Love Like Morning Mist, Gone Before Sunrise Prologue Three years ago, my fiancé cheated on me with my best friend. When grief had nearly finished me, it was his best friend, Jameson, who pulled me out of the abyss. So I married him. After the wedding, Jameson was unfailingly tender. His only fear was losing me: If a male colleague texted me about work after six in the evening, he would demand to know what right that man had to contact another man’s wife. If I laughed a little too freely at a dinner party, his palm would settle heavily on the back of my neck. I thought it was all because he loved me too much. Until I stumbled onto a post on an internet forum: “I took in the worn-out shoes my childhood friend was done with. Every time I touch her, I want to throw up.” The top comment, with the most likes, read: “Cheat back on her and call it even.” “I already have,” my husband had replied—and looking at his latest comment, I felt something in me turn to ash. I bought a one-way ticket on the next flight to Portland, Oregon. When the plane broke through the thick gray clouds and climbed into the open sky, I leaned my forehead against the cold window and closed my eyes. The nightmare was over. Chapter 1 Elena Hendricks POV On Tuesday morning, while I was waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, I stumbled onto a side of my husband I was never meant to see. Two lines. I had seen them at four that morning, in the dark of the downstairs bathroom, and then I put the test in my cardigan pocket like a lit match. On one of those popular relationship forums, a post had been sitting near the top of a smaller board, its title spelled out in plain sight: “I Took In the Worn-Out Shoes My Childhood Friend Was Done With—Every Time I Touch Her, I Want to Vomit.” Every line the original poster wrote dripped with undisguised disgust. He wrote that his wife had been his best friend’s fiancée three years earlier. He said that when his friend cheated on her with her college roommate, he had swooped in like some kind of savior. He wrote that everyone at school thought him a saint for being willing to clean up after a woman who had been left in pieces. Then a single sentence stopped my breath: “She still uses the date her ex proposed as her phone passcode, and calls it our anniversary. I dragged her out of the mud, but in her heart I will never measure up to that man.” I stared at the screen, my fingertips trembling. Three years ago, I had walked in on my fiancé, Cameron Cummings, in bed with my best friend, Brittany Cleveland. In the apartment we shared, I collapsed on the floor and screamed until I had no voice left. While my world came down in ruins, Cameron and Brittany ran off together, leaving behind a non-refundable reception deposit and a floor littered with broken promises. It was Jameson—Cameron’s best friend—who showed up at my door with groceries and moving boxes, offering a comfort that asked for nothing in return. For the three days it took me to pack up my old life, he sat on the floor beside me in silence. He paid the cancellation fee for the wedding venue without telling me. Whenever I woke from a nightmare shaking, it was his arms that pulled me close. A year later, Jameson took me to the coast and proposed. “Elena, you deserve a man who worships the ground you walk on,” he told me that night under the soft lights of the gazebo. “I will spend the rest of my life proving to you that you are always safe with me.” And I believed him. In the two years since, Jameson had played the devoted, tender husband to perfection. Every morning before I left for the marketing firm, he packed me a lunch. He bought my favorite lavender bath salts by the case, terrified I might run out. On Sunday evenings, while I sank into the couch with a book, he stood nearby carefully pressing my blouses. Whenever I worked late, he waited in his car in the underground garage, a thermos of hot tea cradled in both hands. But behind that meticulous devotion lurked something unsettling, something obsessive. If a male colleague texted me about work after six in the evening, Jameson’s jaw would go tight. He would take my phone, read the message three times over, and then demand to know what right that man had to contact another man’s wife. If I laughed a little too freely at a company dinner, his palm would come down heavy on the