Chapter 1: The other woman
The light was too bright. It always was. reflections from the old light bulbs bled across the white walls, a constant, silent pulse that turned the sterile space into a fever dream. Julie stood at the window, a glass of water cool in her hand, and watched the cars streak along the street. Forty-two felt like this house. Clean lines, pretty views, and a quiet, humming emptiness at the core.
Behind her, the bed was still unmade. The sheets held the shape of this morning rush, the ghost of a body curled away from another. On the nightstand, next to a half-read novel about offshore tax shelters, the phone she hang onto every night to text with Mark.
Julie's husband voice had been careful, when he’d shown her the profile last night ago. He’d handed over his tablet like he was presenting a quarterly report. “I found someone,” he’d said. “I think she might be… amenable.”
Julie had scrolled. The woman smiled in three pictures. She was petite, blonde with straight hair that fell like a sheet of polished wheat. No curves to speak of. She looked like a bird, all sharp angles and minimal weight. She had books that fit within a hand and a small, tight ass. Of course she was younger. Everything Julie was not.
She’d felt a distant ping, like a sonar echo from a shipwreck deep inside her. Not jealousy. Something flatter. An acknowledgment of a simple, biological fact. She handed the tablet back.
“She’s very… neat,” Julie had said.
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s not a no. It’s fine if that's what you want. Go ahead.”
She didn’t care. Or she told herself she didn’t. This wasn’t for her. At least not yet. It was for him, and by extension, for the fragile ecosystem of their fifteen-year marriage. She’d approved. Given the go-ahead. He’d set the dates, handled the logistics with the quiet efficiency he used for managing their investments.
Last night, after a dinner of seared scallops she’d made without enthusiasm, she’d reported the plan to Mark.
JulieMar: She’s coming saturday. We ll drop the kids at my parents.
MarkD: Record it.
The sentence hung in the air, heavier than the usual guilt of texting another man secretly.
JulieMar: Record it?
MarkD: For me. So I can see.
JulieMar: You want a video.
MarkD: Yes. I want to see what you look like with others.
He said it like he was asking her to pick up his dry-cleaning. Julie had felt her old curiosity, the one that had led a teenage girl to whisper secrets into a buzzing modem, stir under layers of spreadsheet and calm. It was a grotesque request. It was also, in the brutal logic of their arrangement, bizarrely reasonable.
JulieMar: How?
MarkD: Your phone. Ask them, they might be into it..
Now, in the relentless daylight of the afternoon before, she walked to the nightstand. She picked up the phone. It felt heavier than usual. She switched on the camera and pointed it at the rumpled bed.
The frame through the screen was different. Smaller. Safer. It made the scene a composition: the twisted linen, the smear of daylight on the wall, the abstract painting that neither of them liked but which matched the sofa. She practiced panning slowly from the door to the bed. The motion was smooth, silent.
She put the phone down. Her reflection in the dark window looked back at her—a dark-haired woman in a simple grey sweater, holding a shape that society still called voluptuous but which felt, in this moment, simply inconvenient. The blonde woman would look like a slash of light in this white room. Julie would be a shadow.
Mark’s request shifted the geometry of everything. She wasn’t just permitting an act; she was becoming its archivist. A witness. The thought chilled her, but underneath the chill, a spark of something else fizzed. A dreadful, electric curiosity. What did he actually want to see? The mechanics of it? Or her, how she ll behave a work around it? How she will scream or fake to scream?
She walked to the closet, considering what to wear. Something she wouldn’t mind being seen in, on camera, in the edge of the frame. Something that looked both deliberate and like she hadn’t tried. She chose black linen trousers and a white t-shirt. Neutral. Uninvolved.
Later, she would sit in the dentist’s chair, the drill whining a harmony to the city’s hum outside, and her mind would circle back to the camera’s eye. It would make a record. It would make it real. It would give Mark a piece of the experience he couldn’t have otherwise. It would also, she understood with a sudden, cold clarity, give her a form of power. She held the lens. She controlled the narrative.
She returned home at 3:58. The silence was different now, charged and thick. She poured herself a finger of whisky, something she never did in the afternoon, and let it burn down her throat. She positioned the camera on the bookshelf, angling it toward the bed. She checked the viewfinder. It was a good angle. Clinical. Comprehensive.
