I Forgave My Cheating Savior Once

Start Reading

Id lost the round of Truth or Dare, and my friend, perfectly on cue, leaned in with a glint in her eye.

Out of all the years youve been with Holden, she asked, her voice carrying over the low hum of the lounge, what was the exact moment that made your heart skip the hardest?

I knew exactly what she was doing. I offered a serene, practiced smile.

"When we broke up a few years ago," I said, my voice steady, "and he realized he couldn't live without me just because some other girl threw herself at him. When he came crawling back, begging for a second chance."

The room erupted into a chorus of overly enthusiastic awws and raised glasses. But my eyes were fixed on the girl sitting in the far corner of the velvet booth. Her face was flushed with humiliation, her eyes red-rimmed, sticking out like a raw, bleeding thumb.

A surge of cold satisfaction washed over me. I held her gaze straight on, deliberately leaning my body closer to Holden.

He stiffened. But he let me pull him in, even wrapping his arms around my waist to complete the picture.

It was too much for her. Unable to bear it a second longer, she grabbed her purse and fled the room, the heavy door slamming shut behind her.

As soon as she was gone, Holden leaned down, his lips brushing my ear.

"Daphne," he whispered, his tone laced with gentle reprimand. "Don't you think that was taking it a bit too far?"

I froze. Slowly, I pulled back, putting an inch of cool air between us, and really looked at him.

He was wearing a bespoke charcoal suit I had meticulously picked out for him. The navy silk tie resting against his throat was the one I had knotted myself before we left the apartment. Every single detail of him aligned perfectly with my aesthetic.

But I hated the words coming out of his mouth.

It felt like looking at a masterpiece I had spent years curating, only to notice a jagged, ugly crack running right down the center. A flicker of profound regret passed through my eyes. I was annoyed, and when I'm annoyed, the filter comes off.

"Was it taking it further than when you were fucking Jocelyn?"

Holden choked on his next breath. The sheer shock paralyzing his handsome features was almost boring to look at. I glanced around the table. The music was still playing, but the silence among our friends was deafening. They were exchanging wide-eyed, terrified looks.

I let out a soft, airy laugh and picked up the deck of cards from the table.

"Come on, keep playing. Whose turn was it?"

I was a good host; I knew how to warm up a dead room. Following my lead, they awkwardly picked up the pieces of the conversation, tossing out jokes until the tension thinned. We were here to have a good time. If Jocelyn hadn't crashed the party just to be an eyesore, I wouldn't have ruined the vibe.

A while later, when the game was in full swing, I looked over my shoulder. Holden was gone.

When he finally reappeared at the entrance of the VIP room, the guy who had brought Jocelyn as his plus-one was trailing behind him like a kicked dog. I couldn't hear what the guy was sayinghe was nodding and bowing in apologybut Holdens brow was deeply furrowed in blatant irritation.

After dismissing the guy, Holden kept checking his watch. The second the hour hand hit ten, his voice cut through the noise.

"Daphne. It's time to go home."

I looked down at the cards in my hand, feeling a fleeting sense of disappointment, but I nodded anyway. "Alright. Let's go."

Everyone in our circle knew I had a fragile constitution; I wasn't built for late nights, and Holden was notoriously strict about my curfew. No one tried to stop us.

Just before I walked out the door, I caught Maeves eyethe friend who had asked the question. I gave her a subtle wink and mouthed, Thank you.

Maeve gave me a tiny, knowing salute. She had lobbed that question perfectly to help me vent. If Jocelyn hadn't been so desperate as to show up where she didn't belong, I wouldn't have gone out of my way to humiliate her.

After all, I had a massive heart. I had even forgiven my cheating fianc.

The drive home was suffocatingly silent.

When we walked through our front door, Holden didn't kneel to help me off with my heels like he usually did. Instead, his face dark as a storm front, he headed straight for his study.

It took me a second to realize he was actually furious.

"Are you mad? Why?" I tilted my head, genuinely baffled. "Just because I made Jocelyn a little uncomfortable?"

