"I slept with him. What are you going to do about it?" she snorted.
I smiled and said, "Thank you for making this easy."
Her face went pale after I handed her divorce papers I'd had prepared earlier and played the recording of her confession.
The glass of my 18-year-old Macallan looked obscene in her hand. Not because she was drinking it—we'd shared that bottle on our anniversary—but because of the way she held it: a prop, a weapon. She leaned against the kitchen island, the granite we'd picked out together, her hip cocked in a posture of pure challenge.
"I slept with him. What are you going to do about it?"
She snorted after she said it—a short, derisive puff of air through her nose. The defiance in her eyes wasn't the hot, messy kind from too much wine; it was cold, calculated. She was waiting for the explosion.
For seven years, I knew every micro-expression on Sarah's face: the crinkle of frustration when she couldn't find her keys, the soft, sleepy bloom of happiness in the morning. This... this was a new mask, one carved from contempt and a strange, giddy bravery.
My heart didn't hammer. It didn't break. It simply sank like a stone dropped into a frozen lake, leaving a hole so deep and cold, all sound vanished. The only thing left was the echo of her words and the eerie, spreading calm.
"I see," I said, my voice disturbingly even to my own ears.
"You see?" she mocked, taking a sip of my scotch. "That's all you have to say? I just told you I fucked another man. Mark from my spin class, for the last three months."
Mark. The name was a punchline, a bland gym-rat name I'd heard in passing: Going for drinks with the group from class... Mark says this new place has amazing keto cocktails...
I'd been an idiot, but not for the reason she thought.