Page 57 of Chasing the Other Woman

Brooks’s jaw tightens.

Luci looks between us. “I mean, whatever he said, he’s trying to save himself. He’s pathetic. He was always pathetic.”

I hear Tony’s voice from yesterday.

You don’t understand what went down.

Brooks doesn’t look at me. “Lucinda Becker, you are no longer part of Storm Posse.”

Her mouth falls open. “You can’t fire me in a bar.”

“I can fire you anywhere I want. Especially when you're harassing my wife.”

“You need me.”

“No,” Brooks says. “I needed honest people around me. I needed a team I could trust. You manipulated people under my authority and interfered in my marriage. You’re done.”

A flush crawls up her throat, blotchy and furious. For one second, I think she might slap him.

Petra sets a glass down behind the bar a little too hard.

Luci thinks better of it.

She turns on me instead. “You’ll never be good enough for him."

I step closer. Behind her, I can see Brooks readying himself, as if he can protect me from this one last injustice.

"And you're not even good enough for the peanut dust on Petra's floor."

Her eyes shine with furious tears. She grabs her bag from the back of a chair and storms toward the door. No one moves to stop her. The bell over the entrance gives one pathetic jangle when she shoves outside.

The silence she leaves behind is worse.

People start pretending not to stare. Badly. Chairs scrape. Someone coughs. Petra's the only one who bothers not to move. Her face is losing a battle with a smile.

Brooks remains a few feet away from me.

He looks at my left hand. At the bare finger where my ring used to be. Pain crosses his face before he hides it.

“Sam,” he says.

I stare at him, trying to arrange the pieces.

Luci lied.

Tony was involved.

Brooks knows.

And somewhere in all of this, my husband believed something about me that made him look at me like I was the one who had betrayed us.

My voice is quiet when I finally ask, “What did Tony tell you?”

Fourteen

BROOKS

“What did Tony tell you?”