My Husband Bought His Mistress Our Downstairs Apartment novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Cake on the Kitchen Floor

Dexter knocks over her birthday cake and steps over it; at dawn Quinton arrives and admits he knew about 14B for eight months.

The phone rang before I had finished reading the first reply.

The screen said Dexter.

I answered.

"Delete it," he said.

His voice was low and tight, the way it got in restaurants when he didn't want a scene.

"Delete it right now, Lin."

"No."

"You have no idea what you've done. My mother is in that chat. Quinton is in that chat."

"I know who's in the chat."

"This is insane. You're being completely irrational."

There was a pause, then a door closing and heels on tile.

"Paloma is having an anxiety attack," he said. "A severe one. Your stunt downstairs sent her into a full panic, and now I'm taking her to the hospital."

I didn't say anything.

"Are you listening? She needs real care. I need you to come to the hospital and talk to the nurses and handle whatever paperwork they want. It's the decent thing to do."

My chest went flat.

"You want me to come take care of her," I said.

"I want you to stop making this worse."

Through the phone I heard the elevator ding.

He was already on his way up.

I set the phone on the counter and watched the front door.

He didn't knock, because he still had his key.

He came in with his jacket half on and his phone pressed to his ear again, already talking to someone else.

He crossed the living room without looking at me.

He went into the bedroom and came back with his overnight bag.

He crossed the kitchen.

He didn't look at the cake on the counter, and he didn't look at me.

His shoulder caught the edge of the cake stand.

I watched it happen slowly.

The stand tipped and the cake slid.

Three hours of work went with it, the layers I had leveled with a ruler and the frosting I had piped along the edges in small, even rosettes.

It hit the tile and burst apart.

Lemon chiffon and white buttercream spread across the floor in every direction.

Dexter stepped over it.

He walked out the door.

I stood there and looked at the wreckage on my kitchen floor.

Then I sat down in it.

Not beside it. In it.

I pulled my knees to my chest on the cold tile with the cake around me, and I did not move for a long time.

My phone lit up on the counter above me.

I reached up and pulled it down to read the chat.

His mother, Odette, had written: Dexter. Call me. Now.

A cousin had written a row of question marks.

One of the couples we had dined with for years had written: Is this real?

Then a new message from Quinton came in under his first.

Landing at JFK at five. Do not delete anything. Do not sign anything. I'll come straight from the airport.

I read it three times.

In seven years he had never said a kind word to me, and he had never said an unkind one either.

He had only left the room.

I thought about the job offer I turned down three years ago.

It was a senior account manager position at the firm I had wanted since college.

The offer came on a Thursday, and Dexter asked me that same weekend to plan his team dinner.

I called the firm on Friday and said I needed more time.

I never called back.

And tonight, while I sat on the floor of the kitchen I had designed, he was in a hospital holding her hand.

The chat kept going off against the tile.

I stopped looking at it.

At some point the sky outside the windows went from black to gray.

I watched it happen.

The same pale light came back across the floor that had greeted me yesterday morning, when I woke up and thought today might be different.

I hadn't slept.

I stood up with stiff legs and frosting on my jeans.

I washed my hands at the sink and dried them on the linen towel I had ordered from Vermont because I thought it made the kitchen feel warmer.

In the dark window above the sink I looked at the woman looking back.

She was thirty years old, with flour on her sleeve and cake on her knees.

I told her we were not going to leave quietly.

At six o'clock there was a knock on the door.

It was not the knock of a man who owned a key.

I opened it.

Quinton Barrow stood in the hall in a dark suit that had been slept in, with a carry-on bag in one hand.

He was taller than I remembered.

His grey eyes went over me once, from the frosting on my jeans to the wreck of the kitchen behind me.

He didn't say he was sorry.

He stepped through the cake and set his bag on the counter.

"Dexter bought 14B through the management company," he said. "That company answers to me."

"You knew," I said.

"I saw the sale eight months ago."

I stared at him.

"You knew for eight months," I said, "and you let me bake a cake."

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