Page 20 of Tragic (Lark Cove 3)

“What if you want to come home?” he asked softly. “How will you get in?”

I sighed. “I’m not coming back.”

“But Pip, you love the city.”

I cringed at the nickname, one that he’d given me our first year together. While we’d been happy and he’d been my Good Guy, I hadn’t minded when Adam called me Pip. But things were different and he didn’t get to use old nicknames.

“Piper,” I corrected.

He grumbled something into the phone, chasing away the softness in his voice. “I can’t believe this is where we are. You’ve thrown everything away because of a kiss.”

“Me?” Rage ran through my veins, burning away the guilt. “You did this. Not me. You threw us all away when you kissed another woman.”

“She was a costar.”

I shot off the bed. “Were you on set? Were you rehearsing? Because as I recall, you were out to dinner with her at my favorite restaurant and got caught kissing her in a back booth by an overeager fan with a selfie stick.”

The fan had snapped the photo with herself in one corner and Adam and his costar in the other. They hadn’t noticed with their mouths fused. A herd of elephants could have trampled the restaurant to the ground and they would have been found in the rubble with their lips still locked.

As Adam’s Number One Fan, I’d stalked his social media accounts regularly, never wanting to miss someone bragging about my husband or overlook a picture a fan would post of him signing an autograph.

That was how I found out my husband was having an affair. Via Instagram.

And it had shattered my already broken heart.

“I’m sorry,” Adam whispered. “For the millionth time, I’m sorry. It meant nothing. It was one kiss.”

“And that is what you still don’t understand. It was one kiss.”

I knew that when I’d started dating Adam, he’d often be physical with other women during his performances. I’d sat front row at his first college play, and when he’d kissed his costar, I’d about fainted. It had taken me a week to decide if I could handle it.

But even as a freshman in college, I’d decided he was worth it. I’d learned to compartmentalize that part of his job. It wasn’t my Adam with another woman, it was his character. In my mind, they were two completely separate human beings.

Except the kiss in the restaurant wasn’t him playing a character. It was him. My husband. The man who’d vowed to stick with me through good and bad had shared something intimate with another woman.

And he’d done it a week after we’d found out that I couldn’t bear his children.

The photograph of them together was burned in my brain. It kept company with a slew of images I’d conjured of the pair together, all of them naked in bed.

“Did you sleep with her?”

“No,” he insisted. “I’ve told you that over and over. It was just that kiss.”

Yet I still asked because the pit in my stomach screamed there was more to his story. “It doesn’t matter. The kiss was enough.”

“This isn’t all my fault,” Adam declared. “You weren’t the only one devastated by the doctor’s news. That was a game changer because I wanted kids too.”

I flinched. Not once had Adam held my infertility against me. But here he was, taking my greatest insecurity and using it to justify his infidelity.

So for the first time in my life, I hung up on Adam Hall.

It hurt knowing I’d let Adam down. It hurt knowing I was unable to give him a family. It hurt knowing that someone I’d once loved with my entire being was in pain.

But he’d kissed that woman. Instead of dealing with our problems, he’d found solace with another.

This is not my fault.

Yet here I was, suffocating with guilt.