Chapter 12:

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I took the carriers from his hands, walked to the trash can on the corner, and dropped them in. All of them. The cups hit the bottom with a wet, plastic crunch.

Julian watched me do it. He didn’t try to stop me. By the time I turned around, the color had drained from his face.

“Enough,” I said. “I don’t need flowers. I don’t need bubble tea. I don’t need you showing up at my job or standing outside my house. The only thing I want is for you to stop.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

For a second, standing there under the streetlight with empty hands and nothing left to offer, he looked like what he was: a man who had lost something and only realized its value after it was gone. I didn’t feel sorry for him. But I didn’t feel the anger anymore either. Mostly I felt done.

That should have been the end of it.

Mо𝗌𝘁 r𝖾𝖺d 𝘵𝗁𝗶𝘀 𝘸е𝖾𝗄 𝗼𝗇 g𝗮𝗅n𝗼𝘃𝘦𝗹ѕ.𝗰о𝘮

It wasn’t.

Ivy arrived three days later.

I don’t know how she found him. I don’t know if she’d followed him from China or tracked him through social media or simply called the same contacts he’d pressured for my address. What I know is that she appeared on a Sunday afternoon while Julian was stationed at his usual spot across the street from the coffee shop, and the look on his face when he saw her told me everything.

“Mr. Ashford, come back to me.”

Her voice carried across the sidewalk. She looked different from the last time I’d seen her. Thinner. Paler. The theatrical sweetness was gone, replaced by something rawer. She meant it.

Julian’s reaction was immediate. He turned to me first, then back to her, then to me again, his head swiveling with the panic of someone caught in a lie they didn’t think they’d have to answer for.

“Wren, I have nothing to do with Ivy anymore. After discovering the truth, I transferred her to another department. If you want, I can fire her. I’ll do it right now.”

Ivy flinched. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this. She’d crossed an ocean for a man who was offering to erase her from his life as a bargaining chip.

“Julian.” Her voice dropped. “You can’t accept being apart from Wren. Fine. But deep down you love me, don’t you? If you didn’t, why did you abandon her in that elevator to bring me medicine? Why did you post those photos of us? Why did you buy me the necklace, the real one, while she got the leftover?”

She was listing receipts. Every gesture, every gift, every moment he’d chosen her over me, pulled out and laid on the table like cards in a hand she’d been saving. Her voice shook, but her eyes were steady.

Julian wrenched his arm free when she reached for him.

“Enough, Ivy. Stop chasing me.” His voice was low, almost a growl. “If I was good to you, if I did all those things, it was only because you reminded me of what Wren was like when I first met her.”

The street went quiet. Even the traffic seemed to pause.

He turned to me. “Wren, when we first got together, you were so innocent and cheerful. Later I got used to you, and we lost that spark. When Ivy came into my life, everything got out of control.” He took a breath. “But I can’t forget all these years together. If you come back to me, can we start over?”

I stared at him. He’d just told Ivy, to her face, that she was a replacement. A copy of a girl I used to be. And then, in the same breath, he’d asked me to take him back, as if this confession were supposed to be flattering. As if being the original should make me grateful.

Ivy stood frozen. Her lips were parted, her cheeks wet. She looked younger than I’d ever seen her, and for the first time I didn’t see the performance. I saw a woman who’d believed a man who was incapable of loving anyone except a memory.

Then her expression changed. Something hardened behind the tears.

“If you don’t care about the baby,” she said, her voice suddenly flat, “I’m going to throw myself off that bridge.”

She turned and ran. Not toward the bridge, exactly, but toward the railing at the river walk, twenty yards away, where the water churned gray and cold below.

Baby.

The word reached me a second after she moved. Baby. Julian had gotten her pregnant. During our marriage, or after, it didn’t matter. There was a child. His child.

I looked at Julian. He stood between me and Ivy, paralyzed, his face cycling through emotions too fast to catalog. Then something settled. His shoulders dropped. The fight went out of him.

“I’m sorry, Wren.” His voice was hoarse. “Ivy is innocent in all this. I have to take care of her first.”

He said it like a confession and an apology and a goodbye compressed into one sentence. Then he went after her.

I stood on the sidewalk and let them go.

He caught up to Ivy before she reached the railing. He grabbed her arm, pulled her back, spoke to her in a voice too low for me to hear. She collapsed against him, sobbing. After a while, he walked her to a cab. They got in. The door closed. The cab pulled away.

They went back to China. I found out later, through Sloane, in a two-sentence text that said everything it needed to.

My life after they left didn’t change much. The coffee shop was still there. Marjorie was still there. My uncle still made dinner every night and pretended he wasn’t checking on me. My grandmother still held my hand when we watched television.

The bouquets on the porch wilted. I threw them out on trash day. The peonies in my uncle’s garden, the real ones, were just beginning to bloom.

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