Page 96 of The Illusion
I look at the stranger I believed was my best friend for most of my life, searching his face for any trace of the person I thought I knew. There's nothing there. Just emptiness and calculation and that cold, satisfied gleam of a man who thinks he's won.
I turn away because I can't look at him anymore without wanting to break something. "I'm going to tell her."
He laughs. "I'd think about that if I were you. If you run and tattle to her, she'll never see you as anything other than the guy who ruined her marriage. She'll hate me, yes, but she'll also associate you with the end. The moment when everything fell apart and you were the one holding the knife."
He pauses, letting the words sink in. "That will ruin your friendship forever. She'll never be able to let you in or trust you. She’ll never see you as anything except the messenger of her destruction. And that's a win for me all day long."
I freeze with my hand on the doorknob, his words worming into my brain because he's right. If I tell her, I become exactly what he says. The destroyer, the one who shattered her world.There will always be that association. That moment when everything fell apart and I was the one who told her.
But if I don't tell her, I'm complicit. I'm letting her stay with a man who never loved her, who engineered their entire relationship as a business transaction, who is actively working to destroy her self-worth so she'll be too broken to fight when he finally leaves.
I turn back and look at him one more time, memorizing this version of him, the real version, stripped of all pretense. "One day, you're going to wake up and realize that none of this was worth it. That you threw away something real and good and irreplaceable for money and control and some twisted need to win against people who were never your enemies." My voice drops. "And by then, it'll be too late. You'll be alone, and you'll deserve it."
He doesn't respond. He just turns away as if I've already ceased to exist, like I'm furniture, like I'm nothing. So I leave. He makes his father look like the world’s most enlightened and affectionate man. Asher is a fucking monster.
I don't breathe until the elevator doors close and I'm alone, and then I lean against the wall and let the shaking take over.
Asher doesn't love Julie. He never did. He married her to please his father, to check a box, to take something he thought I wanted. He engineered their entire relationship and now he's destroying her because he doesn't need her anymore.In his mind, she's served her purpose. And now he's bored.
By the time I get to my car, I'm full on freaking out. I sit in the driver's seat and grip the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white, staring at the building where my best friend just told me everything I ever knew about him was a lie.
I pull out my phone and stare at her name in my contacts. Julie. My thumb hovers over the call button, trembling. But I don't press it.
I don't know how to help her without destroying her. I don't know how to fix this when the man I thought was my brother is actually a monster wearing a human face.
And I don’t know how to process the fact that Asher was right about one thing, though. I do have feelings for Julie. I have for years.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
RYAN
I pacemy house like a caged animal as memories keep surfacing, unbidden and unwelcome, of the friend I thought I had. He called me his brother. I thought of him as such. I believed in it the way you believe in things that have never given you a reason to doubt them.
I was wrong about all of it. The thoughts keep circling back to the same point, the same sick drop in my stomach. I talked about her. The day they met. I talked about the girl from 3A when I was at breakfast with Asher. And from that, he used her, and I spent two years watching their marriage and believing in it.
I keep rolling it all over in my head, trying to decide what to do. And then I realize the only viable option is to say all of this out loud to the person who knows her best. So I go to Jamie's. She takes one look at me when she opens the door and steps back without a word, which tells me everything I need to know about how I look.
"I need a drink first," I say. "You're going to want one, too."
She doesn't argue. She pours two glasses of whiskey, neat, and we take them out to her deck and stand by the railing.The sun is going down, the sky bleeding orange and gold over the rooftops, and under any other circumstances it would be beautiful. Right now it just looks like something ending.
I take a long drink and let the burn settle before I speak. "I went to see Asher."
"I take it by the look on your face things did not go well," she says.
"Far from it. It was bad, Jamie. Really, really bad." I turn the glass in my hands. "He's a sociopath. I don't mean that loosely. I mean I stood in his office and watched him tell me he never loved her, and there was nothing behind his eyes. No guilt, no grief. Just calculation."
She goes very still. I tell her everything and watch her expression move through disbelief and fury and something that looks almost like grief as I do. By the time I'm done, she's white as a sheet.
"He's a fucking monster," she whispers.
"I know."
"We have to tell her."
"I know." I set my glass down on the ledge. "But how? What do I even say? 'Hey Julie, your entire relationship was engineered from the beginning. Your husband never loved you. He targeted you specifically because I talked about you, and that told him you were exactly the kind of woman his father would approve of.' How does that not destroy her?"
