My Best Friend Slept With My Future Husband

The champagne in my glass had gone warm. I hadn't taken a sip in twenty minutes.

Jenna's premiere was the kind of night Manhattan lives for. Klieg lights sliced the November sky above the theater on West 57th. Photographers shouted her name from behind velvet ropes. Inside, the lobby glittered like a jewelry box turned inside out — crystal, silk, teeth. I moved through it the way I'd been raised to move through rooms like this: shoulders back, chin level, a small warm smile ready for anyone who caught my eye.

My name is Emerie Hawkins. My father runs one of the oldest holding companies in New York. My mother sits on four boards and remembers everyone's children's names. I am twenty-six years old, engaged to Blake Ray since I was nineteen, and I was born unable to feel physical pain.

That last part matters. Everyone always makes sure it matters.

"Emerie, over here!" a photographer called. I turned, gave him three seconds, moved on.

Jenna was at the center of it all in a black slip gown, her hair swept off one shoulder. She spotted me across the room and beamed. I lifted my glass. She lifted hers. Around her throat, catching light with every breath, sat a diamond pendant on a fine platinum chain.

I knew that necklace. I bought it at Harry Winston two Christmases ago and wrapped it myself.

I let my gaze slide past her before she could read anything in it.

Blake had disappeared thirty minutes ago. "Just checking on something," he'd murmured, kissing my temple. His cologne — the one I'd chosen for him — lingered a second and then he was gone.

I drifted toward the far wall, past a waiter with a tray of oysters, past a director I recognized from the trades. A hallway opened behind a swag of black curtain — the VIP corridor, quieter, dim with amber sconces. I stepped through.

My heels made almost no sound on the carpet.

Halfway down, a door stood open a hand's width. Light spilled out in a thin gold strip. And through it, a voice I'd known for a decade.

"I'm tired of pretending, Blake."

Jenna. Not the warm, laughing Jenna from the red carpet. This one was low, urgent, close to tears.

"When are you going to choose me? Really choose me?"

I stopped walking.

I pressed my fingertips against the wall beside me. Cool plaster. I registered the temperature the way I always registered things — clinically, from a distance, because temperature was one of the few sensations I could trust.

"Baby." Blake's voice. Soft. The specific softness he used with me in the mornings. "You know it's not that simple."

"It could be."

"Come here."

A rustle of fabric. A small sound I did not need to identify.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe hard. My hand stayed flat on the wall. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a very quiet voice — the one that had spoken to me in every doctor's office since I was five — said: Note what you observe. Do not react yet. Reactions can be planned.

I turned around and walked back down the corridor. My smile was in place before I reached the curtain.

"There you are." Sophie Liang caught my elbow lightly by the bar. She'd known me since we were seven. Her eyes searched my face for one second, then softened. "You okay?"

"Perfectly." I set the warm champagne down and took a fresh glass. "Tell me about the Aspen thing. Are you actually going?"

She let me change the subject. Sophie has always known when to.

I stayed another forty minutes. I kissed Jenna's cheek when she found me. I told her she was luminous. I let Blake take my hand when he finally reappeared, tie loosened just enough to look candid. I did not look at his mouth.

At home, I sent the driver away at the curb and rode the elevator up alone.

The penthouse was dark. I did not turn on the overhead lights. I walked to my desk in stocking feet, opened my laptop, and typed her name.

Jenna kept a private blog. She'd mentioned it once, years ago, laughing — a little writing habit, nothing anyone would want to read. Password protected. I found the URL in a cached link on her old portfolio site. The password was her mother's birthday and the name of her first dog. It took me nineteen minutes.

Then I read.

I read about the night at the Carlyle in April. The weekend in Montauk Blake told me was a boys' trip. The way she wrote about my condition — 'the ice princess who wouldn't feel a knife if I put it in her' — with a little laughing emoji after. I read about the necklace. She'd worn it tonight on purpose. She wrote about that too.

My hands stayed steady. That surprised me a little. I'd wondered if they might not.

I printed every page. The machine hummed for a long time in the dark.

At 3 a.m. I stacked the pages neatly and set them on the kitchen island where my mother would see them first thing.

Then I went to my closet, opened the small velvet box on the top shelf, and one by one, I took off every piece of jewelry Blake had ever given me. The earrings from Paris. The tennis bracelet. The engagement ring last of all.

I put them in a shoebox at the back and closed the door.

I was not crying. I was making a list.