Chapter 1
1.What The Fuck Is Going On?
Elena's Pov.
The door wasn't even locked.
I remember that detail most, out of everything. Ryan never locked his bedroom door when I came over, because for five years there was nothing in that room he needed to hide from me. So I pushed it open the same way I always did, holding the bottle of wine I'd brought to celebrate, and the first thing I heard was a moan that wasn't mine.
For half a second my brain tried to protect me. It told me I was hearing things. It told me that was probably a video on his laptop, or the TV left on, or some stupid explanation that would make this not real.
Then I saw them.
Sophie was on top of him. My Sophie. The girl who cried at my apartment three weeks ago because some guy from her office wouldn't text her back. The girl who helped me pick out this exact dress because she said Ryan would lose his mind when he saw me in it.
She had her head thrown back and her hands flat on his chest, and Ryan had his eyes closed like he didn't have a single care in the world. Like nothing existed outside that bed.
The wine bottle slipped out of my hand. It didn't break, just thudded against the carpet and rolled, and that sound was what made Sophie's eyes snap open.
She screamed.
Ryan actually pushed her off him, which would have been funny in any other situation, because it was the exact wrong thing to do. He was fully exposed, scrambling for the sheet like that would somehow undo the last two minutes of my life.
"Elena, this isn't what it looks like."
"Don't." My voice came out flat. Dead calm. That scared me more than screaming would have. "Don't you dare say that to me."
Sophie was crying already, grabbing her shirt off the floor, babbling something about how it wasn't supposed to happen like this. As if there was a version of this where it was supposed to happen at all.
"How long?" I asked.
Nobody answered.
"How long, Ryan?"
He wouldn't look at me. He was staring at the sheet in his lap like it held the answer for him. "Elena, please, just let me explain—"
"How. Long."
"Three months." He said it so quietly I almost didn't catch it. Then, like a coward looking for an exit, he added, "But it didn't mean anything. It was just sex."
Just sex.
Three months of just sex, in his bed, in the apartment I had a key to, while I was planning our future in my head like an idiot.
I laughed. It wasn't a real laugh. It came out broken and ugly, and it scared me a little, hearing it come out of my own mouth.
"Three months," I repeated. "So the weekend we went to my parents' place for my dad's birthday. That was during the three months?"
He didn't answer.
"The night I got food poisoning and you sat with me until three in the morning holding my hair back. Was that during the three months too?"
"Elena—"
"Get the fuck away from me." I turned to Sophie, who was standing now, half dressed, mascara running down her face like she had any right to cry. "Five years, Sophie. Five years I trusted you. You sat in my kitchen and let me talk about him like he was the one. You knew. The whole time, you knew, and you let me keep believing in something that was already dead."
"I didn't mean for it to happen," she whispered.
"Bullshit." The word cut clean through the room. "Nothing about sneaking around behind someone's back for three months just happens. You made a choice. Every single time, you made a choice."
Ryan finally got the sheet wrapped around himself and stood up, reaching for me like he thought I'd let him touch me. "Baby, please. We can fix this. It was a mistake, it's not who I am—"
"Don't touch me." I stepped back so fast I hit the door frame. "Don't you ever touch me again."
I didn't remember deciding to leave. My body just moved. I grabbed my purse from the chair by the door, my hands shaking so hard I nearly dropped it twice, and I walked out of that bedroom without looking back at either of them.
Ryan followed me down the hallway, still holding that stupid sheet around his waist, calling my name like repeating it enough times would make me stop.
I didn't stop until I hit the front door.
"Elena, we've been together five years. You're really going to throw that away over one mistake?"
I turned around slow. "You didn't make one mistake, Ryan. You made a choice, every single day, for three months. There's a difference, and if you can't see it, that tells me everything I need to know about you."
I walked out and slammed the door so hard I felt it in my teeth.
The night air hit my face and I realized I was crying, had probably been crying since the hallway, and hadn't even noticed. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I fumbled for my phone to call a cab, and that's when I nearly walked straight into someone standing by the driveway.
Adrian Carter.
Ryan's father.
I'd met him maybe four times in five years, always at some family dinner where he showed up late, looked bored, and left early with some woman on his arm who wasn't his date the last time I saw him. Tall, gray at the temples, the kind of expensive suit that looked like it had never once been wrinkled. Everyone talked about him like he was some kind of legend. Adrian Carter, the man who built half his empire from nothing and burned through women just as fast.
He looked at my face and whatever he saw there made him go still.
"Elena." His voice was quieter than I expected. Careful, almost. "What happened?"
I opened my mouth to say I was fine, that everything was fine, that he should mind his own business and go back inside to his own dinner or whatever billionaires did on a random Tuesday night. Instead what came out was a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and then I was full on crying in front of a man I barely knew, standing in his driveway, mascara running exactly the way Sophie's had ten minutes ago, and I hated myself for that comparison the second it crossed my mind.
Adrian didn't say anything else. He didn't ask again. He just reached into his jacket, pulled out his keys, and said, "Get in the car."
I should have said no. I should have called my own cab and gone home to cry into my own pillow like a normal person whose life hadn't just exploded in a bedroom down the hall.
Instead I got in the car.
Because right then, standing in that driveway with my whole world in pieces on the carpet behind me, Adrian Carter was the only person who had looked at me and actually seen me.