Holden stopped dead in his tracks. He didn't turn around. "You didn't have to target her like that. I really don't have any contact with her anymore."

"No contact? Then how did she magically track us down tonight?" I dropped onto the sofa, kicking my feet up onto the coffee table, arguing just for the sake of it.

Holden whipped around, his eyes locking onto mine. For several agonizing seconds, he just stared at me. Then, he closed his eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath.

When he opened them again, his gaze was resolute. "Daphne, when I say I'm not in contact with her, I mean I will never initiate contact with her again. The guy who brought her tonight was a connection I gave her back in the day. I promise you, she will never appear in front of you again."

I almost laughed.

Six months ago, when I caught him in bed with Jocelyn, he had sworn the exact same thing.

"Saying things like that... it doesn't just humiliate her, Daphne. It hurts you, too." Holden softened his approach. He walked over to the sofa, dropping to one knee beside me, his voice melting into that warm, tender register I used to love. "Don't say things like that anymore."

I looked down at him, the silence stretching between us. I reached out, my fingertips lightly tracing the line of his jaw. "But it was the truth."

That momentwhen he had come back to me, desperate and devotedhad been his get-out-of-jail-free card. It was the only reason I had allowed him back into my life after the ultimate betrayal.

Holden hadn't expected me to say that. He looked utterly lost.

I pulled my hand back, a sudden wave of profound apathy washing over me.

Holden left for work early the next morning.

As if she had set a timer the moment his car pulled out of the driveway, Jocelyn started texting me. I ignored her.

But she was waiting for me outside my art gallery.

"I need to talk to you," she said, blocking the glass doors. "Unless you want this perfect, curated life you've built to come crashing down..."

I didn't even know I was supposedly curating a "perfect life." I had some time before my first appointment, and a morbid curiosity to hear whatever delusional script she had prepared, so I didn't tell her to screw off.

I regretted it almost immediately. It was entirely pointless garbage.

"Do you have any idea how much funding and resources Holden has been funneling to me behind your back?" Jocelyn asked, her chin tilted up in triumph, finally catching my attention.

"Every single one of my academic proposalswhether they have merit or notgets pushed through without a hitch. I know hes pulling the strings."

Seeing my expression shift, Jocelyn grew bolder. "I'm about to get tenure. Once I reach a status where I can actually stand as an equal beside Holden, youll have no choice but to bow out."

In the second half of her speech, I actually detected a note of condescending pity.

"I suggest you do the smart thing and leave him on your own terms. Don't wait until he dumps you. You don't want the illusion of your happy life to shatter. Save yourself the embarrassment."

Looking at her beaming, unearned confidence, I let out a soft laugh. My voice was eerily calm.

"I don't know if I'll be embarrassed in the future. But I can absolutely ensure you're embarrassed right now. Care to test that theory?"

Jocelyn rolled her eyes. "You're just a painter. What could you possibly do to make me"

"I kept the photos of you and Holden in bed," I interrupted, my tone conversational.

Jocelyns face drained of all color. "You said you deleted them!"

"Did Holden tell you that? I did delete them. But deleting a copy is technically deleting it, isn't it?" I tapped my chin, pretending to be deep in thought. "I wonder... if those photos ended up on the university's faculty forum, would that affect your tenure review?"

...

Watching her stumble away in a panicked frenzy didn't bring me any joy. I looked down at my hands resting in my lap; I had clenched my fists so tightly that crescent moon-shaped cuts were bleeding into my palms.

Using cold logic to smother my fury, I pulled up the faculty roster for her university.

If she wanted to bring the war to my doorstep, she had to pay the toll. She might be shameless, but I wasn't morally bankrupt enough to post revenge porn on a public forum and subject innocent people to that filth.

Instead, I casually zipped the folder of photos and emailed them directly to Nadine, Jocelyns fiercest competitor for the tenure track position. I didn't need to lift another finger. Her rival would gladly bury her.

My fleetingly good mood died the second I walked through my front door that evening.

