1 On our fifth wedding anniversary, I suddenly developed a bizarre ability. I could see exactly how many times people had slept together. I looked just above Tristan’s head. A dense, hovering cluster of crimson threads floated in the air. One thread equaled one time. My face flushed hot as I carefully counted them. Ninety-nine threads. They were all one-way, pointing exclusively to me. I was sitting in a local cafe waiting for my best friend, planning to tell her all about this crazy hallucination. But my phone suddenly vibrated, blowing up with a barrage of texts. “Who are you out with? A guy or a girl?” “Why did you wear sandals out of the house?” … “It’s been five minutes. Why aren’t you replying?” “Hello?” Blair leaned over the table, catching a glimpse of the screen. She scoffed, her face twisting with indignation. “It’s been five years, Rose. He literally dictates what you wear on your feet. How do you put up with this?” “If you ask me, you should just divorce him and stay with me.” She stared at me with big, pleading eyes. Out of pure habit, I immediately defended Tristan. “You love controlling me just as much. When I got married, you literally held a pair of scissors to your own throat, crying and begging me not to leave you.” “Besides, I can actually see it now. His heart and his body belong entirely to me.” Before I could even finish my sentence, a single, glowing red thread suddenly sprouted from the top of Blair’s head. Blair, who claimed to have never dated anyone in her life. I froze. I followed the glowing line across the room. It connected straight to Tristan, who was walking through the cafe doors with a dark, stormy expression on his face. … I rubbed my eyes hard, convinced I was losing my mind. But no matter how many times I blinked, that brilliant red line remained suspended in the air, firmly connecting Blair and Tristan. “Why didn’t you check in with me?” Tristan’s cold voice snapped me back to reality. He knelt right in front of me, taking off my sandals and replacing them with a pair of enclosed leather flats he had brought with him. “The reception is bad in here. The video I took of the cafe wouldn’t send.” The explanation spilled out of my mouth as a pure conditioned reflex. Tristan accepted the excuse with a slight nod and sat down next to me. He draped his arm over the back of my chair and pulled me firmly against his side, marking his territory. Blair rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to stick to her like glue, why don’t you just shrink her down and keep her in your pocket?” Tristan didn’t argue. He just raised an eyebrow and smoothly grabbed the latte sitting in front of me. He took one sip and frowned. “Didn’t I tell you to cut out sugar?” Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed a shot of plain espresso from the side and dumped it straight into my cup. “Are you blind? Rose has a massive sweet tooth.” Blair fired back, instantly grabbing a sugar packet and dumping the whole thing into the mug. “She can’t have sugar.” “Yes she can!” They went back and forth, entirely ignoring my presence, never once asking what I actually wanted to drink. They were always fighting over me. It applied to everything. From screening the friends I was allowed to make, all the way down to picking my major in college. They orchestrated my entire life. But this time, I noticed something sickeningly different. They were arguing loudly. But under the table, the tip of Blair’s foot was sliding smoothly up Tristan’s inner thigh. And Tristan, while gripping my hand tightly with his left hand, was using his right hand to catch her ankle, gently caressing her skin. A sudden, dizzying wave of nausea hit me. Before that ruined cup of coffee could spill over the rim, I abruptly stood up and grabbed my bag. They were too busy arguing, faces flushed, to even notice me walking out the door. I went straight home, locked myself in the bathroom, and splashed freezing water on my face. The woman staring back at me in the mirror looked deathly pale. When Tristan finally came home, I watched them from the second-story window. Just an hour ago, they looked ready to rip each other’s throats out at the cafe. Yet here they were, pulling into the driveway in the exact same car. As Blair stepped out of the passenger side, her legs seemingly gave out. Tristan caught her effortlessly, sweeping her up into a bridal carry. Blair had bought the house right across the street from ours just to be closer to me. When they walked up the steps and saw me standing perfectly still in the doorway, they both froze. Tristan recovered instantly. “It’s getting dark. I couldn’t let a woman walk home alone, so I just gave her a ride.” Blair pouted, her eyes wide and innocent. “Rose, why did you run off so fast? You didn’t even wait for me.” “Tomorrow is your