When someone betrays you, the other person leaves forever.
A bitter little smile pulled at my mouth.
Stuart could love me down to the bone and still bring Luna home to tangle in our sheets, could love me and still have a child with her.
I sat there working my fingers together, helpless, desperate to know one thing. When did they start.
Had every bit of love he'd shown me been an act?
He came home every night to cook for me. The moment something went wrong in my life, he dropped everything to be at my side. That love, given without a single thing held back. How much of it had belonged to Luna all along?
My arms had gone numb. I sat on the couch and said nothing.
That night, my tears soaked into the cushions. I sent the lingerie from the bedroom to a testing lab to find out what the fluid on it was.
The next morning, something occurred to me.
I grabbed the car keys off the nightstand, a fire of urgency burning in my chest.
I drove faster than I should have, and before I knew it I was pulling up outside my parents' house.
"Rosalind? What brings you home today? Stuart didn't come with you?"
My mother stepped forward, folded me into her arms, and drew me inside the house, her voice full of shock.
And in that moment everything I'd buried came pouring out. I pressed my face into her shoulder and told her, muffled, that Stuart had cheated on me.
"Rosalind, could you have read it wrong?"
My father sat on the couch, two reports still in his hands.
"How could I read it wrong? The post mentions seafood, and seafood shows up at my house. How is that wrong?"
"This is exactly what men are. Restless, never satisfied. And that tramp out there has a child with him now."
"I thought Stuart would be the one who was different. I never imagined he'd give in and stray. The promises he made back then. That he cherished me, respected me, that we never needed children. Three years, that's all, and now he's out there chasing a thrill." My mother stroked my back, aching for me, and spat the words out in fury.
My father set down the reports and frowned. "Everyone knows Stuart loves Rosalind more than anything. To win her hand he took the family's punishment without flinching and ended up with a ruined leg, a limp for life."
"So what? A bad leg didn't stop him from cheating. I'm telling you, a man like that knows how to put on a show. Maybe all that devotion at the start was acting too." My mother shot back, glaring at him.
I lifted a hand and wiped my eyes, but my head was full of doubt.
It was just as everyone said.
All these years, Stuart had spoiled me to the skies, treated me like something he was afraid to lose.
He was the Webb heir, the man half the young women in New York dreamed about.
The night before our wedding, the Mitchell daughter, from one of the most powerful families in New York, had me kidnapped. She locked me in a warehouse soaked with gasoline, trying to force him to marry her instead.
Stuart turned her down flat. He pinned her down, put a knife to her throat, and demanded she tell him where I was.
But it was already too late. By the time he got there, the flames were roaring up all around me.
He didn't hesitate, not for a second. He charged into the fire, through the smoke and the falling beams, and dragged me out with everything he had.
His back was nothing but burns afterward. Three broken ribs.
And yet all he did was grip my hand, shaken to his core, his warm tears falling on my shoulder.
"Rosalind, I can't lose you. Only when you're here can I feel my own heart beating."
I'd seen him give himself to me completely. That was why none of this made sense.
Was it really because I wanted a childfree life?
What did Luna have that moved him, that turned his heart?
The next instant my phone started buzzing wildly.
I put it on speaker. Stuart's cold voice came through. "Rosalind, where have you hidden Luna?"
"What are you talking about? I have no idea where she is!"
I frowned, a mocking smile tugging at the corner of my mouth.
"Rosalind! How jealous can you possibly be? You'd believe some baseless garbage off the internet! Where is she?"
My father suddenly clutched his chest and crumpled to the floor, his lips moving.
"Luna? Luna's... gone?"
My mother and I rushed him to the hospital, but not a single doctor there would step forward to treat him.
"Rosalind, the moment Luna comes back is the moment your father gets his surgery."
Stuart's icy voice echoed against my ear through the phone.
"Stuart, the Webbs prize their name above everything. If word gets out that you cheated and left your own father-in-law to suffer like this, you know exactly what that brings down on you."
"The doctors can resuscitate him. But your father wakes up the moment Luna turns up, not before."
After I hung up, my mother had already dissolved into tears.
"Didn't you hear him? Get over here and save him, now!"
Doctors swarmed in and started CPR on my father.
"There's no time, Mom. We'll go bring her back, and we'll get the affair on camera while we're at it."
I yanked my phone open, pulled up Luna's social account to find her location, then opened a car-tracking app.
