My Husband Made Me Apologize to His Dead Mistress

The ticking of the brushed-steel wall clock in Dr. Sylvia Chen’s office was the loudest sound in the world.

"Late-stage," Sylvia said. Her voice was a soft, practiced velvet, designed to cushion the blunt-force trauma of a death sentence. "Metastasized. I’m so sorry, Tatum. We can discuss palliative care to manage the pain, keep you as comfortable as possible..."

I didn't blink. I sat in the stiff leather chair, feeling the steady, rhythmic thrum of my own pulse in my neck. It felt like a lie. My body was quietly dismantling itself from the inside out, yet I just felt cold, suspended in a strange, lucid detachment.

"Skip the pamphlets, Sylvia," I said, my voice entirely flat. "I need a timeline. A precise one."

Sylvia’s empathetic smile faltered, her brow furrowing at my lack of tears. "Six months. Eight, if your body fights. But realistically... you need to get your affairs in order."

I gave a single, curt nod. I stood up, meticulously smoothing the front of my trench coat, and walked out into the sterile hallway alone.

The underground parking garage of my apartment building smelled of damp concrete and metallic exhaust. I turned off the ignition. The engine ticked as it cooled. I stared at the leather-wrapped steering wheel, the digital dashboard clock glowing a faint, icy blue.

*Six months.*

I sat there for exactly eleven minutes.

In the dim yellow light, I looked at my hands. They were perfectly steady. For four years, these hands had built Neil Burke. I had taken an insecure, bright-eyed eighteen-year-old and constructed a million-dollar influencer empire around his smile. I had managed the contracts, smoothed over his tantrums, and swallowed my own needs to feed his insatiable appetite for public validation. I had poured my lifeblood into a boy who was currently drowning in the guilt of his own hidden sins, and my own body was the thing going bankrupt.

I gripped the wheel until my knuckles turned white. There would be no more quiet compromises. No more swallowing the bitter taste of his betrayals for the sake of the brand. The cancer was a deadline, yes, but sitting in the suffocating silence of my car, it felt terrifyingly like an emancipation.

I unlocked the door to our penthouse. The sharp, cloying scent of cheap vanilla candles hit me instantly, thick enough to coat the back of my throat.

The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the grey Seattle skyline, but the blinds were drawn tight, suffocating the room in artificial gloom. In the center of the living room, Neil had pushed the designer coffee table aside. In its place was a makeshift shrine. Three pillar candles flickered violently, casting erratic shadows over a framed photograph of Celeste Harvey.

Neil stood in front of it. He looked feral. His usually perfectly styled hair was matted with sweat, his eyes bloodshot and sunken. He was twenty-two, but in the flickering candlelight, he looked like a hollowed-out ghost.

"Where were you?" he snapped, his voice jagged.

I didn't take off my coat. "Out."

He crossed the hardwood floor in three long strides, stopping inches from me. The smell of stale whiskey and sour sweat radiated off his skin. "I’ve been calling you for hours, Tatum. But you don't care, do you? You never cared."

He was unraveling. The guilt was eating him alive, tearing through his carefully curated persona. Three months ago, Celeste had died in a mangled car wreck on Interstate 5. What his millions of followers didn't know—what Neil thought *I* didn't know—was that she hadn't just been his college friend. She had been his mistress. And she had been carrying his child.

I knew. I had held his hair back while he vomited whiskey into the toilet two weeks after the funeral, listening to him sob out the entire, pathetic truth to the bathroom tiles. He thought I hadn't heard. He thought he was safe.

"She was alone, Tatum," Neil hissed, his hands trembling as he pointed a finger at my chest. "She was driving in that storm because she was miserable. Because you were so cold to me, so controlling, that I had to vent to her. You drove her to it!"

The sheer audacity of his delusion settled over me like frost. He was trying to hand me the bloody knife. He couldn't carry the weight of his dead mistress and his unborn child, so he was trying to break my spine with it.

"Neil," I said, my voice deathly quiet. "Step back."

He didn’t. Instead, his face twisted into a grotesque mask of righteous agony. He grabbed my wrist, his fingers biting into my flesh with bruising force.

"Look at her!" he screamed, dragging me a step toward the shrine. "Look at what your selfishness did! Get on your knees, Tatum. Get on your knees right now and apologize to her!"

I looked at the photograph of Celeste. Her calculated, doe-eyed smile mocked me from beyond the grave. Then, I looked at the boy I had built. His jaw was clenched, a frantic, desperate need burning in his red-rimmed eyes. He needed me to take the blame. He needed me to kneel so he could stand.

My liver was failing. I had six months to live.

I wrenched my arm out of his grip with a violent jerk, stepping into his space until he was forced to look down into my eyes. I didn't yell. I didn't cry.

"I will never kneel for you again," I whispered.