My Boyfriend Staged Affairs to Humiliate Me

The hotel room smelled like cologne that wasn't mine.

I stood in the doorway with my heels still on, my clutch cold in my hand, and looked at the man in my bed. He was maybe thirty, good jaw, expensive watch. He sat up slow, like he'd rehearsed it. Like he'd been told to look surprised.

Seven times. This was the seventh time.

My stomach used to drop at this part. My hands used to shake. Tonight they didn't. I felt strangely calm, the kind of calm that comes right before you do something you can't undo.

I walked in, set my clutch on the dresser, and pulled out my phone. I hit record. Then I looked up at the corner of the ceiling, at the little black smoke detector that had never once, in three years, needed a battery change.

"For the record," I said, keeping my voice even, "it's 11:42 p.m. I came back from the Hensley Group dinner. The door was locked from the inside, but I have the only key card. There's a man in my bed I've never seen before. This is the seventh time this exact thing has happened, always after an event, always when I'm alone." I paused. "I know you're watching, Carson. I know you and Kyra are watching right now."

The man's face went slack. He looked at the ceiling too, like he could suddenly see what I was talking about.

"You can go," I told him. "Whatever they paid you, keep it. Just go."

He went. Fast. Didn't even grab his shoes.

Across town, in a penthouse I'd been in a hundred times, I imagined Carson's smile falling off his face like something slipping from a shelf. I imagined Kyra's mouth going thin and cold. I didn't need to imagine it, really. I'd know soon enough.

Carson called nine minutes later. I didn't pick up. He picked me up instead, waiting outside in his car like nothing had happened, jaw tight, not apologizing, never apologizing. We were ten minutes into the drive home when his phone rang.

Kyra's name lit up the screen.

"Carson." Her voice came through tinny and trembling. "Carson, I can't— I can't breathe, I think I'm having one of my episodes again, please—"

He pulled the car to the curb so fast my seatbelt locked against my chest.

"Get an Uber," he said to me, already unbuckling. He didn't look at me when he said it. "I have to go."

I didn't answer. I got out.

I watched his taillights disappear down Lexington from the back of a stranger's Toyota, and I waited to cry. I always used to cry, alone, in the back of cars, in bathroom stalls, in the shower with the water too hot. Tonight nothing came.

Instead I opened my phone and texted Enzo.

*Rough night,* I typed.

*Define rough,* he wrote back within a minute. Then, before I could answer: *Found something today that reminded me of you.* A photo followed — a jagged chunk of rock, glowing faintly under some kind of lamp. *Stubborn. Beautiful under pressure.*

I laughed. Actually laughed, in the back of that Toyota, at eleven fifty at night, for the first time all evening.

Carson brought Kyra home with him. Of course he did. I found her on my couch when I finally walked into the apartment — shoes off, feet tucked under her like she paid rent here. She'd used the door code. The one I'd never given her.

"Oh," she said, not looking sorry at all. "You're back early."

Then she saw the locket on the coffee table. My grandmother's locket. I'd been holding it earlier, turning it over the way I always did when I needed my hands to remember something steady.

Kyra picked it up between two fingers, like it was something she'd found on the sidewalk.

"Is this from your grandmother?" She turned it over, wrinkling her nose. "It's so... cheap. Like something from a pawn shop."

She let it drop. It hit the hardwood with a small, terrible clink.

I crossed the room in three steps and slapped her.

The sound cracked through the apartment. Kyra's hand flew to her cheek, and within two seconds her eyes were wet, her mouth was trembling, and she was already turning toward the door like she knew, before he even walked in, that Carson would be standing there.

He was.

He didn't ask what happened. He didn't need to. He looked at Kyra's face, then at me, and something in him went dark.

"Carson—" I started.

He scooped the locket off the floor and pulled out his lighter — the same silver one his father used to carry, the one he never went anywhere without — and held the flame to the metal.

"No." I lunged. The flame caught my palms instead. I felt it before I understood it, a white-hot line across my skin, and I fell back clutching my hands as the locket blackened, curled, collapsed into itself.

The room went silent. Ash drifted onto the floor.

I looked down at my burned palms, then up at Carson.

"We're done," I said. No shake in my voice. None at all.

He laughed. Actually laughed, like I'd told a bad joke he'd heard before. "Sure you are."

I raised my left hand.

The ring caught the light — dark, matte, a sliver of something that had fallen out of the sky embedded in the band.

"I already said yes to someone else."

His laughter stopped like someone had cut the sound out of the room.