back of my neck. He always said his jealousy came from nothing but the fear of losing me. “You have no idea how much it hurt to watch Cameron take you for granted,” he murmured in the dark, holding me hard against his chest. “I lived in his shadow for years. Now I will never let anyone take you from me.” I had thought his fear was born of love. I had thought he had simply seen how badly I had been hurt, and that was why he overprotected me. Now my eyes moved down to the comment section. Hundreds of anonymous strangers were piling on the wife. “OP is right,” one top comment read. “This woman is obviously still hung up on her ex. Once a woman’s been with a scumbag, she’s damaged goods for life.” “Cheat back on her and call it even,” another user wrote. “Show her what happens to a woman who keeps her ex in her head.” And twenty minutes ago, the original poster had replied. “I already have,” the poster wrote. “I found a woman who worships me. Getting my self-respect back feels incredible.” Nausea surged into my throat. I tapped on the anonymous poster’s profile. The account was set to private, but his latest activity showed that two hours earlier he had uploaded a photo to the local city board. The post was geotagged: Denver, Colorado. And Jameson was in Denver on a business trip, negotiating a corporate merger. I opened the thumbnail. It was a hotel balcony at first light, looking out at the snow-capped Rockies. A cup of black coffee rested on the glass railing, and beside it lay an expensive gold fountain pen. At exactly six that morning, Jameson had texted me from his personal number. I switched back to our message thread and pulled up the photo he had sent me. The same photo. The same angle. The same snow peaks. The same gold pen, his initials engraved on the clip. The air in the kitchen seemed to vanish all at once, leaving nothing to breathe. Under that photo, in our private messages, he had written: “Good morning, my beautiful wife. Every minute of every hour, I am counting down to the moment I can hold you again.” On the forum, under the identical photo, he had written: “Woke up in a luxury suite with a woman who actually understands me, who appreciates me, lying next to me. My wife is at home right now, probably still fantasizing about my good old friend. The stupid bitch has no idea.” I stared at the screen until my eyes blurred. For two years, Jameson had shared every minute of his life with me in exhaustive detail. Photos of lunch, boarding passes, conference badges, even receipts—he photographed all of it for me. Whenever I told him he did not have to report every little thing to me, he would smile and kiss my forehead. “A man who hides nothing is the only kind of man who can be loyal, Elena,” he always said. “I would never let you doubt me, not for a single second.” All of it, then, had been costume and performance. While he sent me sweet words, he was publishing his disgust for the whole internet to gawk at and mock. I sagged onto a kitchen stool and, with shaking fingers, scrolled into his post history. Every post methodically took my last three years apart. The cold blue light of the phone spilled across the counter as I read word by word, skinning away, layer by layer, every lie I had ever loved.

Elena Hendricks POV The earliest of these posts went back almost a year. Last November, for his birthday, I had spent four hours slow-braising short ribs. I set the table with fresh flowers and baked a chocolate cake from scratch. That night, Jameson posted a photo of the table on the forum. “The wife made dinner tonight,” he wrote. “She looks so pleased with herself. All I could think about was how many times she must have cooked this exact meal for Cameron in college. Every bite tasted like another man’s leftovers.” I could still see that night clearly. Jameson had kissed my hands, raved about the short ribs, and insisted I go rest in the living room while he washed every last dish. He had smiled at me through the kitchen doorway and said that meeting me was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him. I kept scrolling. In January, he had written a long post indicting my phone passcode. “Her passcode is 1014,” he wrote. “October 14th. She says we chose it because it’s our anniversary. Our anniversary. The same day Cameron proposed to her at the lake house, in front of all our