CHAPTER ONE: SHATTERED GLASS
ELARA
The Chinese takeout has gone cold in my hands, but I still can’t make myself knock on Evan’s door.
I can hear laughter through the thin wood. His deep rumble mixes with something higher, more feminine. The sound belongs to someone I know, though I can’t quite place the voice through the champagne fog in my head and the denial wrapping tight around my ribs.
Every working brain cell screams at me to turn around, go home, pretend I never came here with sesame chicken and hand-written fortune cookies that tell sweet lies about love lasting forever.
My key slides into the lock instead. He gave it to me six months ago with a whole speech about me being home to him, about always having a place in his life.
The door swings open on silent hinges.
Their clothes make a trail down the hallway. His jacket hangs over the back of the couch. A red blouse lies crumpled on the floor—the same one I complimented at the company party last month, now discarded like trash.
My feet carry me forward even though my brain has completely flatlined. The bedroom door stands half-open, spilling golden lamplight across hardwood that feels too solid under my shoes, too real, too present in a moment I desperately need to be dreaming.
I push the door wider with my fingertips.
Evan is in bed, but a woman moves beneath him. She turns her head at the creak of hinges. The overhead light catches Mila Cross’s face full-on—his secretary, his so-called work wife, the woman he swore up and down was basically a sister to him.
The takeout bag slips from my numb fingers. Sesame chicken explodes across expensive hardwood in a splash of brown sauce that looks disturbingly like old blood spreading across the floor.
Evan’s voice cuts through the ringing in my ears. “Elara.”
He sounds shocked but not sorry. Caught but not guilty, like I’ve walked in on something mildly embarrassing instead of the complete destruction of my entire future.
I try to speak but my throat has closed around words that would come out as screams if I let them loose.
He pulls away from her and reaches for the sheet like modesty suddenly matters now. Like I haven’t seen every inch of him over three years, memorized every scar and freckle during all that time I spent trying to love him into loving me back the same desperate way.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” he starts, which has to be the stupidest thing he’s ever said to me because it looks exactly like what it is.
My voice comes out flat as roadkill when I finally manage to speak. “It looks like you’re screwing your secretary in our bed.”
Mila sits up, clutching Egyptian cotton to her chest like it can protect her from my gaze. She has enough grace to look embarrassed at least. Evan just looks annoyed, like I’ve interrupted something important instead of walked in on my own brutal evisceration.
“We need to talk,” he says, climbing out of bed and pulling on boxers like this is a staff meeting we’re having. He walks toward me the same way he’d approach the conference room, like we’re discussing quarterly reports instead of standing in the smoking crater where my future used to be.
A laugh scrapes out of me. It sounds like something dying in the woods. “Now you want to talk?”
“You’re too much, Elara.” He says it so matter-of-fact, like he’s commenting on the weather or discussing his coffee order. “Too clingy. Too needy. I couldn’t breathe around you anymore. Mila lets me be myself without constantly demanding more from me every single day.”
The words land like rocks in my chest, settling into places that were already bruised from trying so hard to be whatever he needed. Each syllable confirms what I’ve suspected for months now—that something in me is fundamentally wrong, too hungry for affection, too desperate to be chosen first.
“How long has this been going on?” I hear myself ask.
He has the decency to hesitate for half a second. Mila doesn’t bother with the pretense.
“Six months,” she says quietly, almost apologetically, like that somehow makes it better.
Six months stretches out in my mind. Half a year of him touching her while I planned our anniversary dinner, while I bought fortune cookies custom-printed with declarations of love, while I convinced myself over and over that his distance just meant he was stressed at work and needed space.
“I should go.” The words come from somewhere outside my body, somewhere that still functions while the rest of me caves in on itself.
Evan reaches for my arm like he has any right to touch me. “Elara, wait—”
I jerk away before his fingers can make contact. “Don’t put your hands on me.”
My legs carry me down the hallway, over the spilled Chinese food, out the door into February air that bites through my coat and stings my face with cold. The city is drowning in Valentine’s decorations everywhere I look. Red hearts hang from every lamppost like nooses waiting to be used. Store windows scream about love being in the air.
The whole thing feels like a sick joke the universe is playing specifically on me.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Rhea’s name lights up the screen with a text: Wine night? I’m sensing a disturbance in the force.
My best friend has always had this uncanny timing that borders on supernatural. I type back with shaking fingers: He was cheating. With Mila.
The response comes so fast she must have already been typing before I even sent mine: I’m coming over right now. And I’m bringing tequila because f**k wine.
I make it six blocks before I realize tears are streaming down my face. Ten blocks pass before I admit to myself that I have nowhere to go except back to my mother’s house, back to the bedroom I grew up in, back to being the girl who couldn’t make a man stay even when she gave him absolutely everything she had.
Too much. Too needy. Too clingy.
The words are already carving themselves into my bones, finding permanent homes in the spaces between my ribs where they’ll live for years and years. Where I’ll carry them around like proof that Evan was right about me all along.
