m.”

“Thank you. Go ahead and set the table.”

The door closed. I sat on the edge of the bed. Not spiraling. Just sitting with the information letting it settle, finding its proper weight, before I decided how to carry it.

3 a.m.

I got up. I washed my face. Stood at the mirror a beat longer than necessary not in vanity, just in the way you look at yourself before walking into something. I straightened my back and went downstairs.

Edmund was already at the table.

Dressed. Composed. Sitting with the upright, untroubled posture of a man who came home at 3 a.m. and felt no particular obligation to mention it. The face he wore to boardrooms controlled, pleasant, offering nothing.

I sat down across from him.

“You didn’t come home until 3 a.m.,” I said, level and calm. “And you didn’t return any of my calls.”

He said nothing. Not a flicker. He looked at me the way you look at something that has made a sound you have decided not to respond to.

I reached toward his hand.

“Your birthday is next week,” I said, softer. “I’d like to throw you a party. Something small, close friends…”

He pulled his hand away.

Not slowly. Not gently. With the specific deliberateness of someone removing themselves from contact they found unwelcome. Like my fingers on his were an inconvenience he needed to be free of.

“There’s no need for that, Rebecca.”

“Rebecca, again.”

Not babe. Just my name, reduced to its bare syllables, stripped of everything that used to travel with it. In five years of marriage he had never once said it like that. Like it was just a word.

Before I could absorb it he reached beneath the table and produced a file. Set it between our breakfast plates. Slide it toward me. Held out a pen.

“Sign those papers.”

I looked at the file. I already knew what it was before I opened it. I opened it anyway. Read the top line.

Divorce Papers.

I closed it.

“Edmund,” I said carefully. “What is going on?”

“I’m tired of this marriage. There is someone else. Someone I love.”

The words arrived in my chest the way something very cold arrives, not explosive, just present. Undeniable. Landing in the specific place where the things you have feared but refused to name live quietly until someone finally says them for you.

I felt it. All of it. Five years of Sunday mornings and late nights and love given without condition. I felt all of it collapse in the space of one sentence.

And then I set my face.

“Another woman,” I said. Almost curious. “Well.”

I pushed the file back across the table.

“I won’t be signing those.”

He stared at me. I watched his face process the refusal confusion first, then surprise, then the recalibration of a man whose carefully prepared script has just been set aside.

I picked up my fork.

I opened my breakfast.

And I began to eat.

Calmly. Deliberately. Like the divorce papers were not sitting two feet from my plate. Like my husband had not just told me he loved someone else. Like my heart was not doing something private and violent underneath all of this composure because it was. Underneath the steady hands and the level expression, something in me was breaking in the specific irreversible way that things break when the life you built is dismantled in a single sentence at a breakfast table.

But Edmund did not get to see that.

He did not get to watch me fall apart in the room he chose for this. At the table he chose for this moment. With the pen he brought downstairs because he was so certain of how it would go.

He did not get that.

I was still his wife.

And if Edmund Jones believed for a single moment that I was going to make any part of this easy for him, he was about to spend a very significant amount of time finding out exactly who he had been sleeping next to for five years.