After His Mistress Attacked Me, He Defended Her

I called Eddie the next morning. My voice was steady. My hands were not.

"We need to talk," I said. "Tonight. Just us."

"Yeah, of course," he said. There was a pause. I could hear movement on his end. Sheets rustling. "Actually, Regina, I need to tell you something first."

The way he said my name. Not Reg. Not baby. My full name, like a warning.

"Cat had a really bad night," he started.

My grip tightened on the phone.

"She called me around two in the morning. She was at the bridge on Mercer Street. The one over the river." His voice dropped. "She was standing on the railing, Regina. I had to go get her."

I didn't say anything. The silence stretched out between us like a wire pulled too tight.

"She can't be alone right now," he continued. "Her therapist says the next few weeks are critical. I was thinking—just temporarily—she could stay in the guest room. At our place. Just until she stabilizes."

The air left my lungs in one slow, quiet exhale.

"You're asking me," I said carefully, "to let your ex-girlfriend move into our apartment."

"She has nowhere to go, Regina. If something happens to her—" His voice cracked on cue. "I couldn't live with that. You understand that, right? You're a good person. You've always been a good person."

There it was. The compliment shaped like a cage.

I closed my eyes. Behind them I saw the bridge on Mercer Street. I saw a woman I had never met standing on a railing in the dark. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that I had no way to call his bluff. If I said no and something happened, it would be my fault. That was the architecture of the trap.

"Temporarily," I said. The word tasted like chalk.

"Just a few weeks. I promise."

I hung up before he could thank me.

---

She arrived that afternoon with two large suitcases and a Louis Vuitton vanity case. She wore a cream silk blouse and her hair was perfectly blown out. She did not look like a woman who had been standing on a bridge railing at two in the morning.

"Thank you so much, Regina." Her voice was soft and breathy. She touched my arm lightly as she passed. "You have no idea what this means to me."

I smiled. It didn't reach my eyes.

By evening, her presence had already seeped into every corner of the apartment like smoke. Her perfume—something heavy and floral—hung in the bathroom. When I went to shower before dinner, I found her lacy black lingerie draped over the bathroom door hook. Not folded. Not in a bag. Just hanging there, deliberately, like a flag planted in conquered territory.

I unhooked it with two fingers and set it on the hallway shelf outside the bathroom door.

I didn't say a word.

The next morning, I came into the kitchen and poured myself coffee. Eddie's mug was already in the drying rack. I picked it up to put it away and stopped. A perfect crescent of deep red lipstick curved along the rim. Catalina's shade. The same one she had been wearing when she arrived.

Eddie drank from that mug every morning. He had for three years.

I set it back in the rack. I drank my coffee standing at the window, watching the street below.

---

That night I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.

The guest room wall was thin. At first there was just silence. Then, at midnight, I heard her voice. Low and theatrical, punctuated by soft, deliberate sobs.

"I just feel so alone," she breathed into the phone. "I don't know if I can do this, Eddie. I really don't."

A pause.

"Can you just stay on the line? Please? Just for a little while?"

I turned my head. The strip of light under the guest room door was steady. She wasn't going anywhere. And neither was he.

I lay there for two hours. The ceiling didn't change. The light under her door didn't go out. Eddie's voice drifted through the wall occasionally, low and soothing, the same tone he'd used in my hallway the night he called her baby.

At two in the morning I reached over to the nightstand. The cheap pink hair clip sat there in the dark. I picked it up. Turned it over in my fingers once.

The boy who bought this was already dead.

I just hadn't finished burying him yet.

I set the clip down. I folded my hands over my chest. I breathed in. I breathed out.

I started making a list in my head. Not of wedding flowers or venue deposits. A different kind of list. Quiet. Methodical. The kind my father had taught me to make when a situation required not emotion, but strategy.

I had been patient long enough.