I kept thinking about two words.
Only Olivia.
That’s what the message had said. If he tells you it’s only Olivia.
Not if he mentions Olivia. Not if he brings up a woman named Olivia.
Only.
At 5:42 in the afternoon, I left the house.
Marcus asked where I was going.
“I need space,” I said.
The address was a coffee shop twenty minutes away. Quiet, off a side street, the kind of place that doesn’t have a line.
A woman near the back stood up when I walked in.
Beside her sat six other women.
Every single one of them was looking directly at me.
Seven women. Two pushed-together tables. Some of them looked angry. One wouldn’t meet my eyes. One was turning a coffee cup in slow circles on the table without drinking from it.
The woman who had stood gestured toward an empty chair.
“Danielle?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Tessa.”
My legs felt strange. I sat.
“What is this?”
Tessa looked at the others. “We’re sorry.”
“For what?”
“For how you found out.”
I looked from face to face. “Found out what, exactly?”
Tessa set her phone on the table.
“Marcus told you about Olivia?”
I didn’t answer.
“He always admits to the person you’ve already discovered,” she said. “That’s how he works. You find one, he confirms one. You think you have the whole story.”
My stomach dropped.
Tessa opened a folder on her phone. Marcus’s name at the top. His photo — the one in the grey shirt I’d bought him for his birthday, the one he wore when we went to his sister’s wedding last spring.
She scrolled through it slowly.
Restaurant plans. Messages. Photos I did not want to see.
I made myself look at the dates.
Eighteen months back. Further.
“This isn’t Olivia,” I said.
“No,” Tessa said. “That’s me.”
I stared at her.
“You’re—”
“One of them,” she said quietly.
I looked around the table again.
Seven women.
“No,” I said, though I don’t know what I was refusing exactly.
Tessa slid the phone closer. “Keep scrolling.”
I did.
Tessa. Brooke. Olivia. A woman who’d met him at a conference. A woman who worked near his office. The pattern was so clear once you could see the whole shape of it — Thursdays, late meetings, gym sessions that ran long, business trips that somehow always started a day early.
