After My Husband Hid His Second Family with My Best Friend

The drive back was quiet in the way that felt earned.

Kellen had one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the center console, close to mine but not touching. The radio was low — something instrumental, forgettable. Outside, the highway unspooled in gray and white, the last of the weekend light flattening against the clouds. I watched the trees blur past and thought about nothing. Or I made myself think about nothing. I had gotten good at that.

We were forty minutes from the city when we hit the intersection.

I didn't see the other car. I heard it — a sound like the world tearing open, metal on metal, a crack so loud it seemed to come from inside my own skull. Then the window beside me exploded inward, and something hit my shoulder like a fist made of fire, and the seat belt locked across my chest so hard I couldn't breathe, and then everything was sideways and still.

For a moment there was no sound at all.

Then the pain arrived.

It came in waves, starting in my shoulder and spreading down my left side in long, hot pulses. I tried to move and couldn't. Something was wrong with my legs — not broken, I didn't think, but pinned, the door crumpled inward against my knee. Glass was everywhere. I could feel it in my shoulder, in my hair, against my cheek. Something warm was running down my arm and dripping from my fingers onto the seat.

I knew what warm and dripping meant.

'Jules.' Kellen's voice, from somewhere to my right. Shaken. Close. 'Jules, can you hear me?'

I tried to answer. What came out was not a word.

'Okay.' I heard him moving, heard the creak of his door, heard his feet hit the pavement. 'Okay, I'm calling — I'm calling 911, just stay still.'

I stayed still. I didn't have a choice. The pain was very large and very specific, and it took everything I had just to keep my eyes open. The sky through the shattered window was the color of old pewter. A car had stopped somewhere nearby — I could hear an engine idling, a door opening, a voice calling out asking if everyone was okay.

Everyone was not okay.

I focused on breathing. In, out. In, out. The blood was soaking through my sleeve now, dark and steady. I pressed my right hand against my shoulder and felt the glass shift and bit down on the sound that tried to come out of me.

Kellen was on the phone. I could hear his voice but not the words — he was outside the car, pacing, the way he always paced when he was on a call that mattered. I thought, distantly, that he sounded more composed than I would have expected. Then I thought that I should stop being surprised by what Kellen was capable of.

Then his phone rang again.

I heard him answer it. I heard the shift in his voice — the 911 call dropped away, or ended, and a different call began. And then I heard her.

Poppy's voice came through the speaker, high and fractured and breathless. She was crying — or performing crying, and I no longer knew the difference, and maybe that was the point. The words came in pieces: *collapsed, the ER, they don't know, I need you, please, Kellen, please.*

I turned my head toward the window. It cost me. The pain spiked white and sharp, and my vision went gray at the edges, but I turned my head and I looked at him.

He was standing on the shoulder of the road, maybe ten feet from the car. His jacket was torn at the elbow. There was a small cut above his eyebrow that had already stopped bleeding. He was looking at me through the shattered window.

I watched his face.

I watched him look at me — really look, the way you look at a problem you're calculating the cost of — and I watched something move behind his eyes. Not grief. Not anguish. Something quieter and more terrible than either of those things.

He looked away first.

He stepped to the curb. He raised his hand. A cab that had slowed to rubberneck pulled over, and Kellen opened the door, and he got in.

I watched the cab pull away from the curb.

I watched it merge into traffic.

I watched his taillights — two small red points of light, growing smaller, and smaller, and then gone.

The sirens were still far away. I could hear them, thin and distant, somewhere on the other side of the city. The person who had stopped their car was crouching near my window now, a woman with a gray coat and frightened eyes, saying something I couldn't quite track. I looked at her and I looked through her.

The blood was warm against my fingers. The glass in my shoulder had stopped feeling like glass and started feeling like nothing, which I understood was not a good sign. The sky above me was very still.

I thought about the notebook at the bottom of my bag. I thought about the envelope. I thought about the fourteenth, and the Whitmore building, and the two hundred people who would be in that room.

I thought about a little boy named Oliver who did not know his father had just driven away from his dying mother in a cab.

I thought: *he didn't hesitate.*

Not for a second. Not even for a second.

Somewhere in my chest, in the place where seven years of love had lived — the late nights, the first apartment, the way he used to say my name like it meant something — I felt the last of it go out. Not with a crash. Not with a scream. Just a quiet, final extinguishing, like a candle in a room where no one is left to notice the dark.

The sirens got louder.

I kept my hand pressed to my shoulder and I kept my eyes open and I breathed.

In. Out.

In.

I was going to survive this.

I had things left to do.