birthday. Let me plan the whole day for you, okay?” I quietly stared at the second, brand-new red thread that had just materialized above their heads. I offered a soft smile. “Okay.” Tristan quickly swatted Blair’s hands away from me. “Alright, that’s enough. Rose needs to rest.” “You’re just terrified I’m going to steal her away from you, aren’t you?” Blair glared at him playfully. Tristan simply shut our front door right in her face. He picked me up, carried me to the living room sofa, and wrapped his arms around me. He pressed soft kisses to my ankles. He had always possessed this strange, obsessive quirk. Whenever he wanted to be affectionate, he loved playing with my feet. Normally, I would lean into his touch. But then I smelled it. The faint, undeniable scent of freesia on his collar. It was incredibly familiar. It was the exact matching perfume Blair and I had bought together. But I wasn’t wearing any perfume today. It could only belong to Blair. My stomach violently churned. I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm, “Tristan, what do you actually think of Blair?” His answer was the same rehearsed line he had used for years. “I wish you would cut her off. She consumes way too much of your time. You belong solely to me.” Blair had told me the exact same thing about him. Yet these two people, who supposedly fought tooth and nail over me, had secretly pushed me out of the picture to sleep together. I shoved Tristan off my lap and flicked off the living room light. “I’m tired.” It was the very first time I had ever rejected Tristan. Unsurprisingly, it ignited his temper. For the first time in five years, he didn’t wake me up to demand a kiss before leaving for the office. But he still laid out my clothes and breakfast just like a strict schedule. The exact same oatmeal and eggs I had eaten every single day for a week. He claimed it was a nutritionist-approved diet. He said it was good for me. But I was absolutely sick of it. The clothes were a long, ankle-length dress. I didn’t want to wear a dress today. I pulled open my closet, only to find that every single piece of clothing had a neat little label pinned to the hanger, dictating exactly which day of the month I was allowed to wear it. It wasn’t just my clothes. Every breath I took was strictly controlled. It had been this way since the day Tristan became my financial sponsor. I grew up in the foster system. I had nothing. Initially, I didn’t hate Tristan’s possessiveness. On the contrary, it gave a terrified, abandoned girl a desperate sense of security. But his control slowly derailed into madness. At first, he just made me a daily schedule. Then, he demanded real-time location tracking. Every month, he would confiscate my phone, auditing my text messages and every single social media account. He quietly blocked and deleted every single male contact on my list. When it was time to pick my college major, he logged into the portal behind my back and changed my applications. “Going to school out East is too far. Just go to the local state college. Being a nurse is a nice, quiet job for a girl.” With grades high enough for the Ivy League, I was forced into a mediocre local program. Once I started college, his paranoia only amplified. I would be sitting in the middle of a lecture hall when my phone would ring. “Go back to your dorm and change. That pink sweater is too bright. It attracts too much attention.” I had snapped my head around, staring wildly at the crowded lecture hall. I was terrified. I was suffocating. I couldn’t tell which of the students or professors was secretly on Tristan’s payroll, watching my every move. People used to whisper about us, calling Tristan a control freak. They couldn’t understand why I stayed with him. But Tristan was my only light in the dark. Back when I was starving, working three jobs just to afford textbooks, he was the one who pulled me out of the gutter. Yes, he monitored me, but when I caught a bad flu during midterms, he abandoned a multi-million-dollar tech deal overseas. He flew eight hours straight just to get to my dorm. When campus security wouldn’t let him in past curfew, he stood out in the freezing rain from midnight until dawn, just to hand me a bag of medicine and check my temperature. A ringing phone yanked me out of my memories. “Rose, Mr. Tristan is throwing a huge birthday gala for you tonight, but his phone is going straight to voicemail.” “Is he with you? Can you ask him what flavor the cake should be? And does he want the dress to be silk or heavy embroidery?” It was my birthday. They were my friends on the planning committee. Yet their first instinct was to bypass me entirely and ask for Tristan’s approval. I told them Tristan was at the office, but the girl on the phone begged me to go find him, terrified to make a