Obsessed With The Wrong Brother

Chapter 1

~ Shailyn ~

I made the coffee the way he liked it.

Two sugars. A splash of cream. His favorite mug — the navy blue one with the chipped handle that I'd offered to throw away three times and he'd refused. I'd made it the same way every single day for five years, at exactly 2 PM, and every single day he drank it without comment.

I told myself that meant something.

I told myself a lot of things.

The door to his office swung open under my hand and I stepped inside already smiling, already forming the words — Dante, I brought your coffee — when the smell hit me first. Perfume that wasn't mine. Something floral and cheap underneath the familiar scent of his cologne.

Then I saw them.

He was bent over his desk. Pants around his ankles. Vanessa — the new one, the one with the long legs and the way of laughing too loudly whenever Dante spoke — was spread across his desk like she owned it, her skirt shoved up around her waist, her blouse torn open at the buttons.

Everything stopped.

The coffee mug trembled in my hands. The smile was still on my face. I could feel it, frozen there, because my face hadn't caught up with what my eyes were seeing.

They both froze when they noticed me.

For one horrible, suspended moment, nobody moved. The office was dead silent except for the low hum of the air conditioning and the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.

Then Dante's face twisted.

Not with guilt or shame.

With rage.

"Get OUT, Shailyn! Who the hell told you to walk in here without knocking?"

His voice hit me like a physical thing. I stumbled backward, my hip catching the door frame hard enough to bruise. The coffee sloshed over the rim and scalded my hand, and I made a small, stupid sound — not from the burn, but from something else entirely. Something that lived deeper than skin.

"I — I'm sorry, I just—"

"OUT."

I pulled the door shut.

I stood with my back pressed against it, both hands wrapped around the mug that was still burning my palm, and I breathed. In. Out. In. Out. The hallway was bright and ordinary around me — beige walls, grey carpet, the distant sound of keyboards and low conversation from the open floor.

Normal. Everything out here was completely normal.

It's fine. He was stressed. He didn't mean it like that.

That was what I told myself.

That was always what I told myself.

Then I heard them start up again.

I stood there and I heard it — the rhythm of it, the sounds of it — and I understood in some dim, half-conscious way that he had not stopped. That the interruption had barely registered. That I had walked in, been shouted out, and he had simply... continued.

Like I was a fly he'd brushed away from his food.

The mug was still burning my hand. I didn't move.

"Mrs. Belmar?"

Jessica was watching me from her desk with that expression I'd learned to recognize — the wide eyes, the carefully neutral mouth, the hunger underneath it. She was the kind of woman who collected other people's humiliations like souvenirs.

I set the coffee mug down on the edge of her desk.

I don't know why. I just couldn't hold it anymore.

“You can have that,” I said. My voice came out completely steady. I was always surprised by that — how calm I sounded when everything inside me was white noise.

I walked to the elevator. I pressed the button. I waited.

It's fine. Marriages go through rough patches. This is just a rough patch.

The doors opened. I stepped inside. I pressed the button for my floor.

And then, only then, in the small silver privacy of the elevator, I let the tears flow because I just couldn’t hold it back anymore.

Five years. Five fucking years of being married to Dante Belmar, and he just wouldn’t change.

I collected my bag from my desk without speaking to anyone, signed out for the day, and drove away from the building with the radio off and both hands very carefully on the wheel.

There was a podcast I'd started listening to three weeks ago. A woman with a warm, certain voice who said things like you are worthy of being chosen and your silence is not the same as peace.

I'd found it by accident, searching for something else entirely. I'd listened to the first episode in my car in a parking garage, engine running, and I'd sat there for twenty minutes after it ended without moving.

I put it on now.

"Sometimes we stay not because we are happy," the woman said,

"but because we have confused endurance with love."

I turned it off.

I wasn't ready for that one yet.

My phone buzzed on the passenger seat.