On Saturday they went for lunch to her parents. They left their kids there. They drove back home and he took a shower. At 4:02, the intercom buzzed. The sound was shockingly loud in the quiet loft. Julie’s heart, which had been a steady, disinterested metronome, gave a single, hard knock against her ribs.
She didn’t move toward the panel immediately. She pressed the button to open the door. The click of the gate releasing echoed up the garden. She didn’t go to the door. Instead, she walked to the phone. She pressed record. It was alive. It was waiting. She turned and faced the empty space where the door would open, her hands hanging loose at her sides.
Footsteps, light and quick, sounded outside. They stopped by the door. A pause. Then, a soft knock.
Julie took a breath. The air felt thin. She crossed the room, her own footsteps silent on the polished concrete, and opened the door.
She crossed the room, her own footsteps silent on the polished concrete, and opened the door.
The woman on the threshold was smaller in person. The blonde hair was the same, a sleek sheet falling to her shoulders, but her eyes were a paler blue than the photos suggested. She wore a simple navy dress and carried no bag. She smiled, a quick, professional flicker.
“You must be Julie,” she said. Her voice was higher than Julie expected. “You’re so pretty.”
The compliment landed like a pebble dropped into still water. It was generic, weightless, a social token. Julie felt a bizarre urge to correct her, to list the ways it wasn’t true compared to the image on the screen.
“And you must be?” Julie asked, stepping back to let her in.
“Chloé.” The name sounded like a brand. She entered quietly, her heels clicking once on the floor before she seemed to consciously soften her step. She glanced around the loft, her gaze skating over the high windows, the sterile furniture, lingering for a half-second on the unmade bed. Her expression didn’t change.
Small talk felt like chewing glass. Julie asked about the traffic. Chloé mentioned the line at the bakery downstairs was long. They agreed the weather was unseasonably warm. The words hung in the air, functional and empty.
Footsteps on the staircase. Julie’s husband emerged, freshly showered, wearing dark jeans and a grey sweater. He’d shaved. He looked like he was going to a business meeting. His eyes went to Chloé, then to Julie, a silent question flashing between them. Everything okay?
“Chloé is here” Julie said.
“Welcome,” he said, extending a hand. His grip was firm, practiced.
“Let’s have a drink,” Julie suggested, the sentence rushing out of her. She moved to the kitchen island, the open bottle of white wine already breathing there. She poured three glasses, her hand steady. She handed one to Chloé, then one to David, finally taking her own. The glass was cool. She took a large swallow.
Chloé sipped, her eyes observing them over the rim. “So,” she said, placing her glass down with a soft click. “Shall we talk about the plan?”
It was a relief, this bluntness. He nodded, leaning against the counter. Julie stayed standing, using the island as a barricade.
“Logistics,” he began. “We have the evening. The children are at her parents’ until tomorrow afternoon.”
“I understood the time frame,” Chloé said, not unkindly. “And the rules?”
Julie spoke now, her voice unfamiliar to her own ears. “Safe. Obviously. Also, this is… a one-time arrangement.”
Chloé nodded. “And after? We get up, we have breakfast? We say goodbye?”
Julie's husband cleared his throat. “Yes for now. Who knows what comes next.”
Julie can't hide her surprise. This wasn't discussed. He thought this would happen again?
“So I leave after?” Chloé clarified.
“Yes,” Julie said louder than she wanted. They glanced at each other.
Chloé took another sip. “That works for me. I have a yoga class at ten.” She said it with the casualness of someone discussing a dentist appointment.
The casualness was a shock. It made the whole thing seem both more normal and profoundly more bizarre. Julie refilled her glass. David did the same. Chloé’s was still half-full.
They drank more wine. The conversation stuttered into practicalities—the spare towels in the ensuite, the Wi-Fi password, would she like water by the bed. Chloé answered succinctly. She was a contained system, operating with quiet efficiency. Julie felt her own nerves like a live wire under her skin, humming. David kept touching his watch, a tic he only had during shareholder meetings.
Chloé set her empty glass down. “Well,” she said. She looked from David to Julie, her smile polite, expectant. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Julie’s mouth went dry. The camera on the bookshelf, a silent black pupil, stared unblinking at the empty bed. The momentum of the evening, of the planning had all led here, to this precipice of the actual. And now that it was here, all Julie wanted was to rewind the clock ten minutes, to the safety of talking about the bakery line.
David pushed himself off the counter. He looked at Julie, a question in his eyes that was pure, unfiltered panic.
Chloé watched them, waiting. She was not nervous at all.