Across the room, the vase slammed into the wall and shattered, and the stand toppled over.
Hey, she thought. Wait. I… Did I do that? How the hell did I do that?
She stared numbly at the destruction while the rest of the world faded into swirls of people exclaiming and muttering in the background. Some of the dinner-party guests were slipping out the front door while others lingered to stare.
The imposing stranger regarded the fallen vase, then turned to look at her, a corner of his mouth tilting up. Against a deep suntan, his knowledgeable eyes looked yellow like a cat’s. Reaching to his forehead with long fingers, he tilted an invisible hat at her.
Austin broke the throbbing tension with a loud laugh. “I guess we should have gotten someone to fix the wobble in that vase stand,” he said in a voice pitched to carry across the silent room. “Tell you what, everybody, it’s abundantly clear Molly and I are having a rough moment. Why don’t you all head to the bar in the other room? Russell will serve you up whatever you desire while my wife and I resolve this.”
That snapped her focus back into place.
“Because resolving this should only take five minutes or so?” Her acidic retort caused his head to rear back.
“Where is your Xanax?” he muttered.
“You think drugging me is the way to deal with this?” Raising her voice, she said clearly, “The second time you cheated on me, I cried for weeks. You didn’t know I found out. I was too… something. I don’t even know what the word is. There you were, going through your life with your dick hanging out of your pants, and I was too scared or intimidated or heartsick to confront you. I felt like a failure. I thought it had to be at least partly my fault. I had fallen out of love with you by then, but I still tried to make our life together work. I’m not a quitter, I said. I would stick it out. For better or worse, right?”
As she watched, the embarrassed anger in Austin’s face switched to uncalculated fury. “You frigid bitch,” he spat out. “You don’t know the meaning of the word love. Everything always has to be portioned out with you, balanced on some kind of invisible scale. I had to earn every fuck I got from you.”
His words sank invisible claws deep and tore at her, underneath her unmarked skin. Her face burned with greater fury and humiliation.
She made her shaking lips form words. “The second time you cheated. That was when I knew I didn’t want to have children. Years passed, and now here we are. I’m almost forty, you’re over forty. And I’m looking back over the past twenty years of my life, and all I can think is what a goddamn waste, and none of it was my fault.”
He barked out a harsh laugh. “You’re delusional.”
“Did I ever cheat on you?” she snapped. “Did I?”
“Of course you didn’t,” he growled. “You barely knew how to part your legs.”
The calculated cruelty in his words shredded every tender memory they had shared—every tender moment she had thought they had shared—and the depth of his anger confounded her. She felt wounded and bloodied. Was she really that cold and inflexible? That unlovable?
No. She would not let him do this to her.
Pulling herself together, she thrust away the pain, took a step forward and stabbed at his chest. “Quit trying to justify what you did by tearing me down. I was the perfect wife. I was great in bed, I took all the right classes, and I worked out and kept my figure. I was patient, and I learned how to cook all the right things. I always put your career first, and for what? You are a goddamn waste of space, and I am done living a cliché.”
“Jesus, you two,” Russell growled, shouldering his blunt figure between them. “Will you quit burning down your lives in front of everybody and shut the fuck up?”
Awareness pierced the anger in Austin’s gaze, and he looked mortified. That did her hurting heart a little bit of good.
“I don’t think so,” she told Russell. Underneath everything else, she saw the surprise in both Austin’s and Russell’s eyes that she would dare to talk back to the managing partner. Turning her attention back to Austin, she shouted, “You had that woman in my house. In my bed. No, I will not shut