My Fiancé Promised His Mistress Two More Months

I got home at seven-fifteen and didn't turn on the lights.

I set my bag on the kitchen counter and sat down at the table and pulled up the photos on my phone. Three of them. I'd taken them fast, in under ten seconds, and they were slightly angled — the MacBook screen caught a faint glare in the upper corner — but the text was readable. Every word of it.

I read them again. Then again.

*She's sweet, but she'll never be one of us. You know that, right?*

*Two more months of this performance and then it's just us again, I promise.*

I put the phone face-down on the table.

The kitchen was quiet. The penthouse was quiet. I'd picked out the barstools I was sitting near — spent three weeks deciding between two nearly identical options, drove Kaiden insane sending him comparison photos. The pendant lights above the island, the ones that threw warm circles on the marble — I'd found those at an estate sale in Brooklyn and had them rewired. Every surface in this apartment had my fingerprints on it, literally, from the months I'd spent building it into something that felt like a home.

I got up and made coffee. Black. I stood at the machine and listened to it run and thought about the word *performance*.

Two months. He'd written *two more months of this performance*. Which meant he'd been counting. Which meant there was a number in his head, a finish line, a point at which Lennox Parker would have served her purpose and could be set aside. I thought about the birthday party. The way he'd said *you came* like he was mildly surprised. The way he hadn't followed me to the elevator.

I carried my coffee back to the table and sat down and started thinking.

Not about how I felt. I knew how I felt — I could feel it sitting in my chest like a stone, heavy and cold and very still. But feelings weren't useful right now. What was useful was the question of what I actually knew, what I could prove, and what I was going to do about it.

I knew about the lingerie. I had the photos. I had two years of small things that had seemed individually explainable and now, arranged in sequence, told a different story entirely.

What I didn't have yet was the full picture. The scope of it. How long, how deliberate, how many people knew.

I needed more.

I picked up my phone and backed the photos up to my cloud drive. Then I finished my coffee and went to bed, and I lay there in the dark in the apartment I had built, and I did not cry, and I did not call anyone, and I did not make a single move I wasn't ready to make.

I just waited. I was good at waiting.

---

The rehearsal dinner was at a restaurant in Tribeca that had a private dining room and a wine list the size of a small novel. Brantley Carroll's family had money the way old buildings have water damage — deep in the walls, invisible until you knew where to look. The flowers alone probably cost more than my first apartment.

I wore a navy dress and my good earrings and arrived with Jericho at eight. He looked handsome. He always looked handsome. He put his hand on the small of my back when we walked in, and I let him, and I smiled at the right people, and I was, by every visible measure, exactly where I was supposed to be.

They seated us apart. I didn't know if it was intentional — the rehearsal table had a logic to it, bridesmaids on one side, groomsmen on the other, partners scattered somewhere in the middle — but I ended up at the far end, between a woman named Courtney who worked in PR and a woman named Sloane who did not appear to work at all. They were both perfectly pleasant. They talked to each other mostly.

I watched the other end of the table.

Azalea was three seats from Jericho. She'd worn something ivory and backless, and she leaned toward him the way she always did — not dramatically, just consistently, like a plant turning toward light. Every few minutes she'd say something close to his ear and he'd laugh, or nod, or touch her arm briefly in response. Small things. The kind of things that look like nothing if you're not paying attention.

I was paying attention.

By nine o'clock, Brantley's groomsmen were loud. There were six of them, and they had the particular energy of men who had been drinking since the afternoon and had decided the evening was a performance they were entitled to direct. One of them — tall, red-faced, the kind of handsome that had probably peaked at twenty-two — stood up and announced that it was time for bridesmaid toasts.

Not toasts by the bridesmaids. Toasts about them.

The table thought this was funny. The bridesmaids smiled with varying degrees of sincerity. I watched Meadow Lawrence, the bride, laugh along from her seat at the head of the table, and I noticed that the laugh didn't reach her eyes.

They went down the line. Each dare was dressed up as a toast — stand up, say something embarrassing about yourself, take a drink. The women complied, one by one, with the practiced grace of people who had learned that the cost of refusing a joke in this world was higher than the cost of absorbing it.

Then they got to me.

The red-faced one grinned. 'Lennox.' He said my name like he'd been saving it. 'We want a toast. Roast yourself for being —' he paused for effect, glancing at his friends — 'the only bridesmaid who doesn't summer in the Hamptons.'

Laughter. Immediate, reflexive, the kind that fills a room before anyone has decided whether something is actually funny.

I turned my head slowly toward Jericho.

He was looking at the table. His jaw was tight. He picked up his wine glass and took a sip and set it down and said absolutely nothing.

I stood up.

I picked up my glass. I looked around the table with the pleasant, unhurried expression I had spent years building into something impenetrable.

'To summering in the Hamptons,' I said. 'And to everyone here who's never had to wonder how the other half lives.' I smiled. 'Must be nice.'

I drank.

A beat of silence. Then someone laughed — a real one, surprised out of them — and the moment passed, and the table moved on, and I sat back down and turned to Courtney and asked her something about her job, and she answered, and the dinner continued.

Under the table, my hand was completely still.

I was still keeping the list.