Page 85 of The Silent Hour

Ethan kissed her back. Even if it was only for a second, those sixty seconds were burned like a little brand on my mind.

Eleven years of marriage could make a sixty-second betrayal stretch out like an eternity.

Meg had told me she’d driven past Cortez’s old lawyers’ office, and its façade was now scrubbed clean, windows boarded or replaced, and the interior gutted and repurposed into an antiseptic insurance branch.

No sign of the files or furniture that once held the practice. Another dead end that left more questions spinning in my mind. How long had his previous legal operation collapsed? Why wait until now to rebuild? And why choose Ethan—why my husband—to be the next defender in his shadowy lineup?

Miami wasn’t short on lawyers eager to bend the rules; why Ethan? Those questions haunted me into the night. And so did another: Why had Ethan kissed her back?

I knew neither of us had an answer.

“I keep replaying it,” I admitted into the heavy silence. The three of them, my closest friends, sat around me on mismatched armchairs—Toya’s legs tucked beneath her, Carmen with one ankle perched on her knee, Meg leaning forward on the edge of her seat.

Toya was the first to break the quiet. “Which part?”

I curled one leg underneath me and stared at the scratched wooden floor. “The whole thing,” I said. “He didn’t go looking for her. He didn’t even know she was there, but he kissed her back.”

Carmen’s head bobbed slowly, her dark red hair brushing her collarbone. “Yeah,” she agreed.

“ I don’t know where I’m supposed to put that.”

“Nowhere yet,” Meg said softly. “You don’t have to decide what it means forty-eight hours after it happened.”

Her words settled like gravel shifting underfoot, enough to hold me, if only briefly.

Toya leaned forward, the leather of her chair creaking. “And don’t start defending Ethan so hard that you don’t leave any room to be pissed at him.”

“I’m not,” I shot back, and saw all three faces tighten in protest. “Okay, maybe a little.”

Carmen snorted into her glass.

“I told him not to be alone with her,” I continued, voice trembling with renewed anger. “That’s what’s driving me crazy. I wasn’t telling my husband not to cheat—I’ve never had to do that. I was warning him she was pushing boundaries. Cortez had dropped her name into this shitstorm, and I didn’t trust her.”

My knuckles whitened around the Fiji bottle.

“Ethan is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He can spot a lie in a witness’s left nut, but apparently he couldn’t see that wandering into Lila Marino’s office at two in the morning was a bad idea when she wasn’t emotionally stable.”

Toya’s lips twitched into a reluctant smile. “Left nut?”

I glared at her. “You get my point.”

“Absolutely,” she said, nodding.

I exhaled, letting my shoulders drop. “He should’ve kept walking.”

“Yes,” Meg agreed, eyes soft. “He knows that.”

Toya reached out, placing her hand gently on my knee. “You can hold both things, Juju.”

I peeled my palm off my eyes. “What?”

“You can believe he loves you and still be hurt,” she said, her voice steady. “You can believe those few seconds don’t define your entire marriage and still make him answer for them.”

She squeezed my knee. “And you can trust him without pretending he didn’t fuck up.”

I did trust my husband.

I was also furious.