Chapter 2

The cursor hovered over the play button, my hand frozen mid-air. One flick of my finger, and everything I feared would come pouring out.

My phone sat dark on the desk. Not a word from Chris since he dropped the bomb. His intended mercy, a gesture of friendship, had soured into a curse, hurling me off a cliff.

Melissa’s voice drifted through the wall, humming “I Knew You Were Trouble,” the same Taylor Swift song from the concert a few months back.

I’d screamed every word that night, loud and desperate, almost pathetic, pretending sheer volume might somehow save us.

Now the same melody floated in, light and careless, each note a quiet taunt, blind to her mother’s descent and her father’s collapse just feet away, twisting the morning’s nightmare even deeper.

All that remained was the choice: click and witness the events that had left Emily a disheveled mess kneeling between the twins, or don’t, and live with the kind of doubt that eats a man alive.

The apartment shrank around me as the play button glowed above a version of my ex-wife I no longer recognized. Even with the air conditioner rattling at full blast, it felt like a hundred degrees. Sweat rolled down my sides, soaking through my shirt, the fabric clinging to my back as if the walls themselves were closing in.

My life reeled back in flashes: our wedding day, anniversaries, family vacations, fall Saturdays with college football on the TV. The quiet rhythm of dinners at home. The steady hum of two people who had once been a team.

Now it all ran like a cruel montage, taunting me as I sat there staring at proof of what she’d become.

I clicked before I could stop it. My hand outrunning my thoughts, as if some deeper part of me had already decided.

The video stuttered to life, and there she was. No buildup. No introduction. Not the woman I’d married, and not yet the wreck from the aftermath photo that had dragged me here, but something in between, a before I barely recognized.

This version of Emily sat under layers of heavy makeup, wearing the Florida Gators T-shirt and jeans she’d lived in for twenty-five years. Our alma mater’s colors, the uniform of every Saturday, orange and blue like lifeblood through our family. Her skin was buried under a spray tan so thick it looked painted on. Her hair, once soft, easy, and worn with that Jennifer Aniston glow she carried so naturally, was teased high and shellacked stiff, leaving her with the brittle, overdone sheen of a bargain-bin 90s porn star.

She sat on the couch. Not just any couch, but that couch, almost as infamous as the twins themselves. Dumped in the living room of some shitty Miami apartment, its whereabouts known only to those who had signed the contract and been chosen to become the next thumbnail.

Yellow cloth, sagging from years of abuse: the stage for every Double Decker that had ever taken place, its fabric saturated with the stains of a thousand women before her, a crime scene masquerading as furniture.

The camera stared, unblinking, its cold gaze fixed as always. Emily shifted beneath it, squaring her shoulders as if a straighter posture might somehow mask the tremor in her hands. Her fingers knotted tightly in her lap, clung to each other like her last anchor.

I tried to look away, but the pale band on her finger nailed me to the screen: a ghost circle, the only untouched strip of skin on her painted hand.

She’d worn the wedding band into the booth and only then taken it off, like a diseased appendage she’d finally had amputated.

While I was folding our life into cardboard boxes, she was in some strip-mall salon letting a stranger airbrush twenty-five years away in one bronze cloud, the ink on our divorce papers still wet.

Her eyes flicked away from the lens, panic sparking like a live wire. She looked small, almost pleading, still clinging to an alternate reality that this wasn’t a production, that she might be able to slip behind a closed door with the twins, no lights, no camera, taste the Double Decker, scratch it off her bucket list, and walk out untouched, her innocence and anonymity still intact.

It didn’t take long before the voice cut in, the one everyone knew. Ed. The man behind the camera. His voice carried that unmistakable British accent, casual and almost cheerful, instantly familiar to anyone who had ever caught one of their clips. He wasn’t one of the stars. He hadn’t hit the genetic lottery like Big Ben or Parliament. Just a childhood friend who’d piggybacked on their success and managed to carve out his own niche as the cameraman and the voice behind the production. All of it delivered with the smug arrogance of a man propped up by bigger friends, Napoleon syndrome in full bloom.