decision without his green light. I finally gave in. I put on the pre-selected dress and took a cab to his corporate headquarters. The receptionist blocked my path in the lobby. “I’m sorry, you can’t go up without an appointment.” I had been locked in my house for so long, I had practically severed all ties with the outside world. I hadn’t worked a single day since I got pregnant the first time. At the hospital where I worked, there was an unspoken, toxic rule that nurses had to schedule their pregnancies to avoid staffing shortages. Tristan deliberately poked a hole in the condom. The moment the test came back positive, he secretly called the hospital board and reported my pregnancy. I was immediately fired. I still remember the look on the face of the girl competing against me for the Head Nurse promotion. She smiled so hard her cheeks almost split. “I really thought you had me beat, Rose. I didn’t realize you were such an angel, getting knocked up just to hand me the promotion.” I frowned at the receptionist. “How do I make an appointment?” “You need to clear it with his executive secretary, Blair.” Blair? Since when did Blair become Tristan’s secretary? Right at that moment, Tristan’s personal driver walked through the lobby doors. He looked shocked to see me. “Mrs. Rose? What are you doing here?” He shot a glare at the receptionist. “This is the CEO’s wife. Are you blind?” The receptionist instantly turned a sickly shade of gray. She panicked, stepping in front of the elevator banks, desperately trying to block my path. “But Mr. Tristan is in the middle of something highly confidential right now!” My eyes turned freezing cold. I shoved her aside. I marched into the elevator, hit the button for the top floor, and navigated the sleek hallways straight to the CEO’s suite. Just as my hand touched the brass handle, I heard Tristan’s voice bleeding through the heavy wood. “Are you trying to kill me?” “I wish you were dead. That way, Rose would only have me.” The receptionist hadn’t been fast enough to warn them. I slammed the heavy door open. The two figures on the leather sofa jumped violently, instantly freezing in place. Tristan panicked, frantically pulling his dress shirt over his chest. “Rose, it’s not what it looks like!” Blair, however, took her sweet time. She didn’t even bother covering her bare chest as she strolled right up to me. “See? Men are all pigs.” “Rose, leave him. He doesn’t deserve you.” “Isn’t having me enough for you?” She looked back at Tristan with a sickeningly triumphant, competitive smirk. I looked up at the space above their heads. A third red thread had materialized. “So, this is the birthday present you guys prepared for me.” Tristan’s voice was physically shaking. “Rose, this was just a stupid mistake.” “When did this start?” I cut him off completely. “Was it that time I came back from my business trip down South, and I was completely wasted?” “Or was it May 8th? The day I lost my baby.” I accurately pinpointed the dates based on the sudden shifts in their behavior. “Neither of you is drunk today, but here we are.” Tristan fell dead silent. Blair, however, furrowed her brows in deep annoyance. “Rose, are you seriously going to ruin our friendship over some stupid guy?” “Just like how you deliberately pushed me toward that abusive foster family when we were kids, just so you could keep Tristan all to yourself later?” Blair and I grew up in the same group home. We met when we were three. We were inseparable, two halves of the same soul. But when we were kids, a wealthy couple came to adopt. They only wanted one girl. The night before the meeting, I swallowed a bucket of crushed ice and sat in a freezing bathtub for hours. When the prospective parents saw me shivering and sickly, they thought I was a burden. I did it on purpose. I made sure they picked Blair. But nobody knew the husband of that family was a violent, abusive monster. When Blair finally ran away and found her way back to the group home, her tiny body was covered in black and purple bruises. Because of that, I had carried a crushing, unbearable guilt my entire life. It dictated everything I did. Even in high school. Blair had cornered my new best friend in the locker room, stripped off her clothes, and poured bleach all over her belongings to humiliate her. When I found them, Blair fell into my arms, sobbing hysterically. “I was just so jealous! Why does she get to hang out with you? I’m supposed to be your only best friend!” I protected her. I took the fall for the bullying. I was completely ostracized by the entire school. People wrote “psycho bitch” in sharpie on my locker. Nobody dared to come near me. And just like she wanted, Blair became the only friend I had left. And all this time, she believed I had manipulated that adoption so I could get sponsored by