The text message arrived while I was still bleeding.
Can’t leave lunch with Charlotte right now. Her ex is stalking her. Call an Uber.
Sorry, babe.
I gazed at my husband’s words through the spiderwebbed screen of my phone, my dislocated shoulder screaming with every shallow breath. With my one good hand, I typed back a single word: Okay. That word would end our eight-year marriage, though Tyler didn’t know it yet.
He was too busy comforting his “female best friend,” Charlotte Thomas, over her latest manufactured crisis to realize his wife was lying in Riverside General’s emergency room, selecting between rage and morphine. This morning felt like a different lifetime. At 6:30 a.m., I’d stood in our kitchen making Tyler’s breakfast exactly how he liked it: two eggs over easy, three strips of bacon crispy enough to destr0y, wheat toast with just a whisper of butter.
“Charlotte’s having another crisis,” he’d declared over breakfast. The soft, private smile playing on his lips was the one that applied to be reserved for me. Now, it belonged to her text messages.
“Another one?” I’d kept my voice neutral, cracking eggs into the pan with more force than necessary. “That’s the third crisis this month.”
“Her ex is stalking her. She’s scared, Hannah.”
Marcus, the supposed ex-boyfriend, had reportedly been stalking Charlotte for six months.
Strange how the “stalking” only ever looked to occur on Thursday afternoons, precisely during Tyler’s longest lunch break. Strange how it never quite grew to the point of actually involving the police. I had learned, however, that defending Charlotte was Tyler’s new religion, and I was a non-believer.
Instead, I just reminded him about my dinner. His response was a dagger of predictability. “I’ll try to make it, but if Charlotte needs me…”
She would need him.
She always did on Thursdays.
Six months ago, Tyler had brought Charlotte into my pharmacy at Riverside General for the first time. She’d needed anxiety medication, he said. I watched from behind the counter as she laughed, touching his arm in a way that was casual, int:imate, and deeply familiar.
“She’s going through a rough divorce,” he’d explained later. “She doesn’t have anyone else she can really talk to.”
It started as a casual lunch. Soon it was every Thursday, stretching into three hours while I worked the late shift.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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