Brooke
The smell of latex paint is the smell of a new life. It’s clean and chemical, and it fills my lungs as I stretch to roll the last patch of wall near the ceiling. The color is called ‘Whisper White.’ A blank page. The muscle in my shoulder burns with a satisfying ache. It’s a real feeling, not the phantom ache of a life spent waiting.
A sharp, staccato rap on the door makes me jump. I nearly lose my footing on the rickety stepladder. No one knows this address.
“Brooke Sanderson, you open this door this instant or I will cite precedent for justifiable entry by a concerned party!”
The voice is unmistakable. A grin breaks across my face, the first genuine one in days. I climb down, wiping my paint-speckled hands on my jeans, and pull the door open.
Ava Chen stands in the dingy hallway like a supernova. She’s all sharp angles in a tailored black suit, her sleek bob gleaming under the flickering fluorescent light. In one hand, she holds a briefcase. In the other, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, condensation beading on the iconic yellow label.
“My God, it’s even more depressing than you described,” she says, striding past me and setting the champagne down on a stack of floorboards. Her eyes scan the small room, the drop cloths, the single box of my belongings. “It’s perfect.”
“Ava. How did you even find me?”
She waves a dismissive hand. “Please. I’m a lawyer. Finding a woman who just vaporized a nine-year marriage to a billionaire is a light Tuesday afternoon. I have two plastic cups in my briefcase. Are we drinking to your freedom or am I charging you for this house call?”
I laugh, a real, full-bodied sound that feels foreign in my own chest. “We’re drinking.”
She procures the cups and works the cork out of the bottle with a practiced twist. It exits with a soft, satisfying sigh, not a loud pop. Ava doesn’t do anything ostentatiously.
She pours the golden liquid into the flimsy cups. “A toast,” she says, holding her cup aloft. “To the official, long overdue, not a moment too soon death of Mrs. Blake Harland.”
“And to the resurrection of Brooke Sanderson,” I add, my voice quieter.
We clink the plastic cups together. The champagne is cold and crisp, a shock of luxury in my dusty new world. I take a long swallow.
“So,” Ava says, perching on the edge of my unopened box. “Tell me he went nuclear. Tell me he threw a priceless Ming vase against the wall.”
I shake my head, leaning against the freshly painted wall. “He was just… confused. Like a computer that had been given a command it couldn’t process.”
“The command being ‘no money’?”
“The very one.”
“He’ll assume it’s a tactic. His legal team is probably drafting a counter-offer as we speak. Something obscene. They’ll expect us to meet them in a week.”
“There is no ‘us,’ Ava. And there’s no counter. I told you, I signed everything away.”
Ava takes another sip, her sharp eyes studying my face. “I know. Which is either the most powerful negotiating move I’ve ever seen, or you’ve completely lost your mind. I’m still trying to decide which.” She frowns. “You look… haunted, Brooke. You’re free. The cage is open. Why do you still look like you’re waiting for the warden?”
Her words hit a little too close. The joy of the paint and the champagne suddenly evaporates, leaving a cold dread in its place. I look away from her, toward the window and its view of a brick wall.
“It was never a gilded cage,” I say, the words barely a whisper. “Not really.”
Ava is silent for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is softer, the lawyer stripped away, leaving only my friend. “What does that mean?”
“The door was never locked by him,” I say, turning to face her. My hands start to tremble, so I wrap them around my middle. “It was locked by me. From the inside.”
She slides off the box and takes a step closer. “Brooke, what are you talking about?”
This is it. The moment. I can either swallow the truth back down for another nine years or I can finally let it out. Let it poison the air and maybe, finally, set me free for real.
“There’s a reason he never knew me,” I say, my voice shaking. “I never let him. Because if he ever got too close, he would have seen the truth.”
“The truth about what?”
I take a deep, ragged breath. The words are waiting, lined up like prisoners at the gallows.
“It wasn’t an arrangement, not at the beginning. Not for me. I had… a crush on him. Since college. A stupid, pathetic, lifelong crush.”
Ava blinks. “A crush? On Blake Harland? The man has the emotional range of a granite countertop.”
“I know. But I was twenty-one and stupid.” I start pacing the small space, the words tumbling out faster now. “And he was… devastated. He and Chloe had this massive fight. He thought she was leaving him for good. He came to that little dive bar near campus where I worked. He got obliterated. Just… soul-crushingly drunk.”
I stop pacing and look at her. “I was supposed to call him a cab. I didn’t.”
Understanding dawns in Ava’s eyes, followed by a flicker of dread. “Oh, Brooke. You two…”
“One night. He barely remembered it the next morning. He was so full of shame. And I… I saw my chance. It was my only chance. A few weeks later, I went to him.”
I can’t look at her anymore. I stare at my own feet, at the splatters of white paint on my worn sneakers. “I lied, Ava.”
“Lied about what? The thread count of his sheets?” she asks, trying for levity, but her voice is strained.
“I told him I was pregnant.”
The silence that follows is absolute. The champagne bottle on the box could have tipped over and shattered and neither of us would have flinched. The words just hang there, ugly and undeniable.
Ava lets out a long, slow breath. “Oh, honey. No.”
“His grandfather was putting immense pressure on him to marry. To produce an heir. He hated it, but he hated the idea of a scandal more. So he proposed. A contract. He’d give the child his name and I would get… well, I would get him.”
The shame is a physical thing. It’s a hot flush on my skin, a sickness in my gut. “It was supposed to be easy. I’d just… keep the lie going. But it was a nightmare. Every day, every doctor’s appointment I faked, every time he looked at my still-flat stomach with that cold, resentful obligation.”
“What did you do?” Ava asks, her voice a ghost of a sound.
“A few months in, when it was getting impossible to hide, I staged a miscarriage.” The words taste like ash. “He came home and I was just… crying. I told him it was over. That I lost the baby.”
I finally force myself to look at her. Her face is a mask of shock and a deep, aching pity.
“He was… relieved. I saw it in his eyes. But he was also kind. For the first and only time in our marriage, he was genuinely kind to me. He held my hand. He told me it wasn’t my fault.” My voice breaks on a sob I’ve been holding back for almost a decade. “And that kindness, Ava, that one moment of kindness built on my disgusting lie… it cemented us. After that, how could he leave me? The poor, fragile wife who lost his heir. The fabricated tragedy became the foundation of our entire marriage.”
I sink to the floor, my back against the wall, and finally let the tears fall. They are hot and bitter.
“So you see,” I choke out, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “He thinks he was trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience. But I was the one who was trapped. I was serving a sentence for a crime no one else knew I committed. Every silent dinner, every empty holiday, it was my penance. I deserved it.”
Ava is silent for a long time. Then, she crosses the room in two steps and sinks to the floor in front of me, her expensive suit be damned. She takes my paint-stained hands in hers. Her grip is firm. Grounding.
“No,” she says, her voice fierce with a conviction that I’ve never been able to find for myself. “You were a desperate kid who made a terrible, terrible mistake. And you just served nine years in a prison of your own making.”
She squeezes my hands. “The sentence is over, Brooke. You’re pardoned. It’s time to walk out the gate.”
