Camille called on the second day.
I was sitting on the kitchen counter eating grapes I didn't taste when her name lit up my screen. My hand trembled but I let it ring twice so my voice could find its composure before I answered.
"Hey girl!" She sounded warm and bright, like a friend who genuinely missed me, and if I didn't know better I would have believed every note of it.
"Hey," I said, keeping my tone light enough to pass as normal.
"I just wanted to say again how beautiful the party was. You and Julian are literally goals, Sienna. I'm so happy for you."
Goals. The word almost made me laugh. Not the funny kind. The kind that sits at the back of your throat and burns. This woman had her tongue in my fiancé's mouth two days ago and was calling us goals on the phone like she deserved an Oscar for the performance.
"Thank you babe, it was such a good night." Every word felt like swallowing glass but they came out smooth enough.
"We should do brunch this week. I miss you."
"Definitely. I'll text you."
I hung up and put my phone face down on the counter. My chest was doing that thing again, that tightening that made it hard to take a full breath. I closed my eyes and pressed my palms flat against the cold marble and just focused on breathing because if I thought too hard about what just happened I was going to spiral and I had gotten really good at postponing my spirals to hours when Julian wasn't home.
That was my system now. Hold it together when he was around. Fall apart when he wasn't. Rebuild myself before he walked back through the door. Repeat. It was exhausting but it was working, or at least it was keeping me functional enough that he hadn't noticed anything yet.
Or maybe he had noticed and just didn't care enough to push.
The thing about pretending is that it takes more energy than actually dealing with your problems. Every smile costs something. Every normal conversation drains a little more from you. Every time Julian touched me casually, his hand on my hip as he passed me in the kitchen, his arm across my shoulders while we watched TV, I had to override my body's instinct to recoil and force myself to receive it like I always had. Like his touch was still welcome. Like his skin on mine didn't make me want to peel my own off.
By the third day I was running on nothing. I hadn't eaten a proper meal since the engagement party. Sleep came in fragments, an hour here, forty minutes there, always interrupted by my brain replaying the same scene on a loop. Julian's hand on the back of her head. His lips on her forehead. Baby. I'm sorry. Each time my mind replayed it, it added details I wasn't sure were real. Did she smile when he held her? Did his eyes close when he kissed her forehead? Was his hand on her waist or her hip? The memory was rotting and growing at the same time, becoming something worse than what I actually saw.
I was in the bathroom when I heard Julian come home that evening. I looked at myself in the mirror and practiced my face. Soft eyes. Relaxed mouth. The hint of a smile that said everything is fine without trying too hard. I had gotten disturbingly good at this.
He was in the bedroom when I came out, unbuttoning his shirt, his back to me. I watched him for a second from the doorway. The muscles in his shoulders moved under his skin as he pulled the shirt off and tossed it on the chair in the corner. He turned around and his eyes did that thing they always did, that slow scan from my feet to my face, like he was checking that all of me was still there, still his.
"Come here," he said. Not a question. It never was with Julian. His requests always sounded like instructions and I used to find that attractive. The confidence of a man who expected to receive whatever he asked for because he always had.
I walked over to him because that's what I'd been doing for three days. Following the script. Playing the role. He pulled me in by my waist and kissed my neck, his hands already moving with intention, sliding down my back to my hips and gripping in a way that told me exactly what he wanted.
My body went rigid.
I couldn't help it. Every cell in me rejected the contact and no amount of mental preparation could override it. My hands came up to his chest, not to touch him but to create space.
"Not tonight," I said, keeping my voice gentle because I didn't want a confrontation. I just wanted him to stop touching me.
He pulled back enough to look at my face, his brow creasing slightly. "You said that last night too."
"I know. I'm just not feeling well."
He studied me for a moment and I watched him decide whether to push it. Julian wasn't used to hearing no from me. Not about this. Our physical relationship had always been easy, frequent, something we both initiated without hesitation. Two consecutive rejections was new territory for him and I could see it bothering him more than he wanted to let on.
"What's going on with you?" he asked, and there was an edge to his voice now. Not anger yet but the precursor to it. That slight tightening in his jaw that I had learned to recognize over three years.
"Nothing is going on with me. I'm just tired, Julian."
"You've been tired for three days."
"Then maybe I'm really tired."
He let go of my waist and took a step back, running his hand over his jaw the way he did when he was trying to keep his composure. "You've been off since the party, Sienna. You barely talk to me, you won't let me touch you, you just sit around here all day staring at nothing. What's happening?"
All day. Like I was lazy. Like I didn't have anywhere to be or anything to do because I gave up my job for him and now my days belonged to whatever he decided they should be.
"I told you I'm fine."
"You don't seem fine."
"Well I am."
He stared at me, and for one terrifying second I thought he was going to ask the right question. The one that would force everything out of me. Did you see something at the party? But he didn't ask that because it didn't even occur to him. He was so confident in his own secrecy, so sure that his double life was airtight, that the possibility of me knowing never crossed his mind.
Instead he said something worse.
"You've been like this ever since you stopped working. Maybe you need to find something to do with your time because this," he gestured between us, "this energy you're bringing, it's draining."
I felt that sentence land somewhere in the center of my chest and detonate. This energy I was bringing was draining. I was draining. The woman who rearranged her entire life around him was draining because she wasn't performing well enough at being perfectly fine while her world was collapsing.
"Okay Julian," I said quietly because if I said anything else it was going to be the truth and the truth was going to demolish this apartment and everything in it.
He waited for more. When he didn't get it his jaw tightened further and he grabbed his phone and keys from the dresser. "I'm going out."
"Where?"
He was already walking toward the door. "I need air."
He didn't say where he was going but I knew. I knew the way you know the sun is going to rise tomorrow. He was going to her, to the woman whose name I couldn't say out loud yet, to the person who apparently didn't drain him, who didn't have this energy, who made him feel whatever I wasn't making him feel anymore.
The front door closed and I stood in our bedroom listening to the silence fill the space where he used to be. I waited for the tears to come because they always did. Every day for the past three days at some point they showed up and had their way with me and I just let them.
But tonight they didn't come.
Something else came instead. Something cold and flat that settled over me like a sheet being pulled over a body. I was done crying about Julian Laurent. I didn't have any tears left and even if I did he didn't deserve them, not a single one more.
I picked up my phone and scrolled to a name I hadn't called in months. A name I had deleted twice and re-added three times because I could never fully commit to erasing him from my life even when I was supposed to.
Dominic.
I didn't call him. I put the phone down. Picked it up again. Put it down. Picked it up. My thumb hovered over his name for so long my screen dimmed.
What was I going to say to him? Hey I know I quit and walked away from you four months ago but my fiancé who is your nephew is cheating on me and I have nowhere else to go? That was pathetic and I knew it. Dominic didn't do pathetic. He didn't do emotional. He would look at me with those cold eyes and I would feel stupid for ever showing up at his door expecting warmth from a man who didn't know how to give it.
But I wasn't looking for warmth. I didn't know what I was looking for. I just knew that the apartment felt like it was shrinking and if I stayed in it for one more hour I was going to lose whatever was left of my mind.
I grabbed my keys and left.