friends. She swears that’s a coincidence. Does she think I’m an idiot? Every time I watch her unlock that phone in front of me, I want to smash the damn thing against the wall.” My passcode was 1014 because October 14th was the day we stood in the city clerk’s office and got married. I had changed it on our wedding day, to mark our marriage. He had never once asked me why I used those numbers. For two years he had simply let that tumor rot in his chest, chewing over and magnifying a humiliation he had invented out of nothing. In February, I came down with a vicious flu and lay shivering in bed for three days. Jameson took time off work to stay home and care for me. He made me soup, wiped my forehead with cool cloths, and held my hair back when I was sick. I cried with gratitude and told myself I was the luckiest woman alive. On the forum, he wrote: “She’s sick and pathetic-looking. And I’m the one who has to clean up after her. Cameron got her young and tight and full of energy. I get the broken, sobbing mess. What exactly was I thinking, taking on this burden?” Then the posts stopped for a while. He spent two months of that stretch in Singapore, and apparently even his contempt needed an audience. The most recent post before Denver had gone up last week. It had been pouring that day. My car died outside the grocery store. Jameson fought rush-hour traffic for an hour and a half to come get me. He wrapped his dry wool coat around my shoulders and stood in the downpour loading the groceries into the trunk, soaked to the skin. When we got home, I peeled off his wet clothes and kissed his cold shoulders. We made love on the rug in front of the fireplace. I had thought it was one of the most romantic nights of our marriage. On the forum, he posted: “Tonight I played the gallant husband rescuing his damsel in the rain. She ate it up. We had sex, but I had to close my eyes to get through it. All I could see was her underneath Cameron in their old bedroom. Touching her makes me feel filthy.” Bile surged into my throat. I threw the phone down on the counter and stumbled to the downstairs bathroom. I dropped to my knees in front of the toilet and heaved until there was nothing left in me. Dry retches tore through my chest. My ribs burned. Cold sweat soaked the back of my neck. Every touch, every kiss, every tender compliment of the past two years rotted in my memory at once, turning to pus. I pushed myself up, rinsed my mouth at the sink, and looked at myself in the mirror. Colorless. Eyes red-rimmed. The click of the lock broke the silence of the house. Heavy footsteps came from the entryway. “Elena?” Jameson’s voice, warm and rich. “Sweetheart, are you home? I changed to an earlier flight. I couldn’t stand the thought of a whole night without you.” The sound of it turned my stomach. I dried my face with a towel, pushed the bathroom door open, and stepped into the hall. Jameson stood by the entryway console, dropping his leather weekender onto the hardwood floor. He wore a well-cut navy suit, his tie loosened at the collar. He looked handsome, sharp, entirely at ease. The moment he saw me, that signature gentle smile spread across his face. “There you are,” he said, opening his arms and coming toward me. “I missed you so much.” He reached out to pull me into his arms. I stepped back fast, twice, until my shoulder blades hit the cold wall. His arms stopped in midair. The smile faltered, then reshaped itself into concern. “What’s wrong?” he asked, tilting his head. “Are you angry that I didn’t tell you I was taking the earlier flight? I wanted to surprise you.” He reached out again, fingertips testing for my chin. “The weather in Denver was miserable,” he went on, his tone smooth. “Nothing but endless board meetings all day. All I could think about was getting home to you.” I stared into his deep-set eyes. There was not a flicker of guilt anywhere on that face. If I had not seen those posts with my own eyes, I would have gone straight into his arms and apologized for not having dinner ready. “Who is she, Jameson?” I asked. My voice came out flat and dry, without a tremor in it. Jameson frowned. “Who is who? Elena, what are you talking about?” “The woman who was in your suite this morning,” I said, meeting his eyes and spacing out every word. “The one you slept with to get your precious manhood back. Isn’t that right?”

