Page 57 of So Close to You
Then Elliot turns around.
And Seraphina feels an immediate chill run down her spine.
Because she sees no anger on his face. No rage. Not even contempt.
Only devastation.
The look of a man who has just watched his entire life crumble before his eyes.
He holds his cell phone in a trembling hand. The screen partially illuminates his face in the dim light. Seraphina holds her breath when she recognizes, even from a distance, one of the photos from Chester open on the screen. Their hands intertwined. The Roman wall. Nerissa looking at her as if she were the only thing that mattered in the world.
The entire universe seems to stand still around her.
Elliot holds her gaze for a few endless seconds.
And when he speaks, his voice is broken by something far worse than anger.
“You’re late, Seraphina,” he says, utterly devastated. “They’ve already told me.”
Chapter 20
“No… it… can’t… be…”
The phone slips from Seraphina’s fingers and hits the living room carpet with a muffled thud that barely manages to cut through the intense ringing invading her ears. For a moment, she can only make out the reflection of the lights outside, in the garden. Lights that bathe the room’s ivory walls in a cold, merciless glow. The whole world seems to have shrunk to that frozen image in her mind: she and Nerissa walking along the walls of Chester, hands clasped beneath the glow of the old streetlamps, oblivious to the rest of the universe.
Elliot stands motionless in front of the window, his chest heaving with uneven breaths. There is no trace left of the impeccable lawyer who smiles at dinner parties or the calm man who avoids raising his voice in front of the children. Now he seems like a stranger, someone who has just discovered that his entire existence was built on a carefully crafted lie.
Seraphina tries to catch her breath, but her lungs refuse to cooperate. She feels a metallic taste building on her tongue as she stares at the enlarged photographs on the screen.
Everything she had experienced as something intimate, vulnerable, and deeply human has now been transformed into irrefutable evidence. Into ammunition ready to be fired. Into a public and merciless execution.
“Elliot…” Seraphina manages to murmur, though her own voice sounds foreign to her, as if it belonged to someone else. “I was going to tell you. I swear.”
He lets out a short, broken laugh that makes the hair on her arms stand on end, then runs his free hand over the back of his neck in a gesture laden with disbelief and pain.
“Tell me?” he repeats slowly, looking at her as if seeing her for the first time in his life. “And when exactly were you planning to do that, Seraphina? After your face appears in every newspaper in the city tomorrow? After our children have to hear at school that their mother is having an affair with a surgeon from her own clinic while pretending everything is fine at home?”
Seraphina feels the ground seeming to open up beneath her feet. “The children. Good God, the children.” The image of Oliver coming down the stairs in his school uniform, his hair still tousled, and Ivy falling asleep the night before, clinging to her arm, pierce her chest with a violence that takes her breath away. Her whole body reacts with a delay: her hands begin to shake visibly, and her heart pounds against her ribs so hard that the pain becomes almost physical.
“I didn’t want it to happen like this,” she whispers. “I never wanted you to find out this horrible way.”
“Like this?” Elliot takes a step toward her, his shoulders tense and his jaw clenched. “Is there a right way to find out that your wife has been cheating on you for so long? Tell me, Seraphina, when would the ideal moment have been for you?”
She opens her mouth, but the words get stuck in her throat. Any explanation she tries to offer sounds pathetic even inside her own head. There are no longer any possible nuanceswhen the evidence glows starkly on an eighty-inch screen in the middle of the family living room, where they’ve celebrated birthdays, Christmases, and moments that now seem fake.
Elliot picks up the phone from the floor and shoves it right under her nose, displaying another image that makes Seraphina’s heart freeze. He clenches his jaw so tightly that the muscle visibly trembles beneath his skin.
“How long have you been with her?” Elliot growls.
Seraphina closes her eyes for a second. She could lie, downplay it, try to soften the blow. But there’s nothing left to protect.
“Longer than I allowed myself to admit…”
Elliot looks away for a moment and runs a weary hand across his face. When he looks back at her, his eyes reflect something far worse than anger: a deep, heart-wrenching humiliation.
“Everyone has called me. Everyone. The chairman of the board, the general counsel, Premier’s major investors… Even Malcolm Reed from London, asking if it was true before the news hits Bloomberg tomorrow. Do you realize the magnitude of this?”
She feels the ice breaking inside her chest. “Damn Adrian.” The bastard has made his move too soon.
