After My Husband Locked Me Away for His Mistress

Cheyenne moved into the east guest suite twelve days after my anniversary. She said it was for her nerves. She said the primary suite made her anxious, being so close to "where it happened," as if she hadn't been the one standing in it wearing my robe. Amos had Marguerite move her things herself — three suitcases, a garment rack, a box of shoes still in their tissue paper. I watched from the hallway and said nothing, because saying something had already stopped working.

She stopped cooking within the week. Stopped doing the laundry, stopped answering the intercom. I found her one afternoon sprawled across the living room sofa, my cream cashmere sweater pooled around her like she'd melted into it, scrolling through something on her phone that made her laugh — a short, ugly bark of a laugh, nothing like the soft breathy voice she used around Amos.

"That's mine," I said, nodding at the sweater.

She looked up slowly, like I'd interrupted something far more important than me. "Amos said I could borrow it. He said you have, like, forty of these." She stretched her arms over her head, and the sleeves slid down to her elbows. "Cashmere's really soft. I get it now. Rich people stuff."

I didn't answer. I went upstairs and started locking my closet.

The wine happened three days later. I came home to find my competition certificates — the ones from Junior Nationals, the ones from my first World Cup podium, all framed and hung along the hallway to my old office — soaked through, the glass cracked on two of them, a dark stain spreading across the mat of my sixteen-year-old face holding a silver medal. Cheyenne stood at the end of the hall with an empty glass in her hand.

"God, I'm so sorry," she said, and her voice cracked exactly right, exactly on cue. "I tripped. I feel awful, Vivienne, I really do."

I believed her the way I believed weather forecasts. Which is to say, I checked the sky myself.

That night at dinner — a dinner I hadn't cooked, hadn't planned, hadn't even known was happening until the caterers arrived — I heard her tell one of Amos's business partners, in a soft, wounded murmur clearly meant to carry, that "Mrs. Morales has been struggling emotionally lately. We're all just trying to be gentle with her." The partner's wife glanced at me with something between pity and suspicion, and I smiled at her the way I'd been trained to smile at judges who'd already decided my score before I landed.

When I brought it up to Amos afterward — the certificates, the whispers, the way the staff had started taking their instructions from a woman who didn't even sleep in this house six months ago — he didn't look up from his phone.

"She's fragile, Vivienne," he said. "She needs protection right now. And you're standing there sounding jealous. It's beneath you."

"I'm not jealous. I'm asking why the housekeeper is giving orders in my kitchen."

"She's not the housekeeper anymore." He finally looked at me, and something in his face had hardened into a shape I didn't recognize. "Try being kind for once instead of cold."

I went to bed that night and didn't cry. I was getting good at that.

Lylah came back on a Thursday, unannounced, the way she always did. I was in the kitchen when I heard her voice from the service corridor — not calling for me, but sharp, urgent, cut with something like disbelief. I started toward the sound and then stopped, because I heard a second voice answering hers. Not answering me. Answering itself.

I found out later what she'd seen: Cheyenne backed against the wall near the laundry room, and Rafael — the brother, the quiet one who came by sometimes with grocery bags and never quite looked anyone in the eye — gripping her wrist hard enough to leave marks, his voice low and furious about money, about *waiting*, about *not blowing this now*. Not siblings arguing. Something else. Something that made the back of Lylah's neck go cold, she told me later, though at the time I only saw her hurrying out through the garage exit, phone clutched tight in her hand, cheeks flushed.

She called me from the sidewalk, breathless, half-laughing in that giddy, reckless way she got when she thought she'd won something.

"Viv. Viv, I've got something that ends her. I swear to God. Meet me tomorrow, that café on 73rd, the one with the terrible coffee. I need to show you."

"Lylah, what did you—"

"Tomorrow," she said, and I could hear her grinning through the phone. "I love you. I'll see you tomorrow."

She hung up before I could ask anything else.

I didn't know, standing there in my ruined hallway of cracked glass and wine-stained medals, that I would spend the rest of my life replaying that word. *Tomorrow.* I didn't know that somewhere behind me, in the doorway of the service corridor, Cheyenne Guzman had watched my sister walk away with a phone full of proof clutched in her hand — and that she'd already started making calls of her own.