Jillian's POV
“Jillian, hurry and come pick Ethan up. He’s wasted!”
“Babe, I miss you so much!”
From his slurred voice, it was obvious that he had drunk too much. I glanced at my phone and saw that it was already one in the morning.
I kept telling myself that he at least knew how to get home, despite being drunk, that he still remembered that I was his wife, and that maybe it had all been just a show tonight.
But another part of me knew better. Three hours after I left was plenty of time for him and that Dulce to do whatever they wanted.
My hand tightened around the thought of the twins inside me, conceived with so much trouble, and despite everything, my heart softened again.
By the time my taxi pulled up at the bar, only Howard and Ethan were left in the private room. Howard greeted me like nothing had happened. “Jillian, where have you been? Ethan’s been calling ‘wife’ in my ear so long I’ve got blisters!”
He said my name with oily smoothness, and I used to like hearing Ethan’s friends call me that. But now that tone felt like mockery.
While getting Ethan into the car, Howard didn’t miss a beat. “Jillian, make him a hangover soup when you get home. He worked so hard to land that client today!”
If I hadn’t seen and heard it myself, I might have been touched. But Ethan hadn’t been risking his life to earn money for me. Whether he’d been trying to close a big deal or to win some hard-to-get girl, I didn’t expose him.
Drunk, he kept smiling like an idiot, and I couldn’t tell whether he was happy for me or for her.
He then leaned against me, intimate in the way that used to comfort me, but now his breath stung of alcohol.
Through the blur in my eyes, I still saw the lipstick mark on the ridge of his ear. That tiny stain set my eyes burning and my chest aching.
By the time I got him home, I was exhausted and drenched in sweat from the effort.
He sprawled on the floor in a drunken starfish and, for the first time, I felt no pity. I didn’t bother carrying him to bed or making him the usual wake-up soup. I was not his maid. I had no obligation to do those things.
I took a hot shower, locked the door, and climbed into bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. His phone kept buzzing in his pocket, and the sound gnawed at me until I fished the device out. It was the first time I’d ever checked his phone.
The screen kept lighting up and, as I stared, my fingers hesitated over the passcode. He had once told me not to worry, that his phone password was our anniversary, so I could always check it. But when I typed the date, the phone said the code was wrong. Obviously, he had changed it.
They said no woman ever walked out of her husband’s phone smiling. With my heart racing, I pressed his finger to the sensor and unlocked it with his print.
There, I saw that the top chat wasn’t mine. It was that sultry girl, Dulce.
Opening their messages sent me tumbling down. They’d been close for a long time. Under a client label I recognized, their chat read like the old, intimate messages Ethan used to send me—sweet, flirtatious, electric. In a single day, he could send her thousands of messages, far more than he had said to me in the last two years.
[Ethan, I’ve reserved a VVIP seat for your performance tomorrow. Please come support me!] Together with that message, Dulce had also sent him the ticket location and seat info.
I just found out that she was an arts student, majoring in piano.
I remembered telling Ethan once that I wanted to learn piano because girls who played instruments had a certain charm. But he’d just shrugged and dampened my enthusiasm, calling piano “pretentious upper-class nonsense.” Yet he coaxed Dulce into competitions and said he wanted to see her shine on stage.
After reading their conversation, I marked the messages unread and went back to lie down, but sleep did not come. When dawn finally allowed me to drift off, I was jerked awake by a knock on the door.
There he was, standing and blinking resentment into the morning light.
“Babe, I slept on the floor all night. Why didn’t you look after me?” he demanded.
How was I supposed to “look after” him? Like a top-class free maid?
“Don’t call me that,” I said coldly. “I’m Jillian, not your babe.”
