His Mistress Filmed While My Fiancé Killed Me

The yacht was white and enormous, docked at the edge of the Hamptons marina like something that didn't belong to the sea at all, more like a hotel that had wandered off and gotten lost near the water. I stood on the gangway and looked at the Atlantic stretching out past the breakwater, gray-blue and endless, and my knees went soft.

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum. Underneath the diamond necklace Jett had given me, underneath the cold stones, I could feel the small hard shape of the whistle. My father's whistle. I always wore it close, hidden, like a secret that kept me alive.

"There she is." Jett's arm came around my waist from behind, pulling me in like he was fitting a piece into a display case. He didn't ask if I was okay. He never asked. "Smile, baby. People are watching."

I smiled. I always smiled.

The upper deck was already loud by the time the sun started sinking gold over the water. There were champagne towers stacked in careful pyramids, a DJ spinning something with too much bass, and Jett's friends — Trevor Wade and the rest of them — laughing too hard at things that weren't funny, all of them angling for a look from Jett like sunflowers turning toward the same light.

I found a spot near the railing, as far from the open water as I could get while still looking like I belonged. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I hummed, so quiet only I could hear it, the little tune my father used to sing when he tucked me in. It was the only thing that ever slowed my heart down.

"Oh my god, hi guys!" Blair Kelley's voice cut through the music, bright and practiced. She had her phone up, filming, narrating her own life like it was a nature documentary. "We are on the most insane yacht right now, okay, look at this sunset—" She swung the camera and it landed on me. I felt it before I saw it, the little red light. "And there's Saige, looking real thrilled to be here." She laughed, light and easy, the kind of laugh designed to make cruelty sound like a joke. "Someone's not having fun."

I didn't say anything. What was there to say.

Blair drifted toward Jett like she always did, like gravity, one hand landing on his forearm, her mouth close to his ear. I watched her whisper something and watched him laugh, head tipped back, easy and warm in a way he never was with me anymore.

"She never seems fun at these things," Blair said, louder now, loud enough for the little cluster of people around them to hear. She glanced at me over the rim of her glass, smile sweet as poison. "Is she, like, ride-or-die? Or just... ride-along?"

A few people laughed. Jett laughed loudest.

I pressed my hand harder against my chest and hummed. No one noticed. No one ever noticed.

"You know what," Jett said, and I felt the shift in him, felt him puff up under the attention like a balloon filling with air, "my fiancée would do anything for me. Wouldn't you, baby?"

I looked at him. "Jett—"

"No, no, hold on." He held up a hand, silencing me the way he silenced waiters, the way he silenced everyone. He climbed up onto the low bench along the railing, swaying slightly, champagne sloshing in his glass. "Everybody. Everybody, listen. I want to talk about loyalty."

A few people whooped. Trevor lifted his phone.

"Love," Jett announced, "means sacrifice. Real love. Not the fake stuff." He unclasped his watch — the Patek Philippe, the one he'd shown off for weeks, custom-made, worth more than most people's houses — and held it up so it caught the dying orange light. "This watch cost more than some of your apartments." Laughter. "And I'm about to prove a point."

"Jett, what are you—"

He threw it. Just like that. An easy, careless arc over the railing, glinting once in the sunset, and then gone, swallowed by the black water without so much as a splash I could see from where I stood.

The deck went quiet.

He turned to me, and his smile didn't reach his eyes. It never reached his eyes. "Go get it."

The world tilted. I looked past him at the water, the churning dark water sliding against the hull, and I wasn't on a yacht anymore. I was eight years old on a muddy riverbank, watching my father's back disappear under a current that didn't care how much I loved him, feeling the whistle pressed hot into my palm, hearing his voice — *hold onto this for me, sweetheart* — and then nothing. Just water. Just silence. Just the whole rest of my life stretching out empty in front of me.

My breath wouldn't come. My legs wouldn't move. I opened my mouth and nothing came out, not a word, not a sound, nothing.

Blair raised her phone a little higher, angling for a better shot.

And I stood there, frozen, humming a tune only I could hear, waiting for the water to take something else from me.