After My Husband Dropped Me to Save His Mistress

The emerald was gone.

I heard about it at six in the morning. Adrian called my cell. I was already awake, at my bench, working on the preliminary settings for the necklace I didn't want to make. His voice was clipped.

"The Muzo stone is missing," he said. "Vault was breached overnight."

I set down my tools. "When?"

"Security is reviewing footage now. Don't come to the building until I clear you."

He hung up.

I stared at my phone. The settings I had just soldered sat on the bench cloth, cooling. Forty-seven carats of irreplaceable material, gone. I should have felt something. Relief, maybe. The project canceled. The humiliation postponed.

I felt nothing.

I went back to work.

---

By noon, Adrian had his answer.

I got the message from his assistant: "Mr. Hayes requests you come to the office at two. The matter has been resolved."

Resolved.

I arrived at one fifty-five. The executive floor was quiet. Too quiet. I passed Adrian's assistant without speaking and moved toward his study. That's when I saw Rome Stephens in the lobby outside the elevators.

He was holding a cardboard box.

I stopped.

Rome had worked building security for thirty years. He knew my name. He always held the service elevator when he saw me coming with equipment. He had grandkids. He'd shown me pictures once—two boys, maybe seven and nine, holding fishing rods.

Now he stood next to a planter with a box that held a desk lamp, a framed photograph, and a jacket.

I walked over.

"Rome?"

He looked up. His face was very calm. That's what I remember most. How calm he was.

"Ms. Moreno." He nodded slightly. "Heading out."

"What happened?"

He glanced at the box. "Mr. Hayes let me go. Says I was near the vault last night during my rounds. Says the cameras saw me."

"Were you?"

"I do my rounds same time every night. Two-fourteen AM, I check that corridor. Been doing it for thirty years." He shifted the box slightly. "Guess that doesn't matter now."

Something moved inside my chest. Not anger. Not yet. Something colder.

"Did he investigate?"

Rome's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "No, ma'am. Ms. Carroll told him she saw me acting strange near the vault. That was enough."

Paige.

I felt it then. A crack. Small. Clean. Like the sound a gemstone makes when you apply pressure to the wrong facet and the internal structure gives.

"Where will you go?" I asked quietly.

Rome shrugged. "I'll figure it out. Lost my pension access, but I've got some savings. I'll be all right."

Sixty-two years old. Thirty years of service. Fired without a hearing on the word of a woman who wore emeralds like costume jewelry.

I held out my hand. Rome shook it. His grip was steady.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Not your fault, Ms. Moreno."

I watched him walk toward the exit. He didn't look back.

I turned and went to Adrian's office.

---

He was on a call when I walked in. He saw me, held up one finger, kept talking. I stood in front of his desk and waited.

He finished. Set the phone down. Looked at me.

"The emerald situation is handled," he said. "Stephens is gone. I've notified insurance. We'll source a replacement stone from—"

"You didn't investigate."

Adrian stopped. His eyes narrowed slightly.

"Excuse me?"

"Rome Stephens. You didn't investigate. You fired him on the spot."

"The security footage—"

"—showed him doing his rounds. The same rounds he's done for thirty years." I kept my voice level. Quiet. "You took her word over thirty years of his service."

Adrian leaned back in his chair. He studied me the way he studied quarterly projections. Looking for the variable that didn't fit.

"Paige saw him behaving suspiciously near the vault. The timing matches. I made a decision based on available evidence."

"You made a decision based on her tears."

Something shifted in his face. "Careful, Clare."

"He's sixty-two. You just took his pension."

"He should have thought of that before stealing a forty-seven carat emerald."

"You don't know that he did."

Adrian stood. He came around the desk. He stopped two feet from me. Close enough that I could smell his cologne. Far enough that it wasn't quite a threat.

"Don't make this into something it isn't," he said softly. "This doesn't concern you."

I looked at him.

I had spent three years looking at this man. Three years watching him parade Paige through rooms I was standing in. Three years accepting assignments designed to humiliate me. Three years performing the role of perfect, untouchable composure.

I looked at him now and I felt the last thread—so thin I had barely known it was still there—go completely slack.

"You're right," I said. "It doesn't."

I turned and left.

Behind me, I heard him say my name. Once.

I didn't stop.

---

That night, I contacted an employment attorney from a burner phone I bought at a drugstore three blocks from my apartment. I explained the situation. I provided a written statement of what Rome had told me. I arranged for the retainer to be paid from an account Adrian would never trace to me.

I did not tell Rome I had done it.

I went back to my workshop. I pulled out my sketchbook. I stared at the designs for a necklace that would never be made, for a stone that was gone, for a woman who had just destroyed an innocent man's life because she could.

I flipped to a blank page.

I wrote a number in the top corner.

Twenty-eight.

Then I went to sleep.