My Husband Buried Me for His Mistress

I watched it alone.

The bedroom door was locked from the inside. My side. The laptop sat open on the bed, screen glowing in the dark. I'd already seen the footage once—the news segment, the ribbon-cutting, the crowd in black tie raising champagne flutes while the camera panned across the bridge. Across me. My body rendered in steel and concrete, posed in ways that made my throat close.

I clicked replay.

This time I watched Nathanael's face. The way he smiled when the reporter asked him about the design. The way his hand settled at the small of Armani's back, casual, proprietary. The way the crowd laughed when someone made a joke I couldn't quite hear through the laptop speakers.

My thumbnail found my palm. Pressed in. The skin split easy now. I'd worn the same spot raw for weeks.

I didn't call Lennon. Didn't cry. I closed the laptop and sat in the dark and felt something inside me go very, very quiet. Not peaceful. Not calm. Just quiet, the way a house goes quiet after everyone inside it has stopped breathing.

Three weeks later, I was required to attend a gala.

The invitation arrived on heavy cardstock. Foster Foundation Annual Benefit. Black tie. My attendance was not a request. Nathanael's assistant—not Armani, one of the others, a girl whose name I never learned—delivered it to my room with a note clipped to the corner. *Dress appropriately.*

I dressed immaculately.

Midnight-blue gown, silk, cut close but not tight. Hair pinned at the nape of my neck. No jewelry except my wedding band, which I still wore because taking it off felt like admitting something I wasn't ready to admit. I looked in the mirror and saw a woman who could pass for fine. That was the goal. Pass for fine. Get through the night. Go home.

The ballroom was all chandeliers and marble and people who had known me before and didn't anymore. I stood near the entrance and watched Nathanael work the room. He was good at it. He'd always been good at it. A hand on a shoulder here, a laugh there, the performance of warmth executed with the same precision he brought to his architectural models.

Armani was beside him. Red dress. Hair down. She looked happy.

I walked to the bar and ordered a glass of white wine I didn't drink. A couple I used to have dinner with—back when I was a person people had dinner with—saw me and turned the other direction. I watched them go. Didn't follow.

A group of women I'd once considered acquaintances stood near one of the tall windows. I recognized them from charity luncheons, from gallery openings, from the kind of events where everyone smiled and no one meant it. I walked over because I didn't know where else to go.

"Saoirse," one of them said. Her name was Margot. She had kind eyes. She used to ask about my book recommendations. "I didn't know you'd be here."

"I'm still his wife," I said. It came out flatter than I meant it to.

Margot glanced at the others. No one said anything. Then Armani appeared at the edge of the circle, a champagne flute in one hand, and the women turned toward her like flowers toward the sun.

"Ladies," Armani said, smiling. She didn't look at me. Didn't acknowledge me. Just stepped into the space where I'd been standing, and the circle closed around her.

I stepped back. No one noticed.

I found a column near the edge of the room and stood beside it. I wasn't hiding exactly. Just standing somewhere I didn't have to perform. Across the ballroom, Nathanael laughed at something a model in a silver dress said. His hand was on her arm. The photographer from one of the tabloids—I recognized him from the bridge unveiling—raised his camera and took the shot.

Then he turned and saw me. Alone. Standing by the column. He raised the camera again.

I didn't move. Didn't smile. Just looked at him until he lowered the lens, and then I looked away.

The photo ran the next morning. I saw it at the kitchen table over coffee. Someone had left the paper folded open to the society page. The image was exactly what you'd expect: me, standing alone in a beautiful dress, while across the frame Nathanael laughed with a woman who wasn't me. The headline read: *The Wife Who Stays.*

I read it twice. Set the paper down. Drank my coffee. My expression didn't change. I'd gotten very good at that.

Weeks later, I was still in the hospital.

They'd admitted me after I stopped eating. After the night I stood on the penthouse balcony for two hours and couldn't remember deciding to go back inside. Dr. Bishop made the call. I didn't fight it. Fighting required energy I didn't have.

The room had no windows I could open. A nurse checked on me every hour. I was on a seventy-two-hour hold that had stretched into weeks because every time they evaluated me, I said the wrong things. Or maybe the right things. I couldn't tell anymore.

One afternoon, a nurse came in to take my vitals. She was young. Chatty. She set her phone on the bedside table while she wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm.

The screen lit up. A video, already playing. I saw Armani's face first—red lips, perfect smile, standing in front of a press backdrop I recognized from one of Nathanael's events. A reporter's voice, off-screen: *"And the pregnancy—was that part of the reason for the separation?"*

Armani's smile didn't falter. *"Oh, that. Nathanael considers that whole situation someone else's mistake, frankly. A mercy that it ended when it did."*

The nurse saw me looking. Fumbled for the phone. "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Foster, I didn't mean—"

I looked at her. My face felt very still. "It's fine."

She left quickly.

I lay back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling tile. The pattern was familiar now. I'd spent a lot of hours looking at it. I pressed my thumbnail into my palm and felt the skin give, warm and wet, and something inside me that had been holding on—some last filament of hope that underneath all of it, Nathanael was still the man I'd married—snapped cleanly in two.

I didn't cry.

I just lay there and felt it break, and then I felt nothing at all.