Chapter Seven
Catherine heard the front door open before she saw him.
The heavy click of the lock, the lazy exhale he always made when he stepped inside—like the apartment itself bored him.
Caleb didn’t call her name.
He didn’t ask where she was.
He just walked in with the kind of confidence only a man with nothing to lose—or everything to hide—could carry.
When he appeared in the kitchen doorway, he didn’t stop walking. He didn’t even pretend to look surprised she was there.
His eyes skimmed over her the way someone might glance at a stain on their shirt: irritated, dismissive, already done with it.
“You’re still up,” he said, tossing his keys onto the counter. They bounced once, sharp and metallic, cutting through the air.
Still up.
Not “How are you?”
Not “We need to talk.”
Just… still up.
Catherine straightened, pulse tightening in her throat. “It’s nine-thirty, Caleb. Not exactly the middle of the night.”
He shrugged out of his coat. “Felt later.”
His tone said something else:
I don’t care.
Why are you talking to me?
Why do you still exist in the same room as me?
Catherine watched the droplets of rain slide off his collar and hit the floor. They splattered onto the same tiles she’d cried on. It felt symbolic. Insulting.
“You didn’t answer my texts,” she said carefully. “Or my call.”
He opened the fridge like she hadn’t spoken. “I was busy.”
Busy.
The new word he used like a leash—short, tight, just enough to choke the conversation.
She stepped closer. “Busy with what?”
Caleb stopped.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
He turned toward her, and for the first time that night, their eyes locked.
What she saw in his expression wasn’t anger.
Wasn’t guilt.
It was worse—an amused kind of disdain, like he was watching a child try to lift something too heavy.
“Catherine,” he said, voice low, patronizing, “you don’t want to start this.”
Something in her stomach knotted. “I didn’t start anything. You did.”
He gave a soft laugh. Not kind. Not even human.
“You always think that, don’t you? That everything I do is some attack on you.” He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, as if settling in for a show. “Maybe the problem isn’t my behavior. Maybe it’s your… interpretation.”
The room went cold.
He was gaslighting her. With the ease of someone who’d practiced.
Her fingers curled at her sides. “Caleb, I’m not imagining things.”
He raised a brow, bored. “Aren’t you?”
Her breath caught.
This wasn’t avoidance.
This wasn’t distance.
This was contempt—sharp, open, and deliberate.
A slow, trembling anger filled her chest, pushing up against her throat.
“You come home late. You smell like a cologne that isn’t yours. You look at me like—like I’m an inconvenience. And you think I shouldn’t ask questions?”
Caleb’s jaw tightened for the first time. Not enough to reveal a truth—just enough to signal he didn’t like being confronted.
“You’re making drama where there is none,” he said flatly.
But Catherine wasn’t the same woman who cried on this floor.
Not anymore.
She stepped forward, close enough to hear his breath hitch—barely, but it was there.
“Then look me in the eyes,” she said quietly, “and tell me there’s nothing going on.”
Caleb’s expression didn’t change.
But his silence did.
It wasn’t empty.
It wasn’t peaceful.
It was loaded.
A fuse waiting for flame.
And in that split second—standing in the kitchen where their marriage had first cracked—Catherine realized something terrifying:
Whatever he was hiding…
he was willing to burn them both to keep it buried.