My Fiancé Promised His Mistress Two More Months

The subway was a furnace.

I stood in the car with a canvas tote cutting into my shoulder — fresh pasta, a bottle of Barolo, the good kind of olive oil — and told myself the sweat on the back of my neck was just the July heat. Ninety-four degrees outside. The kind of day that turns Manhattan into a slow-cooked argument.

Jericho's birthday. I'd been planning it for three weeks.

The pasta was from that little shop on Arthur Avenue he mentioned once, offhand, six months ago. I wrote it down. I always wrote things down. The wine I'd researched for two hours on a Tuesday night after he fell asleep, cross-referencing vintage years with a food pairing guide I bookmarked on my phone. The gift — a first-edition copy of a biography he'd mentioned wanting in passing — had taken me four months of checking eBay alerts to find at a price I could actually afford without touching my savings.

I wasn't embarrassed by any of that. I just didn't tell him.

The elevator in his building opened directly into the penthouse foyer, which meant I heard the party before the doors finished sliding apart. Music. Voices layered over each other. The bright, percussive sound of a social event already well underway.

I stepped out and stopped.

The apartment — our apartment, the one I'd spent four months furnishing, sourcing vintage pieces and arguing with contractors over tile samples — was full of people I didn't recognize. Someone had pushed the living room furniture to the walls. There were catering trays on the kitchen island I'd picked out. The rooftop doors were thrown open, and through them I could see a crowd gathered under string lights that were not mine.

Azalea Sanchez was standing at the kitchen island, laughing at something a man in a linen blazer had just said. She had a glass of champagne in one hand and the easy, proprietary posture of someone who had never once questioned whether she belonged somewhere.

I knew who she was. Jericho's oldest friend. His whole life, he'd said. They'd grown up together, gone to the same schools, moved in the same circles for thirty years. I'd met her four times. Each time, I'd come away feeling like I'd failed a test I hadn't known I was taking.

She looked up and saw me.

'Lennox.' Her smile arrived instantly, warm and wide. 'Oh, you made it. Come in, come in — let me take that.'

She reached for the tote before I could answer. I held on to it.

'I'm fine,' I said. 'Where's Jericho?'

'Rooftop, I think.' She tilted her head toward the open doors. 'He'll be so glad you're here.'

The way she said it made it sound like a consolation prize.

I found him near the railing, talking to two men I recognized vaguely from charity events — friends of his father's, or maybe business contacts, the kind of people whose names I could never quite