The Video Called Me His Mistress, But I Was His Wife novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Three in the Morning

Hazel hides at Ruby's. Gavin comes to the door and explains, and she says what he did aloud. He tells her he found a folder with her father's name in his father's desk.

Ruby opened her apartment door in her scrubs with a toothbrush in her mouth.

She took one look at my face and spat in the hall.

"Who."

"A lot of people," I said. "Can I come in?"

She pulled me in by my torn collar and sat me on the closed lid of the bathtub.

She cleaned the cut on my lip with the cold brisk hands she used at the hospital.

"Your cheek will go purple by morning. Your ribs?"

"Sore."

"Lift your arm."

She looked at three marks along my side and said nothing about any of them.

Then she put her phone on the sink and played the video.

I had not been able to watch it. She made me.

"Keep moaning," Gavin said on the speaker, in the voice I loved.

"That voice is not for strangers," Ruby said quietly. "Where is he?"

"At the precinct. He told the police I was his assistant."

Ruby stopped moving.

"He told them what."

"That I have a crush on him. That it happens."

"Anything else?"

"The sergeant said the complaint against me was filed at 7:12. The video went up at eight."

Ruby's hands went still on the kit.

"So somebody knew an hour ahead that you'd be hauled in."

She sat down on the floor across from me, in her scrubs, with the first aid kit open between our knees.

"Five years, Hazel," she said. "I asked you at the wedding why it was a secret."

"He said his father would take it apart."

"And you said okay."

"I said okay."

She put the gauze down.

"Sleep here. Tomorrow we decide what to do about him."

I slept in her bed with my bag under the pillow.

The notebook was in it.

At three in the morning, someone knocked on the door.

Ruby was already standing in the hall in her socks, holding a frying pan.

"Don't," I said.

"I will absolutely hit him."

"Let me."

I opened the door the width of the chain.

Gavin stood in the stairwell in the same dark suit.

He had no coat. His tie was gone. The scar in his eyebrow was white.

"Hazel."

"You have a minute."

"May I come in?"

"No."

He nodded as if he had expected it.

"I couldn't call you," he said. "My father had a man standing behind the sergeant. He was holding a phone."

"So?"

"He was on a call with Sunrise House."

That was my mother's care home.

Ruby lowered the frying pan an inch.

"Whoever was on that phone told me, in front of everyone, that they would stop her room fees if I said a word," Gavin said. "I said the one thing that kept her bed."

I leaned my forehead against the doorframe.

"You could have looked at me."

"If I looked at you, I would have said it."

"You told them it happens."

"I know."

"You said that's all she is."

His mouth tightened.

"I know what I said, Hazel. I have heard it all night. Every time I close my eyes."

"Then hear me say it back to you."

I took the chain off, and I opened the door all the way.

"Five years I have stood behind your chair and watched you sign things. Five years I have called you Mr. Prescott in front of the people who ate your dinner. And the first time anyone was hitting me in front of strangers, you could have said my name, and you said that's all she is."

He didn't argue.

He didn't reach for me either.

His eyes went to my cheek and stayed there.

"Who hit you?"

"A lot of people. They all had phones."

"I'll find every one of them."

"I don't want you to find them. I want you to be sorry in front of them."

"I'm sorry in front of you," he said. "It's all I have at three in the morning."

Ruby cleared her throat and went back into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee loudly.

He took a step into the doorway, no farther.

"There's something else. I wasn't going to say it tonight."

"Say it."

"Last week I went into my father's study for a pen. The bottom drawer was open."

He took a folded paper out of his pocket.

It was a photocopy, soft at the creases.

At the top, in my father's square capital letters, were the words BRENNAN TOOL AND DIE.

Under it was a photograph of a girl of nineteen at a graveside, in a black dress, with her hair pulled back.

It was me.

"My father has a folder on you," Gavin said. "It is nine years thick."

The hall light buzzed over his head.

"Who is your father to him, Hazel? And why has he kept your picture since before I ever met you?"

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