Elena Hendricks POV The warmth left Jameson’s face all at once, as if someone had wiped it off with a rag. His posture changed. His shoulders dropped. The eager returning husband was gone. He slid his hands into his pockets. “You went through my things?” he asked, his voice flat and low. “You posted your own mess on Reddit,” I said, gesturing toward the kitchen. “That sunrise photo you sent me at six this morning is now the header image on your profile. Did you really think nobody in the world would put two and two together?” Jameson stood in the middle of the foyer. He was not rattled. He did not apologize. “That photo went out to eleven people before eight this morning,” he said. “You want to tell me which one of them wrote that?” “You’ve been waiting for a reason to believe the worst of me since the day we met. Congratulations. You found one.” I read the line out loud. “The stupid bitch has no idea.” He looked at me for a long moment. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a silver cigarette case. He took out a cigarette. He had never smoked a single cigarette in this house. The lighter clicked. The tip caught, and a thread of gray smoke drifted up toward our white ceiling. “So you saw,” he said, as if it were nothing. “Nobody I know reads that cesspool. I wasn’t hiding from you. I was hiding from people who matter.” I stared at him, my nails digging into my palms. “You called me used goods to a crowd of strangers,” I said, my chest heaving. “You told the whole world my body disgusts you. Then why did you marry me, Jameson? You got down on your knees and begged me. You swore you loved me!” Jameson looked down at the cigarette between his fingers, then up at me. “I did love you,” he said evenly. “I still do, in my own way. But you have no idea what it’s like to walk into a marriage knowing you were handed someone else’s leftover prize.” He took another drag. Then, without so much as glancing down, he stubbed the lit end of the cigarette into the antique wooden console, grinding the ember into the polished mahogany. That table was the first piece of furniture we had bought together after our honeymoon. He had known I loved vintage furniture, and he had spent three weeks combing flea markets to find it. Now there was a smoking black crater burned into the smooth wood. “When Cameron had you, you were clean and whole,” Jameson said, his voice soft and steeped in venom. “Your first time was his. Your best years were his. I cleaned up his mess, I dried your tears, I bought you a big house. And every single time I touch you, something in my head screams that he was there first.” “I was engaged to him, Jameson!” My voice climbed with disbelief. “You were his best friend! You knew everything about us before you ever came after me!” “Knowing is one thing. Living with it, day after day, is another,” he cut in sharply, his eyes going dark. “It took me a while to see that I’d been played for a fool. I gave you everything I had, holding nothing back, and what did I get? A woman who spent five years in another man’s bed. It wasn’t fair. So I settled the account in Denver. Now we’re even.” A cold, bitter laugh slipped out of me. “Settled the account?” I said. “And you think sleeping with someone else cures that sick, twisted inferiority of yours?” “At least now it feels fair.” He didn’t blink. “You don’t get to stand on moral high ground and judge me. If you hadn’t let Cameron ruin you back then, I wouldn’t have needed to balance the scales.” The arrogance in his voice, so nauseating, shattered the last of my grief. “I want a divorce.” I looked him straight in the eye. “Pick up your bag and get out of my house.” Jameson let out a short, mocking laugh. “A divorce?” he sneered. “Where would you go, Elena? Back to Cameron? Is that why his engagement date is your passcode? You’ve been waiting for an excuse to run back into his arms, haven’t you?” “My passcode is our anniversary, you miserable coward!” I screamed at him. “October fourteenth is the day we got our marriage license!” Jameson went still. As the words landed, his pupils widened slightly. For a second, something like panic crossed his face, and then his ridiculous pride tore it to shreds. “So what. It doesn’t matter,” he said, taking a step toward me. “You are not divorcing me. I took you in when you had nothing. You carry my name, you live off my investments. You belong to me.” He shot out a hand and clamped it around my right wrist, hard as an iron cuff. “You’re not going anywhere. You stay right here,” he said, bending close, his breath on my cheek. “We are going to move past this. And you had better learn to be grateful for the life you have.” I didn’t think. I swung my left hand and slapped him across the face with everything I had. The crack of it rang through the foyer. His head snapped to one side. He let go of my wrist and slowly raised a hand to his reddening cheek. When he turned back to me, his eyes were terrifyingly empty. Three years ago, in the parking lot of my old apartment, that was the look he had worn one second before he broke Cameron’s nose with a single punch. That year, I had naively thought he was defending my honor. Only now did I see it for what it was: he was marking his territory. I backed down the hall toward the guest room, slipped inside, and slammed the heavy oak door. His fist hit the door just as I threw the deadbolt. “Open the door, Elena,” came his voice from the other side, unnervingly calm. “Don’t make this ugly.” I didn’t answer. I slid down the door and sat, my knees hitting the thick carpet hard. Shaking all over, I reached into the pocket of my cardigan and pulled out the white pregnancy test I had hidden there that morning, before I ever picked up my phone. Two clear, unforgiving lines. I was pregnant. A sob rose in my throat, and I forced it back down. I gripped the plastic stick with both hands and snapped it in two. Then I tore the wrapper to shreds and shoved it down to the very bottom of the trash. I would not let this child become the next weapon he used against me.