Jocelyn
The doorman, George, smiles at me as I step out of the cab. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Maddox.”
The name lands like a punch to the stomach. I force a smile that feels like cracking plaster. “George.”
I don’t remember the elevator ride up to the penthouse. It’s a silent, mirrored box, and I don’t look at my reflection. I don’t know who I would see.
The heavy oak door opens into silence. Our home. It’s never silent. There’s always music playing, or the low hum of the news, or the sound of Zayn on the phone in his study, his voice a low, commanding rumble. Today, there is nothing. The silence is a presence, heavy and suffocating.
I find him in the living room. He’s standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows, a glass of amber liquid in his hand, looking down at the city sprawled below us like a personal kingdom. He doesn’t turn when I enter. He knows I’m here.
“Did you have a good meeting?” he asks, his voice unnervingly calm. It’s the same voice he uses to close a deal, to sentence a man, to order dinner.
My purse slips from my fingers, hitting the Persian rug with a soft thud. The ultrasound picture is still inside. A secret that has spoiled.
“I know about the certificate, Zayn.”
He takes a slow sip of his drink. No reaction. Not a flinch, not a tightening of his shoulders. Nothing.
“I assumed Davies would be thorough,” he says to the glass.
“You assumed.” My voice is a raw whisper. I clear my throat, willing it to be stronger. “You lied to me for eight years. You put a ring on my finger in front of a hundred people and it was all a performance. A lie.”
He finally turns. His face is a mask of stone. The dark eyes that I have woken up to for nearly three thousand mornings are unreadable, shuttered. He looks at me, but he doesn’t see me.
“It wasn’t a lie,” he says, his tone flat. “It was a complication.”
“A complication?” I laugh, a sharp, ugly sound that echoes in the vast room. “Is that what you call your wife? A complication?”
I see the barest flicker in his jaw, the only sign that he’s heard me. “Whitney is a part of my past.”
“She’s a part of your present! You are legally married to her, Zayn. Which makes me… what? What have I been for eight years?” I’m pleading now, my voice cracking. I hate the sound of it. I want to be steel, but I’m shattering.
“You were my life, Jocelyn.”
“Don’t.” The word is a blade. “Don’t you dare say that to me now. If I was your life, you would have told me. You would have fixed it. You wouldn’t have let me live a lie.”
He walks over to the bar and sets his glass down with a heavy clink. He moves with a purpose I don’t recognize. He’s not my husband. He’s a stranger.
“I couldn’t fix it,” he says. “It wasn’t an option.”
“Why not? Divorce isn’t some ancient, impossible ritual. People do it every day.”
“My world is not like other people’s, you know that.”
“This isn’t about your world. This is about ours. The one you built on a foundation of sand.” I take a step toward him, my hands clenched into fists. “Why, Zayn? Just tell me why. Was it for her? Do you still love her?”
He looks at me then, and his eyes are cold, so cold they burn. “She’s coming back.”
My breath catches in my throat. Ancient history. That’s what he called her.
“It’s over, Jocelyn. Whitney and I… we’re going to be together.”
It’s a clean, brutal cut. No apology. No remorse. Just a statement of fact. A business decision. And I was the asset being liquidated.
All the fight drains out of me, replaced by a hollow, aching numbness. This is it. This is the truth. It wasn't a mistake or a trap. It was a choice. He is choosing her.
“I see,” I say, my voice impossibly small. I wrap my arms around my stomach, a subconscious shield for the only thing that’s truly mine.
Zayn’s eyes follow the movement, but his expression doesn’t change. He doesn’t know. He can’t know.
He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulls out a long, white envelope. He slides it onto the marble coffee table between us.
“What is that?” I ask, my voice dead.
“It’s a settlement. Ten million dollars. My lawyer can have it wired to any account you choose by morning. It’s enough to start over. Go anywhere you want.”
Ten million dollars. For my trouble. For eight years of my life. For my heart, my body, my loyalty. He is trying to buy my silence, to put a price on my humiliation.
“You think you can buy me off?” I ask, the numbness giving way to a white-hot rage. “You think ten million dollars erases this?”
“I think it makes for a clean break,” he says, his voice still level, still cold. “Take the money, Jocelyn. Don’t make this messy.”
“Messy?” I walk over to the table and stare down at the envelope. My name is typed on it. Ms. Jocelyn Foster. He had this prepared. He knew this was coming.
“You are a son of a bitch,” I say, the words clear and sharp. I look up from the envelope and meet his empty gaze.
“I don’t want your money,” I tell him. “I don’t need it.”
A flicker of something. Annoyance? Surprise? “Don’t be a fool. You can’t afford this place on your own.”
“I don’t have to,” I say, and for the first time, I feel a sliver of power. It’s a cold, bitter thing, but it’s mine. “My grandfather’s will was very specific. In the event I was unmarried, the entire estate passes to me. Solely.”
I watch his face, searching for a reaction. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, I see it. A crack in the mask. Shock. He didn’t know. For all his planning, for all his control, he missed the most important detail.
Then the mask is back. He recovers so quickly I almost think I imagined it.
“Is that so?” he says, his voice tight.
“Three hundred and forty-seven million dollars,” I say, letting the number hang in the air like a death sentence for what we were. “Properties. Assets. Controlling shares. It’s all mine, Zayn. He protected me from you, even from the grave.”
He nods slowly, a dark look crossing his face. “Good for him.”
I expected a fight. An argument. A negotiation. I expect him to stake some kind of claim, to tell me I owed him.
He does none of those things. He gives me the cruelest gift of all: indifference.
“Then take it,” he says, his voice flat and final. “Take it all and go. It’s better this way. It makes the clean break even cleaner.”
He turns his back on me then, walking back to the window, dismissing me as if I were a servant who had overstayed her welcome. The conversation is over. My life with him is over.
Any lingering hope I had, any pathetic, desperate fantasy that this was some terrible misunderstanding, dies in that moment. It shrivels and turns to ash in my chest.
My hand is shaking as I reach down and twist the diamond ring on my finger. The weight of it, once a comfort, is now a brand. I pull it off. It resists, clinging to my skin after all these years. I finally get it free and my finger is pale and indented underneath.
I don’t throw it. I don’t make a scene. I walk to the coffee table and place it carefully on top of the envelope that holds my ten-million-dollar severance package.
The diamond winks under the recessed lighting, a cold, empty fire. A beautiful, expensive lie.
“I’ll take what’s legally mine,” I say to his back. “And nothing more.”
He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t say a word.
I walk out of the room, out of the penthouse, out of the life I thought was mine. The click of the door closing behind me is the most final sound I have ever heard.
He wants me to go. He wants me to disappear.
Fine.
But I won’t just run. I will erase him. I will take the life he thought he controlled and I will become something he can never touch again.
