"I can't fucking believe you did this in front of all those people."
The hotel room door clicks shut behind us as Gary's hand is still gripping my upper arm while he guides me like a child who made a scene.
He's done worse to me in rooms like this.
Squeezed hard enough to leave finger-shaped bruises on my bicep. Shoved me into a doorframe and said I walked into it. But always here — behind walls, behind closed doors, where the only witness was the woman too stupid to leave.
Never in front of a room.
When he finally lets go, I press my fingers to the spot where his hand was, feeling the warmth he left behind on my skin like a stain I can't see yet. My cheek is still throbbing like a second heartbeat, loud and hot, marking time since his palm hit my face.
Gary crosses to the bar cart and pours himself a scotch and takes a slow sip before turning to face me.
"What did you think was going to happen, Waverly?" He says it as if tired, faintly inconvenienced. "Tonight was mine. I even invited Morrow so he could watch and choke on my success." He sets the glass down. "And you made it about you!"
Made it about me.
The sentence lands in the soft place between my ribs, and I hate that after everything Gary's disappointment still has a key to the inside of my chest.
"I told four hundred people I'm carrying your child, that we’re finally having a family we wanted for so long… And you slapped me for it."
My cheek answers for me as I say it — a fresh throb that rolls through the left side of my face and settles into my molars. But the familiarity is what undoes me. Not the pain — I have made peace with pain a long time ago.
What breaks through is the recognition.
My body knows this language. It has learned to catalog Gary's hands like other wives catalog anniversaries — the bruise on my bicep from March, the doorframe-shaped mark on my shoulder blade from last fall.
"You stole my spotlight." Nothing moves in his face. "In front of the press. In front of investors. In front of fucking Morrow!"
"Is that what really worries you?" I step forward, my heels sink into the carpet. "What Beckett Morrow thinks?"
His fingers tighten around the glass. The knuckles go white for a second before he catches himself.
"Does the slap worry you, Gary? What they saw? What it looked like?"
He doesn't answer. He swirls the scotch, studies the amber as it coats the sides, and lets the silence stretch until it does the work for him.
I can hear the liquid turning in the glass and the sound makes my teeth clench.
"You're always like this when you're pregnant." His voice drops — softer, warmer, the voice he uses when he's about to rewrite what just happened. He loosens his tie with one hand, casual, as if this is any other night. "You don't think, you just… do."
"I'm thinking more clearly than I have in eight years."
"Are you?" He tilts his head, concern painted over contempt. "Because this looks exactly like last time. And the time before. You spiral, Waverly. It's what you do. I had to step in and run this business because you were failing."
I know this script. I've lived inside it — after the first miscarriage, he dissolved my board seat. After the second, he moved my office to the guest floor. Each time wrapped in the same tender voice.
‘You need rest, Waverly. Let me handle things.’
And I believed him. Because the man I married held my hand in the car and said, "Let me carry this for a while, take this weight for you."
So I let him carry the business while I stared at a bedroom ceiling for weeks. And the doing-nothing only made me smaller.
He didn't carry the weight for me. He carried it away from me.
My title, my chair, my name off the door.
I was stupid and grieving when I signed those documents. I thought Gary wanted to take care of me. I thought rest meant healing. But the rest was a removal, done so gently I even thanked him for it.
"Someone had to step up," Gary says, rolling the scotch glass between his palms — back and forth. "You couldn't run a company and grieve at the same time."
"I was devastated, Gary. Not dead." My nails dig into my palms. The sting of it keeps my voice level. "I trusted you when you said I needed rest. But you weren't protecting me. You were replacing me!"
His jaw flexes — a small involuntary clench below the ear. He sets the scotch down and the base of the glass meets the marble with a sound that carries through the room like a period at the end of a sentence. He doesn't pick it up again.
"Waverly. I overreacted tonight, okay? The slap… that was wrong, and I know it."
The words are shaped correctly. The tone is warm. Six months ago, I would have let them settle over me and told myself that this time he meant it.
But the slap woke me up.
I could forgive Tegan. I could forgive the years of being diminished, talked over, erased from my own company. I could forgive the cold dinners and the empty hospital room and the way he learned to look through me like I was furniture.
I cannot forgive being hit when I told him I was having his child.
And I know exactly why he hasn't touched me since we walked through this door. My cheek is still swollen — I can feel the skin pulling tight every time I move my jaw, the heat of it radiating into my teeth.
I said I wanted a divorce in front of four hundred people, and he needs to walk back into that ballroom with a wife who doesn't have fresh bruises. He needs the room to believe this was a moment of passion, a thing they'll forget by next year's gala.
He can't do that if my face tells a different story.
"You're not sorry," I say. "You're just deciding which face to wear back downstairs."
The softness drops from Gary's face. It happens fast — like watching a hand close into a fist.
"You think you can survive without me?" He steps closer. His cologne fills the space between us, and my stomach turns. "You can barely carry a child to term."
The cruelty is precise. Aimed at the exact place where I am most afraid. My hand twitches toward my stomach — an involuntary reflex, fingers curling inward like I can shield eleven weeks of hope with a palm and five fingers.
I stop it before it arrives. I won't give him that.
I don't move. I don't blink.
His eyes hold mine, and what I see in them is not anger anymore. It's ownership. His breath is warm and scotch-sour against my forehead. He's that close.
"You did this to yourself, Waverly," he says, "when you got rid of that child."