Dante: [Don't you ever walk into my office without knocking again. I mean it.]

I read it at a red light. I put the phone face-down. How he had no guilt putting me through hell.

I pulled into the hospital parking lot and cut the engine and sat for a moment in the silence. My reflection watched me from the rearview mirror — mascara tracked down both cheeks, hair escaping from its pins, eyes that looked like they belonged to someone much older than thirty-one.

Pathetic.

The word arrived in Dante's voice, as it always did. Because he'd said it exactly once, two years into our marriage, during a fight I'd started by asking him why he hadn't come home the night before. He'd looked at me with something like contempt and said you're pathetic, do you know that, and then he'd left the room, and I had stood there and decided he was right.

I grabbed my purse.

I had to see my mother.

✦ ✦ ✦

She was asleep when I came in, the way she usually was in the afternoons — her face slack and peaceful, her chest rising and falling slowly under the pale hospital blanket. Another stroke scare, another round of monitoring, another bill that would take three months to work through.

Aunt Patricia was in the chair beside the bed with her coat already on, bag already on her shoulder. Waiting.

"Finally," she said, before I'd fully crossed the threshold.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"I need more money, Shailyn." She stood, arms folding across her chest. "The medication costs have gone up again, and I've been managing your mother for twenty-eight years. You're married to one of the wealthiest men in this city. Stop acting like I'm asking for something unreasonable."

Guilt moved through me, automatic and deep-rooted. Patricia had taken me since childhood. She had fed me and clothed me and made sure I went to school. I owed her a debt I could never fully name.

"I'll transfer something tonight," I said quietly.

"Good." She pulled on her coat. "Oh — before I forget. Your mother wrote you something."

She held out an envelope. Thick. Slightly worn at the edges, like it had been handled many times before being handed to me.

My breath snagged.

"She wrote this?"

"One letter at a time. She's been working on it for almost a year." Patricia shrugged, as though this were a minor administrative matter. "I'm going to the market. Lock up when you leave."

The door shut behind her.

I stood in the middle of the room holding the envelope in both hands. My mother's handwriting was on the front — slow and uneven, each letter an enormous effort, the letters of my name taking up almost the entire width of the paper.

SHAILYN.

She had been trying to speak to me my whole life. Her first stroke had taken her voice before I was born, leaving her inside a body that wouldn't cooperate, that turned every word into a battle. I had grown up watching her fight to communicate — the slow spelling out of words on a board, the single-word answers, the exhausted silences.

She had spent a year writing this letter.

My hands were shaking. I started to open it—

—and felt the familiar dull ache low in my abdomen that told me my cycle had started.

The timing was so absurd I almost laughed.

I tucked the envelope carefully into my bag and went to find the bathroom.

✦ ✦ ✦

There were two women inside, mid-argument, their voices bouncing off the tile.

"—did you see Chantel's new bag? The Birkin? Please. We all know Dante bought that."

I stopped just inside the door.

"Dante buys everyone things," the second voice said, bored. "It doesn't mean anything special."

"It means he's sleeping with her."

"Dante's sleeping with half of Kington. That's not news."

I stood very still. There was a stall directly in front of me. I went into it and locked the door and sat down on the closed lid and breathed.

They're not talking about my Dante. It's a common name. It doesn't mean anything.

Then one of their phones rang, and the pitch of the argument changed completely.

"Are you SERIOUS? Why is Dante calling you right now? Why does he even have your number?"

"Let go of me…"

The sound of a slap. A gasp. Then suddenly both of them were shouting, the sound of a real fight — bodies colliding with the counter, someone's shoes squeaking on the tile.

"He's MINE, Priscilla…"

"Yours? He gave me syphilis! YOUR ex-boyfriend gave YOU syphilis and you gave it to Dante and now I have it because of YOU, you absolute…"

The word hit me somewhere behind my sternum.

Syphilis.

My prescription. In my glove box. The one I'd been filling every time Dante came home from a business trip for the past three years.

