HIS FORSAKEN WIFE HIS GREATEST REGRET

When Family Becomes the Enemy

Roberta's POV

Brett's eyes were on mine. Then he nodded. "I'm right here," he said. Just that.

I nodded. Then I slipped out of the car.

The morning air was cold, and the house looked exactly as it always had — indifferent, beautiful in the way of things built to impress rather than to hold. Same hedges. Same dark windows. Same cold, impressive facade that had never once felt like home. It looked exactly the same as the morning Ziva left in the back of Jace's car with her face pressed against the glass.

and I walked toward the house steadily, and everything I needed to take back had already mapped in my mind.

I didn't look behind me.

But I knew Brett was there.

I stood in front of the door.

The code was still the same.

Of course it was. Why would Jace change it? He had no reason to believe I was coming back. As far as he knew, I was still unconscious in a hospital bed, or dead, or simply ceased to matter — which to Jace was probably the same thing.

The code that unlocked our home was Irene's birthday. Not mine. Not Ziva's.

I had asked him once, early in the marriage, if we could change it to something that meant something to us. He had looked at me with that particular patience he reserved for requests he found tiresome and said his mother's birthday was a date he'd never forget.

I pressed the numbers, and the door opened, and I stepped inside.

The smell hit me first.

His cologne. The specific brand he'd worn for eight years. It lived in the walls now, in every room he'd moved through like he owned the air.

He did own the air. He owned everything.

I stood in the hallway and let myself feel it for exactly three seconds — the weight of eight years pressing down from every surface — and then I walked.

Ziva's drawings were still on the refrigerator.

I had not expected that. I don't know why. I stopped and looked at them. A house with four people in front of it, all different heights. A dog we never had, but she'd wanted desperately. A picture of me with disproportionately large hands because she thought my hands were the most important part of me — the hands that held her, cooked for her, tucked her in.

I pressed my fingers to my mouth and kept walking.

I went upstairs.

Our bedroom.

I kept my eyes away from the bed.

Because I couldn't bear it. I had already burned through the phase of that particular wound the night I pushed the door open and found Millie and Jace. What was left was something colder and more useful. Rage in its settled form, past the shaking, past the tears, sitting in my chest like banked coals that I was learning to manage rather than be managed by.

I went directly to the closet

The back corner. Behind the row of shoes he never looked at because they were mine and therefore irrelevant. The box was exactly where I had left it, undisturbed, which told me everything I needed to know about how much attention he had ever paid to anything in this room that belonged to me.

I pulled it out and opened it.

The photos were still there. I checked each one quickly. All there. Dates written on the back in my careful small handwriting, each bruise documented, each morning I had stood in the bathroom and forced myself to record it instead of just hiding it. Twelve photographs over a year. More than enough.

The journal. I opened it to a random page — his voice in my own words, a Tuesday in August when Ziva had been at school and he had come home in a mood that announced itself from the moment I heard his car — and closed it again. More than enough.

The recording device is at the bottom. I pressed play for three seconds just to confirm it still worked. His voice came out of the small speaker, and I turned it off immediately. His voice in this room, even recorded, even controlled, felt like a violation. But it worked. More than enough.

I picked up one of my bags. I put everything inside the bag.

Then I thought about Ziva's iPad. It never came back home with her from the hospital where she had that surgery.

I pulled out my own phone and switched it on for the first time since the hospital. It buzzed with messages I didn't read. I pocketed it.

I was turning to go when I saw our photo album on the dresser.

I hadn't meant to stop. My feet did it without my permission. I opened it with shaky hands.

Me and Ziva at the river park. Her sixth birthday, face lit by candles. A Wednesday after school where she had insisted on wearing her rain boots despite there being no rain and I had taken a picture because she looked so pleased with the decision.

My whole chest ached.

I picked up the birthday one.

Her face. That face. The way joy sat on her so completely, so without reservation, like she had never learned to hold it back or make it smaller for other people's comfort.

Did I help Nolan? Is he okay?

Even then. Even at the end.

I removed the photograph from the album and put it carefully in my bag.

Then the school photo. I took them all. Every photograph of Ziva in this room was coming with me. He didn't get to keep her image after what he did with her life.

Then I saw the last one.

Worn at the edges. Old. The Clearwater Children's Home courtyard in the background, the light coming from the side the way it always did in the late afternoon. Two girls. Thin arms. Big eyes. Arms wound around each other with the unself-conscious certainty of children who had chosen each other in the absence of anyone choosing them.

Me and Millie.

I picked it up.

I looked at her face. She was nine years old at that time. The gap in her front teeth. The way she leaned her head toward mine like she was sheltering something. We had survived that place together — the cold winters, the social workers who came and went, the particular loneliness of a shared dormitory that was somehow lonelier than being alone. We had found each other in all of it.

What happened to you? I looked at the girl in the photograph. Her young, unguarded face. Her eyes that had no idea what was coming. What happened to both of us? We were supposed to be sisters.

The girl in the photograph didn't answer.

I stood there a moment longer. Looking at the child Millie had been before, she became the woman who sent my daughter to an operating table and had s*x with my husband on the night I buried her.

I wondered when the decision had been made. Not the decision to sleep with Jace — that could have been gradual, opportunistic, a thing that started before she understood what it would become. But the decision to use me. To position herself as my confidante while systematically dismantling everything I had. To sit across from me and hold my hand and tell me I wasn't alone while feeding information to the man who was supposed to be my husband.

That decision had a moment. A specific point where she looked at our friendship and decided it was a resource.

I wanted to know when.

I carefully set the photo down on the dresser. Didn't bother to put it back in the album.

"That girl is gone," I said quietly. To the photograph. To the room. To whatever remained of the twenty something years I had spent believing, she was family. "She's been gone for a while, and I just didn't see it." I picked up my bag. "The only thing on my mind now is making sure you understand exactly what you threw away."

I heard movements downstairs.

I froze.

Then I moved to the window. Pulled the curtain back an inch.

Jace's car in the driveway. The engine was still running.

He got out first.

He was laughing before he was fully out of the car — head back, easy, the laugh of a man without a single weight on him. He turned back toward the passenger door, still smiling, and said something I couldn't hear through the glass.

Millie stepped out.