THREE CAN PLAY

Chapter 4

MELISSA'S POV

The papers had been in the bathroom drawer for nine days, tucked under a stack of towels Adrian never touched, and Lis had rehearsed this speech so many times the words had started to lose their shape in her mouth.

"I want you to know it's not you." She said it to the mirror, low, testing the sound of it. Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the counter to make them stop, and they didn't. "It's me. I just — I've changed. We've grown apart."

She stared at her own reflection and hated how unconvincing she looked saying it — soft, apologetic, like a woman asking permission instead of one already gone.

"Screw this." Her voice cracked out sharper, angrier, something closer to true. "It's your fault this is happening. You were never here. You left me alone in this house for months at a time and expected me to just—" She stopped, breath coming fast now, chest tight, throat tighter. "Just sign the damn papers, Adrian."

Better. That version she could almost believe.

Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her ears. She opened the drawer, moved the towels aside, and picked up the folder — thin, unassuming, absolutely enormous in her hands — and held it against her chest for a long moment, eyes shut, willing her legs to just carry her out of this bathroom and down the hall before the fear caught up with her feet.

Just walk. Just say it. Just hand it to him and let it be done.

She opened her eyes. Opened the bathroom door.

Her phone buzzed on the counter behind her.

She almost didn't check it. But her hand went back for it anyway, an old reflex faster than any new resolve, and the screen lit up in her palm.

Something in her chest loosened the second she saw the name. A smile broke across her face before she could stop it, helpless, the kind of smile she never let Adrian see anymore.

R❤️

We need to talk. 7pm. Love you Mama.

The papers suddenly felt very heavy in her other hand.

She looked down at the folder. Looked at the phone. Some small, honest part of her — the part that had built up the nerve over nine days, the part that had rehearsed a speech in the mirror until her voice stopped shaking on the angry parts — went very quiet, very fast, like a door closing somewhere she wasn't ready to look at directly.

We need to talk could mean anything. It could mean nothing. It could mean everything.

She turned around, and slid the folder back under the towels, careful, the way you put something away when you don't want to have to explain why you took it out in the first place.

Adrian was sitting up in bed when she came in, phone face-down on the nightstand, a look on his face she hadn't seen in a while — alert, present, like he'd been waiting for her.

"You said you wanted to talk to me about something," he said.

The words landed strange in her chest. For a second she almost laughed, or almost cried, she couldn't tell which — the papers still sitting warm from her own hands under a stack of towels twenty feet away. "Never mind. It's nothing, really."

"Are you sure?" He was watching her carefully, some hope still sitting undisguised on his face, like he actually wanted the conversation more than he wanted to be spared it.

"Yeah." She made herself smile. "Why?"

"Because there's actually something I want to talk to you about."

Something in her stomach went cold and fast. "Okay." She sat on the edge of the bed, putting a careful distance between them without quite deciding to. "I'm all ears."

He opened his mouth.

Her phone rang.

"Excuse me." She was up before she'd finished the sentence, already reaching for it, grateful in a way she didn't examine too closely. "I'll just go take this real quick."

She didn't look back to see his face fall. She didn't let herself.

In the living room, she didn't answer the call. She let it ring itself out standing by the window, phone pressed to her ear for a show she wasn't performing for anyone but herself, and when it finally stopped she just stood there, breathing, looking out at nothing.

It was Nadia from work, she knew without checking — Nadia only ever called about the same thing these days, some broke boyfriend who kept borrowing money he never paid back, some speech Lis had heard a dozen times about how she knew she should leave but she just — couldn't, not yet, not when things were finally starting to feel good again. Lis had no patience for it today. Didn't call her back.

She let her mind go, instead, to the version of her marriage she kept close at hand for moments exactly like this one.

Two months. That's how long he'd been gone on that last trip — two months, barely a phone call some weeks, coming home too tired to even really look at her, like she was just another item on a list of things waiting for him when he finally landed. Before that, another trip. Before that, another. She'd counted once, in a bad month, and stopped counting because the number had made her feel something she didn't want to feel.

She'd been a good wife. She'd waited. She'd kept the house, kept showing up to a bed that was empty more nights than it wasn't. What was she supposed to do with all of that — with a body that wanted to be touched and a husband who treated home like a layover? He'd built this. Every night he'd chosen work over her, he'd built the exact shape of the hole that got filled eventually, one way or another, by someone who actually showed up.

That was the story. She believed it fully, it's stopped being an explanation and started being a memory. Adrian's absence sat at the center of it like a sun everything else orbited — her own hunger, her own choices, barely visible in that light at all, edited down to almost nothing.

She glanced at the phone screen, still glowing faintly with the last unanswered call, and thought instead of the message sitting on it from some minutes ago.

Her chest did something warm and frightened at once.

She put the phone in her pocket and went back down the hall, rehearsing a smile for the bedroom, already deciding this was a conversation for another night.

*****

ADRIAN'S POV

The club hit him the same way as the last time — bass first, up through the floor and into his chest, then the dark, then the lights carving color out of all of it.

He stood near the entrance for a second, scanning, feeling foolish, feeling exactly like a man who'd driven forty minutes on a Tuesday night to stand in a doorway.

Then he saw her.

She was across the room, mid-conversation with another man, and something in her posture changed the second she clocked him — a beat of stillness, quickly covered, before she said something to the man and started toward him.

"You," she said, arriving in front of him, arms crossing. Not unfriendly. Not exactly friendly either. Careful, the way she'd been in his office, like she hadn't decided yet which version of herself this conversation called for.

She reached into her purse before he could say anything. "Your wallet."

He looked at it, then back at her. Suddenly, all the anger he'd carried from the conversation he and Lis hadn't had, and from knowing she was lying earlier about going grocery shopping, felt very far away.

"Keep it."

Her eyebrows pulled together. "Why?"

He didn't say anything.

"Look, I only took your wallet because I wanted you to come get it back." She rolled her eyes. "You paid well the last time."

"I'm not here for my wallet."

"Then why are you here again?"

He didn't answer right away. He stood there a second too long, aware of the bass in his chest, aware of her waiting, aware of everything he'd spent the whole day trying to talk himself out of.

Because he'd spent the whole day convincing himself he didn't need to come back.

And then he'd come anyway.

"I wanted to see you."

Raven went very still, studying his face like she was checking it for a lie and not finding one.

Adrian swallowed.

"I missed you."