I stood in the entryway. From the living room, I could hear Holden on the phone. Jocelyn was sobbing through the speaker.

Holden was silent for a long time. Finally, he spoke, his voice a soothing balm.

"Jocelyn, Ill take care of this. I told you I'd protect your career. I will always be your safety net."

What a breathtakingly charming thing to say.

I didn't wait for him to hang up. I couldn't help myself. I started clapping.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

Holden whipped around. The sound of my applause echoed through the room, bleeding right through the phone for Jocelyn to hear.

I didn't have to wonder. I knew exactly how pathetic I looked.

Leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over my chest, I watched Holden. It took him only a fraction of a second to compose himself.

"When did you get home?" he asked, abruptly ending the call. His voice was devastatingly normal.

I tilted my head, pretending to think. "'Holden, it's all Daphne's fault, what are we going to do?'right about then."

Just mimicking her whining tone sent a physical shiver down my spine.

Holden's expression didn't so much as twitch. He walked over to the shoe cabinet, pulled out my house slippers, and knelt on the floor in front of me.

"Put your shoes on first. The floor is cold."

I rested my hand lightly on his shoulder to steady myself and slipped my feet into the slippers.

A few minutes later, I was sitting on the sofa, taking tiny sips of the warm water he had poured for me. Holden was in the kitchen, bustling around, preparing dinner.

This used to be the sight that brought me the most profound peace. Now, it just made me bone-tired.

I set the glass down and walked to the kitchen threshold. "So. Is this what 'no contact' looks like?"

Holden went rigid. The knife hovered over the cutting board.

"You've been secretly feeding her resources, keeping a direct line wide open." I couldn't suppress a dry, hollow laugh. "'I will always be your safety net.' Truly, a touching sentiment."

I stared fiercely at his back. The emotions violently thrashing against my ribcage felt like they were going to tear me apart from the inside.

After a suffocating standoff, Holden finally moved. He turned around, his eyes brimming with earnest desperation.

"She was with me for a while, Daphne. I can't just leave her to drown. But I swear to you, I will never do anything to betray you again."

Looking at him, I felt a toxic wave of irony wash over me. His promises were cheaper than dirt.

Like a bucket of ice water to the face, clarity finally struck me. My mind flashed back to the day he had shown up at my door, bags in hand, begging to get back together.

Three years ago, like so many ordinary couples, the distance had broken us. It wasn't a lack of love; it was just the grinding friction of life eroding what we had.

But shortly after we split, my parents were killed in a head-on collision.

The grief shattered my psychological floor. On a completely unremarkable Tuesday, I had planned to end my life.

But Holden showed up.

After Jocelyn had confessed her feelings to him, he realized I was the only one he wanted. So, he abandoned his perfectly stable, successful life in his hometown and moved across the country to my city, starting over from scratch.

He showed me through his actions that there was still one person in this world who would fiercely, unconditionally choose me. He sat in the waiting room during my therapy sessions. He whispered into my hair, night after night, promising he would never leave me.

But six months ago, right as we were planning our wedding, I found him naked in our bed with Jocelyn.

And now, he was telling me he would always be her safety net.

How long, exactly, was his forever?

Perhaps the absolute devastation on my face broke through his defenses. Holden dropped the knife, wiped his hands, and closed the distance between us.

Holden had these incredible, expressive eyes. When he looked at you, it was so easy to drown in them.

I reached up and gently covered his eyes with my hand.

"One story last night. A completely different story tonight," I whispered. "Holden, which lie am I supposed to believe?"

He let me cover his eyes. His lips parted, but he couldn't form a single syllable of defense.

He was the one giving another woman the ammunition to humiliate me. And here I was, still trying to put a fresh coat of paint over a rotting house. All because he had once run to me when I was dying.

But gratitude has an expiration date, and today, mine had finally run out.

I pulled my hand away. Blinking against the sudden light, Holden looked disoriented. A second later, panic flared in his chest, and he reached out to grab my arm.

I stepped back, dodging his touch.

His hand hung in the dead air between us.

