After My Husband Slept with My Best Friend

The client meeting got canceled at two in the afternoon. Some issue with the venue permit. My assistant sent the text while I was already in the cab, so I told the driver to take me home instead.

I was glad. My lower back had been throbbing since morning. A dull, heavy ache that wrapped around my hips and pressed down into my pelvis. The last round of IVF was three weeks behind me, but my body hadn't gotten the memo. It never did. The hormones lingered like uninvited guests, bloating me, exhausting me, turning my joints into something rusted and unreliable.

I was thirty-five. Senior event director at one of the top experiential marketing firms in Manhattan. I could stage a five-hundred-person product launch in a converted warehouse with seventy-two hours' notice and make it look effortless. But I couldn't make my own body do the one thing I kept asking it to do.

The apartment was on the Upper West Side. A prewar three-bedroom that Myles and I bought the year we got married. Myles Anderson. My husband. Tall, polished, the kind of handsome that photographs well at charity galas. We'd been married for seven years.

I let myself in quietly. Not on purpose. I just didn't have the energy to announce myself. I set my bag on the console table in the foyer and slipped off my heels. The hardwood was cool under my feet.

That's when I heard it.

A sound from down the hall. From our bedroom. Low and rhythmic. A woman's voice, breathy and muffled, followed by a deeper one. Myles's voice. I knew the texture of it the way I knew the layout of every venue I'd ever worked. I could identify it in a crowded room, across a phone line, through a wall.

Through a bedroom door.

I stood in the hallway. Ten feet from the door. The sound continued. The woman laughed softly, then moaned. It was a specific kind of laugh. Intimate. Comfortable. Not the sound of something new. The sound of something that had been happening for a while.

I knew who was in there with him.

Thalia Rivera had been my best friend for twenty years. We met freshman year of college. She was funny and warm and she needed people in a way that made you feel important. She'd moved into our guest room four months ago after a lease fell through. I was the one who offered. I told Myles it would be temporary. He said he didn't mind.

I stood in that hallway for ten seconds. I counted them. One. Two. Three. Each number a small, clean incision. Four. Five. Six. My hands were still at my sides. Seven. Eight. My breathing didn't change. Nine. Ten.

Then I walked to the kitchen.

I took a glass from the cabinet. Filled it from the filter. Drank it slowly, standing at the counter, looking out the window at the rooftops across the street. The water was cold