Chapter 67 Chapter 67: Can’t Go Back Home
Cathy’s P.O.V
The elevator doors opened and the lobby of Hunter's building greeted me with its cold marble floors and its sharp, clean lighting. I walked through it slowly, my coat pulled tight around me, the prenup tucked inside my bag against my ribs.
But my mind was still back upstairs, the whole conversations was still replaying in my head.
Sophia, bathtub, gifts laid out beside her like a farewell arrangement. Death.
I pushed through the revolving door and stepped outside and the cold hit me immediately, the kind that reaches through fabric and finds skin. I stood on the pavement for a moment and just breathed. The street was quieter than it had been when I arrived. Fewer cars. Fewer people. The city was settling into itself the way it does in the late hours, slower and softer but never fully still.
Then I felt something. Something light and cold on my cheek. I looked up.
Snow was falling. Small, unhurried flakes drifting down from a dark sky, catching the light from the streetlamps and vanishing the moment they touched the ground. I stood there and watched them fall and felt the heaviness in my chest press down harder than it had all evening.
I thought about Sophia again. I couldn't stop thinking about her. A young woman who had given three years of her life to a man who had never deserved a single day of them, and when the full weight of his betrayal landed on her, she hadn't been able to find a reason to stay.
And then I thought about myself.
Not long ago, I had been standing on a sidewalk in the dark, barely holding together. I remembered the feeling clearly, the way everything inside me had gone quiet in a way that frightened me now when I looked back on it.
The way the ground had felt unsteady under my feet and the world had seemed to narrow down to nothing. If Hunter hadn't appeared that night, if he hadn't stopped and stayed and pulled me back from that edge without even knowing how close to it I had been, I didn't know where I would have ended up.
The snow kept on falling and I realized I understood Sophia in a way I wished I didn't. I wrapped my arms around myself and stood there for another moment, letting that truth sit without trying to push it away. Then I exhaled slowly, watching my breath mist in the cold air, and made a decision.
I was not going back to that house tonight.
The thought of walking back through those doors, past the rooms where Xavier and Caroline had stood laughing about me, past the guest room that had become my quiet, humiliating exile, made something in me recoil completely. I couldn't do it. Not tonight. Not with everything that was now sitting inside my chest.
Hunter had offered for me to stay, of course he had. But I knew I couldn’t stay here either, not until I was truly free from my shackles. And besides, if what Hunter said was actually true, if Xavier’s ‘open marriage’ declaration was really a trap, I didn't want to drag Hunter down with me into something neither of us were ready for just yet.
I took my phone out and scrolled to Hannah's name.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Cathy?" Her voice was alert despite the hour, like she had been awake anyway.
"Hannah." I started walking slowly, not in any particular direction yet, just moving. "Can I come to you? I know it's late but I have something urgent and I can't talk about it over the phone."
There was a brief pause. "Of course. Come now. You know where I am."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes," I said.
"I'll tell my mum you're coming," she said, and hung up.
I got into my car and started driving before I could change my mind.
Hannah's building was on a quiet residential street about four blocks from a small park I used to walk through on lunch breaks in a different, simpler version of my life. The building itself was modest but well-kept, with a security desk in the lobby and an intercom system at the entrance that actually worked. There was nothing flashy about it. It just felt safe. The kind of building where people actually knew their neighbors.
I rang the bell and was buzzed in almost immediately.
By the time I reached the right floor and knocked, the door was already opening before my knuckles finished their second tap.
Hannah's mother stood in the doorway, her smile wide and eyes a little moist.
She was a small woman with reading glasses pushed up on her head and a cardigan that looked like it had been lived in for twenty years in the best possible way. The moment she saw me, her face opened into something so warm and so immediate that my throat tightened without warning.
"Cathy." She said my name like it was something she was glad to have back in the room, and then she pulled me into a hug before I could prepare myself for it.
I hugged her back and held on for a second longer than I intended.
She smelled like cooking spices and fabric softener and something I couldn't name but that felt dangerously close to what the word home was supposed to mean. I thought about my own mother, her careful distance, her measured affections, the way she always seemed to be evaluating rather than embracing.
I pulled back and managed a smile. "I missed you too," I said, and meant it more than she probably realized.
She fussed gently over my coat and told me I looked too thin and asked if I had eaten or was even eating at all, all in the space of about thirty seconds, before Hannah appeared in the hallway and gently steered me toward her room with a hand on my elbow and a look over her shoulder that said she would handle her mother.
Hannah's room was tidy and warm, a desk stacked with legal books along one wall, a small lamp on the bedside table throwing a soft amber light across everything. She closed the door and turned to face me.
"Sit," she said, gesturing to the small armchair near the desk.
I sat like a baby taking orders. She perched on the edge of her bed, pulled her knees up, and looked at me the way Hannah always looked at people when she was paying full attention, directly and without pretense.
"Your voice on the phone," she said. "What's going on?"
I didn't answer right away. I unzipped my bag and reached inside, my fingers finding the familiar edges of the folded document. I pulled it out and held it for a moment.
Then I leaned forward and placed it on the bed between us.
Hannah looked down at it. Then back up at me. "Is that what I think it is?" she asked, jaw tight.
"My prenup," I nodded. "My copy. I found it in my sweater drawer and took it with me when I left the house." I sat back and pressed my hands flat against my thighs. "I need your help to go through it, Hannah. Properly. Line by line if that's what it takes." I looked at her steadily. "I need to know how much trouble I am in.”
“I need to know what I'm walking into and what I'm walking out with, because I can’t stay with Xavier any longer. I tried, Hannah, I really did. I thought I could manage it or wait it out or find some middle ground but there isn't one. There is no middle ground. And the longer I stay, the more I lose, and I don't mean just money."
Hannah picked up the prenup carefully with both hands. She turned it over, looked at the cover page, and then set it in her lap with a deliberateness that reminded me she was not just my friend at that moment. She was a lawyer.
"I'll read every word of this," she said. "I'll have a proper answer for you, I promise. I just need a little time to go through it carefully."
"I know," I said. "Take whatever time you need."
She nodded slowly, still looking at the document. Then she looked up at me with an expression that was gentle but serious.
"Cathy." She paused. "Are you sure about this? Because once we start moving in this direction, it becomes real very quickly. I need to know that you're sure before I start pulling at threads. That you’re not going to back out midway and change your mind."
The question hung between us.
I thought about the CCTV footage. About Caroline's laugh. About being called an obedient dog. About a girl named Sophia sitting in a bathtub surrounded by gifts before she ended her life. About the feeling of standing on a sidewalk in the dark not long ago, barely breathing, barely here, while my own husband chose to pleasure another woman.
About the way Xavier had looked me in the eye and offered me an open marriage with a straight face, like it was kindness.
I looked at Hannah now, and felt the full weight of everything press down on me at once, not breaking me, but clarifying something. Like coming to terms with reality and what was never real to begin with.
"I feel cornered," I said quietly. "Like every direction I turn, there is a wall. And the only way out, the only real way out that doesn't leave me smaller than when I entered, is to divorce him." I held her gaze. "For good, Hannah. I want out for good."
Hannah looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded once, the way she nodded when a decision had been made and there was nothing left to argue about.