Chapter 183: Manipulated

Chapter 183: Manipulated
Chapter 183: Manipulated

ABEL DONOVAN

"I want to ask you something,"She said. "And I need you to answer me honestly. No management. No version that makes you look better than you were."

"I will," I said. "I promise you. Whatever you ask."

She held my gaze across the table.

"Did you sleep with Flora on the night of our anniversary?"

The question landed between us like a stone in still water.

Did I sleep with Flora that night?

The question lived in my head the way guilt lives — not loudly, not always, but persistently. In the corners. In the quiet. In the moments right before sleep when the mind stops performing and starts confessing.

Anna was looking at me from across the table with that expression she'd perfected — the one that gave nothing away, that offered no mercy and no trap, just open, waiting space for whatever truth I was willing to deposit into it. She had always been like that when she was serious. No theatrics. No raised voice. Just stillness, and eyes that saw further into you than you'd consented to.

I straightened in my chair.

I reached for my glass.

"I—" The word came out and stalled. My throat had gone dry in a way that had nothing to do with thirst. I felt the heat of the room acutely — or maybe it wasn't the room. Maybe it was the specific, suffocating warmth of a man sitting directly in front of his own wreckage and being asked to describe it out loud.

I swallowed and set the glass down without drinking.

"That night," Anna said, and her voice was so calm it was almost worse than anger —

"A picture was sent to me."

My hand froze on the table.

My eyes came up to hers slowly, the way you look at something you're not sure you want to confirm is real.

"A picture," I repeated. My voice came out wrong. Scraped thin.

"Yes." She didn't blink. "Flora sent it to me. You and her. A hotel." She tilted her head slightly, the way she does when she's controlling something she doesn't want you to see her controlling. "What exactly were you doing in a hotel on our anniversary night, Abel? While I was at home waiting for you?"

And then it came back — fragmented, the way things do when you've spent years burying them under layers of selective memory and justified rage. That morning. Anna trying to show me something on her phone. Her voice cutting through the noise of my fury, trying to get my attention. I have something to show you. Look at this. And me — God, me — already so far gone into my own storm that I'd looked straight through her.

I had not let her show me.

I had not let her show me because I had already decided what the truth was, and I hadn't wanted anything interrupting that decision.

I pressed my fingers flat against the table.

"I don't want to face this," I said quietly. More to myself than to her. "But I think it's time I did."

"So you did sleep with her." Anna said it the way you state a fact you already knew — flatly, without surprise, as if she had simply been waiting for the confirmation to make the file complete.

"Did you sleep with Flora on the night of our anniversary?"

She asked it again anyway. Because she wanted to hear me say it. Because she had earned, after everything, the right to hear me say it clearly without wriggling or qualifications.

The restaurant felt smaller than it had when I walked in.

There was no exit here. No redirect, no version of this that let me leave the question unanswered and intact. I had come here to be honest. I had told her I would answer her honestly. That was the only currency I had left that was worth anything.

I exhaled.

"Yes." A beat. "I did."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

Anna didn't move. Didn't flinch. Didn't give me the reaction that might have, in some shameful way, made it easier — the tears, the raised voice, the visible crack. She just sat there and let the word exist between us, and somehow that was infinitely harder to bear than anything else she could have done.

"I don't know how it happened." I pushed forward because I owed her the full account, not just the admission. "I was in a meeting that night — a client. Flora was there. I still don't understand what she was doing there, but she was. And then—" I stopped. Pressed my fingers to the bridge of my nose. "My memory of that night is blurred. Pieces of it. I've never been able to account for that fully."

Anna's eyes sharpened almost imperceptibly.

"Afterward," I continued, "she said—" I hesitated on the words, hating the shape of them. "She said I forced myself on her."

Anna's brow shifted. Something moved behind her eyes.

"I believed her. I was horrified. I apologized and she — she said she understood. Said she wouldn't tell anyone. Said she forgave me because of what you were putting me through." I exhaled slowly. "And then she pulled out the photos. Of you. She told me you had been unfaithful for years. That you didn't love me, that you'd always told her so. That the man in those pictures was the one you truly wanted and that you were only with me for what I could provide financially. She said when you had enough, you would leave." I paused. "She said so many things. And I—"

I stopped.

Because this was the part I could not dress up, could not contextualize into something more palatable. This was the part that was simply me, and who I had been in that moment.

"I believed her," I said. "All of it. Every word. I took what she gave me and I built a verdict out of it without once going to you. Without once asking you to your face." I shook my head slowly. "And now, looking back at all of it — the blurred memory, her presence somewhere she had no reason to be, the way the photos appeared at exactly the right moment — I think I was set up too. I think she orchestrated every part of that night, mine included. I don't think what she claimed I did is what actually happened."

I looked at Anna.

"But I want to be clear about something. Whether I was manipulated or not — I am not standing here trying to make myself the second victim in this story. Because what came after is on me. Every accusation I leveled at you, every time I shut you out, every moment I chose my own rage over your truth — that was my choice. I had agency in all of it, and I used it wrong. Every single time."

Anna was quiet for a long moment.

Then she looked at me with something that was not quite pity and not quite contempt but lived somewhere in the complicated territory between understanding and exhaustion.

"You look pathetic, Abel Donovan," she said. Not cruelly. Almost gently, which was worse. "But I understand." She exhaled. "So. You slept with my step-sister — or were manipulated into it, or some version of both that you still can't fully account for — and then spent years pointing fingers at me. Accusing me. Treating me like the guilty party while carrying all of that." She let out a short, mirthless sound. "How did you live with yourself?"