I sat on the closed toilet lid in a hospital bathroom and understood, slowly and completely, something I had been choosing not to understand for a very long time.

It wasn't a rough patch.

It had never been a rough patch.

I didn't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the fighting to stop, for one of them to start crying, for the other to slam the door on her way out.

Long enough for the silence to become unbearable.

‘Face your fears.’

That was from the podcast.

‘The longer you hide, the smaller you become.’

I unlocked the stall door. I pushed it open.

The one who remained — the one who'd been crying — was standing at the sink, mascara destroyed, and she looked up when she heard me and went completely still. She recognized me as the wife of the man she and her friend had just fought about. I could see the exact moment it happened — the way the color drained from her face, the way her mouth formed a small, horrified O.

I walked to the sink beside her.

I turned on the tap. I washed my hands. I pumped the soap dispenser twice and worked it into a lather and rinsed it away, and I did all of this with the methodical care of someone who was holding herself together through sheer attention to small tasks.

In the mirror, I could see her watching me. Frozen. Waiting for me to scream, perhaps. Or cry. Or collapse entirely.

I dried my hands.

I took out my compact and fixed my makeup. I'd gotten very good at this over the years — filling in the smudges, smoothing out the evidence. There had been a photo, two years ago, of me jogging near our building. Someone had taken it without my knowledge and posted it online with the caption: when you marry for money but can't afford mascara. It had gone mildly viral in certain circles. Dante had mentioned it once, at dinner, with a small smile.

Since then, I never left the house without being put together.

I snapped the compact shut.

I left without speaking.

In the hallway, I let out a breath that felt like it had been building for hours. My legs were unsteady. My hands wouldn't stop trembling.

But I had not hidden. I had not cried in front of her. I had not apologized for being there.

It was such a small, ridiculous thing to be proud of.

My phone rang as I walked back to my Mom’s room. It was Tyler, my amazing father in-law.

"Shailyn, darling! You'll be at dinner tonight, yes? Seven o'clock at the manor. The whole family."

My stomach tightened. "I didn't know about…"

"Dante didn't tell you? Oh, that boy." He clicked his tongue. "Can you pick up some of that ginseng drink on your way? The herbal blend, you know the one."

"Of course," I said. "I'll be there."

I ended the call.

Of course Dante hadn't told me. Why would he? Telling me things required acknowledging I existed, and acknowledging I existed required a basic level of regard he hadn't managed in years.

I kissed my mother's forehead. She stirred but didn't wake. I tucked the envelope more securely into my bag — I would read it tonight, I promised myself, when I had privacy and quiet — and drove to the mall.

✦ ✦ ✦

The ginseng shop was small and warm, tucked into the corner of the mall's east wing, fragrant with dried herbs and something woody underneath. I found Tyler's brand quickly — I'd bought it enough times to know exactly where it sat on the shelf — and turned toward the register.

I didn't see him until I walked straight into him.

The collision drove the air from my lungs. The bottle flew from my hands and hit the floor and exploded — glass and amber liquid spreading in a wide arc across the tile, glittering under the shop's warm lighting.

"Oh God, I'm so…"

I looked up and the apology died completely.

The man I'd collided with was... breathtaking. Tall, broad-shouldered, with sharp cheekbones and dark eyes that seemed to look straight through me. Tattoos crept up from beneath his collar, wrapping around his throat like serpents.

He looked down at the broken bottle. Then at me.

Then he simply... walked away.

No apology or acknowledgment. Absolutely nothing.

Burning anger flared in my chest, I have been through enough for one day. Before I could stop myself, I shouted:

"Stop right there!"

The entire shop went silent. People turned to stare.

And to my shock... he stopped.

My heart pounded as he slowly turned around, one eyebrow raised. Those dark eyes fixed on me with an intensity that made my knees weak.

‘What now, Shailyn? What the hell do you do now?’