Chapter 6: The Confession

Marcus found Isabelle in his study when he returned from dinner, sitting in his leather chair with the antique phone charging on his desk beside her. The sight stopped him cold in the doorway—his wife had never entered this room uninvited, had always respected the boundaries of his professional space.

But the woman looking at him now didn't seem concerned with boundaries.

"How was dinner with the Hendersons?" she asked, her voice perfectly conversational. "Did you close the Riverside deal?"

Marcus loosened his tie, his eyes fixed on the phone. "The Hendersons canceled. I ate alone downtown." The lie came automatically, practiced from years of small deceptions. "Isabelle, what are you doing in here?"

"Waiting for you." She gestured to the phone. "We need to talk about Sarah."

The blood drained from Marcus's face. For a moment, he looked older than his forty-eight years, the confident facade cracking to reveal something raw and afraid underneath.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Isabelle laughed, a sound without humor. "Even now? Even caught red-handed, you're going to lie to me?" She picked up the phone, its screen lighting up to show the photo of him and Sarah at Navy Pier. "This is over, Marcus. The lies, the gaslighting, the pretending I'm crazy for suspecting what I could feel in my bones. It's over."

Marcus stepped into the room, closing the door behind him with deliberate care. When he turned back to face her, his expression had shifted from shock to calculation—the look he wore during difficult negotiations.

"Where did you get that phone?"

"Does it matter? You kept it, Marcus. Three years after your affair ended, you kept every photo, every message, every piece of evidence. Why?"

He moved to the window, staring out at their manicured garden where motion-sensor lights cast everything in stark shadows. "It's not what you think."

"It's exactly what I think. You had an affair with Sarah Chen for eight months. You told her you were going to leave me. You made promises you never intended to keep, and when she called your bluff, you chose your assets over your heart."

"Isabelle—"

"I'm not finished." Her voice cut through his attempted interruption like a blade. "For three years, I've been receiving gifts from someone who knew about your secret. Someone who wanted me to discover the truth. And instead of coming clean, instead of showing me even a shred of respect, you let me think I was losing my mind."

Marcus turned from the window, his hands spread in a gesture that might have been pleading or surrender. "The gifts... they started after Sarah left. I thought maybe she was trying to cause trouble, get revenge for how things ended."

"But you knew they weren't from Sarah."

"I... suspected they weren't. Sarah isn't vindictive. She's not the type to—"

"To what? To expose a lying, cheating husband to his wife? To make sure I knew what kind of man I was married to?" Isabelle stood, the phone still clutched in her hand. "Tell me about the promises, Marcus. Tell me what you whispered to her by the fountain in Millennium Park."

His composure finally cracked completely. Marcus sank into the chair across from his desk, his head in his hands. "How could you possibly know about that?"

"Because someone wants me to know. Someone who cares more about my right to the truth than my right to blissful ignorance." She moved around the desk, standing over him. "The promises, Marcus. What did you tell her?"

When he looked up, his eyes were red-rimmed, his perfect facade finally crumbling. "I told her I loved her. I told her I'd never felt anything like what I felt with her. I told her..." His voice broke. "I told her I was going to divorce you and we'd start fresh somewhere new."

The words hit Isabelle like physical blows, each confession confirming what she'd already known but somehow making it more real, more devastating. "And did you mean it?"

"Yes." The admission came out as a whisper. "God help me, in that moment, I meant every word."

"What changed?"

Marcus was quiet for so long she thought he might not answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was hollow. "The numbers. My accountant ran the projections for a divorce settlement. With the prenup voided by adultery, you'd get half of everything. The business, the properties, the investments. Sarah was asking me to give up everything I'd built for thirty years."

"So you chose the money."

"I chose survival. I chose the life I'd worked for, the empire I'd built from nothing." He looked up at her, and she saw something she'd never seen before in his eyes: genuine remorse. "I thought I could have both. I thought I could find a way to keep you happy while finding someone else to make me feel alive."

"And Sarah?"

"Sarah saw through me. She knew I was never going to leave you, not really. She took the job in Portland and disappeared. I tried to contact her, tried to explain, but she'd blocked me everywhere." His laugh was bitter. "She had more integrity in her little finger than I had in my whole body."

Isabelle felt something cold settle in her chest. Not just the betrayal—she'd suspected that for years. But the casual cruelty of his plan, the arrogant assumption that he could manage both women like assets in his portfolio.

"How many others?"

"What?"

"How many other Sarahs have there been? How many other women have you promised to leave me for?"

Marcus's silence stretched long enough to be an answer.

"Jesus Christ." Isabelle sank into the chair opposite him. "Our entire marriage has been a lie."

"No." He leaned forward, desperation creeping into his voice. "The first ten years were real. I loved you, Isabelle. I married you because I wanted to build a life with you."

"And then?"

"And then success changed me. The business grew, the money grew, and I started believing I deserved more. That I was entitled to more." He ran his hands through his silver hair. "Sarah wasn't the first. She was just the first one who mattered enough to make me consider actually leaving."

The confession hung between them like a toxic cloud. Isabelle stared at her husband—this stranger who wore Marcus's face and spoke with Marcus's voice but had just revealed himself to be someone she'd never really known.

"The others," she said quietly. "How many?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

Marcus closed his eyes. "Five. Maybe six. Never at the same time, never for very long. Just... distractions. Ways to feel young and powerful and desired."

"While I was home playing the perfect wife. While I was hosting dinner parties for your clients and smiling for photographers at charity galas and pretending our marriage was something to envy."

"Isabelle, I'm sorry. I know that doesn't mean anything now, but I am genuinely, deeply sorry. I never wanted you to find out. I never wanted to hurt you."

She laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "You never wanted to get caught. There's a difference."

"What are you going to do?"

The question she'd been dreading and anticipating in equal measure. Isabelle looked around the study—at the expensive art, the leather-bound books, the symbols of success that Marcus had chosen over love, over honesty, over her.

"I'm going to divorce you," she said simply. "I'm going to take half of everything, just like you were so afraid I would. And I'm going to make sure everyone in Chicago knows exactly what kind of man you really are."

Marcus's face went white. "Isabelle, please. Think about what you're saying. Think about our life together, everything we've built—"

"Everything you built on lies. Everything you were willing to throw away for a woman who was smart enough to see through you." She stood, the phone still in her hand. "I'm keeping this. Evidence for the divorce proceedings."

"The prenup—"

"Is void due to adultery, as you well know. Your own accountant told you that three years ago." She moved toward the door, then paused. "Oh, and Marcus? I know you're wondering who's been sending the gifts. Who Elle really is."

He looked up at her with desperate hope, as if understanding his tormentor might somehow save him.

"She's not Sarah," Isabelle continued. "Sarah was too classy to engage in psychological warfare. Elle is someone else entirely. Someone who wanted me to know the truth badly enough to spend six years orchestrating my education." She smiled, cold and satisfied. "Someone who understood that the perfect revenge isn't destroying a man's life—it's letting him destroy it himself."

She left him sitting in his study, surrounded by the trappings of the success he'd chosen over everything else. As she climbed the stairs to their bedroom—her bedroom, now—Isabelle felt something she hadn't experienced in years.

Freedom.

Tomorrow, she would call the best divorce attorney in Chicago. She would begin the process of dismantling the life they'd built together, of claiming her share of the empire Marcus had valued more than their marriage.

But tonight, she would sleep alone in their bed for the last time, and dream of white lilies blooming in gardens she'd never seen.

The ghost who called herself Elle had given her the greatest gift of all: the truth that set her free.