The wife I forgot to love novel Chapter 6

Cassidy went silent for exactly one second.

Then she said a word. One word. The kind that came from a place so deep and so furious that Helena had never once heard it leave her sister's mouth in thirty years. It landed in Helena's ear and somehow that single word, more than the phone call and the rooftop photo and the hand across the restaurant table, was the thing that finally made Helena's eyes sting.

"I know," Helena said quietly.

"She went into his phone," Cassidy said. Her voice had gone to that flat, dangerous place. "She went into your husband's phone, found your number and called you. At work. To tell you about their history."

"Yes."

"And she said it like she was doing you a favor."

"Yes."

A long pause. Helena could hear Cassidy breathing on the other end.

"What are you going to do?" Cassidy asked.

"I'm going home," Helena said. "And I'm going to talk to my husband."

"Helena, "

"Not to fall apart. Not to beg." Her voice was very steady. "I'm going to look him in the face and tell him what I know. And then I'm going to let him decide what happens next. Because I am done making decisions based on half the information."

Cassidy was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You want me to come?"

"No," Helena said. "This one I do alone."

She sat in her car outside their house for four minutes before she went in.

She looked at the front door. At the house she had kept for two years. The window boxes she had planted in April because she liked the way they looked when she came home. The small things you did for a life you believed in.

Then she got out of the car.

Damian was in the kitchen when she walked in. Standing at the counter with a glass of water, still in his work clothes, jacket off. He looked up when she came through the door. He looked like a man who had been waiting.

"Helena," he said.

"She called me," Helena said.

She watched his face. Watched something move behind his eyes and then go still. He set the glass down slowly.

"What?" he said.

"Camila. She called me at my office today. She got my number from your phone." Helena set her bag on the chair by the door the way she always did, the way she had done a thousand times. "She told me about your history. About why she left Velmont. About coming back." She looked at him directly. "She was very thorough."

Damian looked at her for a long moment without speaking. That stillness of his. She used to find it solid. Right now it felt like a wall.

"I was going to tell you," he said.

"When?"

He did not answer.

"Damian. When were you going to tell me?"

"I don't know," he said. And it was the most honest thing he had said to her in weeks and somehow that made it worse.

Helena looked at her husband. At the man she had made coffee for and cooked for and looked up for every single time his key hit the door for two years. At the man who had said I'm happy with a pause before it that she had been turning over ever since.

"Do you love her?" she asked.

The kitchen was completely quiet.

Damian closed his eyes. Opened them. Looked at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before and could not fully read. Not guilt. Not denial. Something more tired and more honest than either of those.

"I don't know what I feel," he said.

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