a billionaire, while I spent those years working three grueling shifts a day just to keep a roof over my head. “I let you have Tristan back then. Honestly, I didn’t care, because you’re my best friend.” “If I can sacrifice that much for you, why can’t you do the same for me?” Tristan joined the interrogation, stepping closer. “Rose, who are you going to choose?” I stared at the two of them. The two most important people in my entire world. The same two people who had systematically isolated me, destroyed my social life, and stripped away my independence until I had literally no one else to choose. A suffocating wave of grief hit my chest. I tilted my head back, trying to stop the tears, but they spilled over my cheeks anyway. Seeing me cry sent them both into an instant panic. “Rose, please don’t cry! It breaks my heart when you cry!” “I swear to God, from now on, I am entirely yours. I messed up.” They stood in front of me, swearing on their lives that it would never happen again. Right in front of me, they deleted each other’s contact information. Blair even handed in her resignation on the spot. They promised me the world. But as the days went on, I watched a new red thread appear above Tristan’s head every single day. The threads stretched across the street, leading directly into the house across from ours. Until May 8th rolled around again. On that day, the glowing red threads between Tristan and Blair officially outnumbered the ones pointing to me. Blair kicked our front door open, waving an ultrasound picture in the air, screaming at the top of her lungs. “I’m pregnant!” My foot froze mid-step in the hallway. Then, I heard Blair drop her voice into an annoyed whisper. “This is all your fault. If you hadn’t messed with the pills, Rose’s baby would have been born, and my kid and her kid could have been best friends just like us.” Tristan snapped back. “Rose was completely obsessed with that baby. I couldn’t just stand there and watch her heart be divided.” “Besides, you’re the one who crushed the abortion pill and dropped it into her water glass. I just handed the cup to her.” Blair suddenly remembered, letting out a bright, airy laugh. “Oh, right! Rose only needs me anyway. A kid just gets in the way.” “Exactly. She has us. That’s all she needs.” They spoke with such casual, horrifying entitlement. It hit me like a bullet to the chest. It wasn’t my weak body that had failed my baby. They murdered my child. For weeks after the miscarriage, I walked around like a ghost. I spent nights curled up on the bathroom floor, clutching the tiny, blood-stained clothes I had bought, completely broken. They had held me while I cried. They had acted even more devastated than I was. It was all a sick, twisted performance. I leaned heavily against the hallway wall, trying to keep my legs from collapsing. My fingernails dug into the drywall, leaving bloody crescent marks. My heart felt like a sponge soaked in acid. With one tight squeeze, all the bitter rot poured out. When Blair finally walked into the living room and shoved the ultrasound into my hands, she was vibrating with excitement. “Rose, I’m carrying Tristan’s baby! You’re going to be a godmother!” “But don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you in public.” “I’ll just hire some random guy to play the dad. No one will ever know the baby actually belongs to your husband.” Tristan didn’t say a word. He just stared down at the ultrasound picture, a look of absolute fascination and pride on his face. They were so completely drowned in their sick joy that neither of them noticed the dead, hollow look in my eyes. Blair moved fast. A few weeks later, she paraded a man into my living room. The poor guy looked blissfully happy. I just felt a deep, overwhelming pity for him. He was rubbing Blair’s swollen belly, genuinely believing he was the father. “Rose, you’re going to get me an amazing gift for the wedding, right?” I forced the corners of my mouth to twitch upward. “Of course.” I had prepared her gift the exact second I realized they were my baby’s murderers. On the day of the wedding, Tristan looked happier than the actual groom. His wedding gift was an absurdly expensive collection of imported baby gear from France. When it was my turn, Blair looked at me with glowing anticipation. I just stared at the dense, horrific web of red threads floating above their heads. There were three new threads today alone. Over three hundred more than when this all started. I looked at Tristan with dead eyes. “Do you have any idea how many times you two have slept together?” On the other side of the room, Blair had eagerly ripped the wrapping paper off my gift box. When she pulled the contents out, the entire ballroom gasped in collective, horrified silence.
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