Page 120 of The Temporary Bride

I stagger back slightly. My chest is tight, my face hot, and the room feels smaller than it did a minute ago.

“I wrote that months ago,” I say, my voice shaking. “Before the wedding. Before I knew you. Before any of this became what it is now. It… it doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t mean it, not even while I was writing it.”

“The files were on your computer, Chloe.”

“I didn’t put them there.” I shake my head urgently. “I didn’t steal anything from you. I swear to you, on anything you want me to swear on, I did not do this.”

He doesn’t have a response to that, but I can tell from the set of his shoulders that he doesn’t believe me. This is the same man who held me while I cried about Spencer, who told me I was the strongest woman he knew—and right now, he’s looking at me like he doesn’t know me at all.

“Someone must have used my computer,” I say, my voice climbing, my hands moving without my permission. “Someone who had access to my office, who knew my login, who wanted it to look like it came from me. I don’t know who or how, but there has to be another explanation, because I would never do this to you. I would never.”

“The evidence says otherwise.”

“Then the evidence is wrong!” My voice cracks on the last word and I hate it, hate that I’m shaking with my own handwriting sitting on the desk making me look like exactly what he thinks I am. “I know I can’t prove it. I know how it looks. But I’m asking you to believe me anyway. Just trust me. Please.”

He holds my gaze for a long, terrible moment. “Why should I?”

The question cuts right through me so sharply that I almost gasp.

“Because I’m your wife.”

His expression goes flat. “That doesn’t mean anything. We both know what this is.”

Those words land like a knife between my ribs, and I gape at him, tears welling in my eyes before I can stop them.

With shaking hands, I slip my wedding ring off my finger. I stare down at the jeweled band in my palm for a heartbeat, unable to let it go. This thing that I’ve worn every day for months. This thing that stopped feeling like a prop such a long time ago, somewhere between the engagement party and the kitchen counter and the night he told me he wanted this to be real.

You have to, I tell myself.

I pull myself together, my jaw set and spine rigid as if the stiffness of my posture can hold my emotions together.

“If that’s what you really think,” I say, my voice breaking badly in the middle of it, “after everything—if you really believe I could do this to you… then we’re done.”

I set the ring down on his desk next to the note. The flash of pain that crosses his face hurts to look at, but I make myself turn away. I can’t stay here, not with this between us.

I walk out of the office. My feet carry me down the hallway and I don’t look back, not once. My vision is blurry and the hallway swims in front of me, but I find the front door by instinct and pull it open and step out into the night air and keep walking.

“Chloe!”

His voice calls out from the doorway behind me. I don’t stop. I walk down the front path with my arms wrapped tight around myself, my bare feet hitting the stone cold and rough beneath me, not thinking about anything except getting as far away from this house as possible.

The iron gate latch is cold under my hand. I march through the gate at the end of our—Tristan’s—driveway until I reach the edge of the road, the night air cool against my tear-streaked face, the asphalt rough under my bare feet.

My driver already left. I’m not about to go back inside and take Tristan’s keys. I probably shouldn’t be driving anyway, not when I can barely see straight.

Fuck it. I’ll walk. I’ll call a fucking cab.

“Chloe!”

His voice is closer now, tight with something I don’t have the capacity to figure out right now. I pull my arms tighter around myself and keep moving, my feet finding the edge of the road. I start to cross it, needing to be somewhere that isn’t here, somewhere far enough away from Tristan’s house that I can breathe again.

My ears start to ring.

The buzzing comes on fast, that high-pitched sound cutting through everything, drowning out the sound of my harsh breaths until there’s nothing but static pressing in on both sides of my head. The world turns muffled and strange, that underwater quality I’ve come to dread, and I shake my head but keep walking.

Tristan’s voice reaches me through the ringing again, muffled and distant, the words swallowed by the static filling my ears.

And then his voice changes. Even through the ringing, even through the thick pressing silence, something cuts through. A tone I’ve never heard from him before. Pure, raw terror.