Page 108 of Discretion at Its Finest

This was insane.Iwas going insane.

Stress was getting to me. I was reading into things because everything else in my life was falling apart, and the last thing I needed was for this, my home, my family, to crack too, even though it was basically falling apart.

I reached for the whiskey again, letting the burn slide down and settle inside me. It didn’t calm me. If anything, it made the thoughts louder.

I stared at the opposite wall, the framed degrees, the photos, the illusion of stability I’d spent years curating, that my family spent years protecting. The Newman name. My inheritance and my burden.

My eyes fell on the family portrait of Genevieve and me when she was pregnant with Eugene. I stood, walking over to the frame, grabbing it off the wall.

I stared at the picture for a long moment, the memory of that day trying to surface. Her standing slightly angled toward me because the photographer told her it would soften the look, my hand on her stomach because that’s what a fiancé was supposed to do, the smile she gave that never quite reached her eyes.

…I’d never noticed that before.

Or maybe I had, and I’d convinced myself it meant something different back then.

I traced a thumb along the edge of the frame. The more I looked, the more wrong it felt. The woman in the picture, the son we raised, something about it felt…wrong.

I told myself I was imagining it. That it was the alcohol talking, my poor planning and lack of presence as a father ridiculing me, exhaustion from being the failure everyone coddled mockingme, being in the shadow of the man who erased whatever dignity or respect I had left enraging me.

It should’ve been all of that.

But then another thought slipped in louder than the rest:

Whendidshe start looking at me like that again?

Blank… distant. Present in her body, somewhere else entirely in her mind.

I dragged a hand down my face. I didn’t recognize the woman in the photo, didn’t recognize the woman I walked past every day now… Genevieve… My Genevieve was gone.

And every time she faded like that… there was always one constant, one man at the center of it:

Reid.

His presence or his disappearance.

It affected her deeply, her emotions, her behavior… everything about her changed with him… It was never that way with me.

Placing the photo down, another thought passed my mind, another ridiculous thought that screamed louder than the rest…

Genevieve was pregnant again. Reid was taken into custody… He leftagain. And she was a different person… again.

Come to think of it… When was the last time she and I were even… intimate?

The question hit harder than it should’ve. I reached for the memory… and nothing came.

Just weeks bleeding into months.

And then dates lining up in my head in a way that made my vision darken at the edges. The night Reid came back… that was the last time.

The math of it all—the math wasn’t adding up.

I dragged both hands down my face, pacing once, twice, breath growing uneven. My brain pounded in my skull, jogging my memory years ago for the same question. And still, eventhe timeline of her first pregnancy was… hazy. Close enough to assume, but not enough to be certain.

My hands landed on the edge of my desk, my failures staring back at me—but I didn’t care about that anymore.

I didn’t know what bothered me more. The possibility that I’d overlooked something back then… or the possibility that I was overlooking it again now.

My fingers dug into wood until it groaned.