I turned my back to him. "Just make dinner," I said quietly.

Once we finished this final supper, I was done.

Over the next few days, Holden was frantic, using every connection he had to salvage Jocelyns imploding career. He was so distracted he completely missed the fact that I had sold the art gallery my parents left me.

I planned to take the money and relocate to my parents' hometowna small, rainy island in the Pacific Northwest.

To keep it off Holden's radar, I only told a few close friends about the sale. The day after the paperwork was signed, Maeve showed up at my apartment.

"Are you seriously retiring to be a full-time housewife?" Maeve asked, leaning against the counter. "You're not even going to keep the gallery running?"

She sighed, her tone shifting into something maternal and urgent. "Listen to me. Holden is practically parading Jocelyn around town right now. You need to keep a safety net for yourself."

I frowned, genuinely confused. "Who said anything about me getting married?"

Maeves brow furrowed. "Holden did. I was in the private room next to theirs last night. He took Jocelyn out to dinner with the dean of her faculty."

A cold laugh bubbled in my throat. Brilliant. To kill the rumors about Jocelyn sleeping with a taken man, he simply fabricated an impending wedding for himself.

"Stop being foolish, Daphne," Maeve pleaded. "Holden is not worth destroying your life over."

We weren't best friends, and she was stepping over a boundary, but looking into her worried eyes, a genuine warmth spread through my chest.

"Don't worry," I said softly. "I'm never marrying him."

When I got home that night, Holden was slumped on the living room sofa.

My heart seized. In the corner of the room, several large, packed suitcases were sitting in plain sight.

But seeing him leaning his head back, eyes closed in utter exhaustion, I quietly let out a breath.

"Everything okay?" I asked.

Holden opened his eyes. They were bloodshot. His voice was a raspy whisper. "You're doing the seasonal closet swap again? Sorry, baby. I've been so swamped, I haven't had time to help you."

Right. Jocelyn's mess was proving difficult. Holden had power, but the university had its own politics. It was the perfect time to throw a little gasoline on the fire.

"Daphne? Daph?"

I snapped out of my thoughts. "Hmm?"

"Why don't you leave the boxes for a few days? I'll help you organize when things quiet down."

I rejected the offer instantly. I was praying he wouldn't have a free second to spare. Thank God for my well-documented, neurotic habit of overhauling my entire wardrobe every time the seasons changed.

For the next few days, Holden left before sunrise and came back after midnight.

It gave me the perfect window to log onto his home computer and dig up the hard evidence of Jocelyn's academic fraud.

On my final day in the city, I shipped my suitcases via overnight freight, then headed to a caf to meet Nadine.

A moral failing might be swept under the rug by an influential man, but plagiarized data? Fabricated peer reviews? Let's see Holden try to bury that.

After handing Nadine the flash drive, I walked out.

As I passed a high-end hotel lobby, a familiar voice drifted from one of the private alcoves. I stopped. Through the partially open sliding door, I saw a man's wrist resting on the table. The custom watch facean engraving of my first award-winning paintingcaught the light.

Then, an older man's voice drifted into the hallway. "Look, why make this so complicated? If you and little Jocelyn just announce you're officially together, this whole scandal disappears."

Jocelyn, tucked perfectly into Holdens side, flushed a deep, beautiful red. They looked like a Renaissance painting of young, tragic lovers.

I glanced at my phone. I was going to miss my flight.

Whatever answer Holden gave them, I didn't care to stick around to hear it.

The mountains are high and the rivers are long. May we never cross paths again.

By the time the tiny puddle-jumper landed near Orcas Island, the sky had bruised into a deep, stormy purple.

I found myself wondering, just for a second, if Holden had realized I was gone yet.

Probably not. He probably took the older man's advice, reignited the flame with Jocelyn, and they were currently tangled up in hotel sheets, entirely dead to the world.

The fact that my breakup text still read Delivered and not Read only solidified my theory.

It never occurred to me that Holdens phone had simply died.

When Holden walked into the apartment, it was suffocatingly quiet. He pulled his phone from his pocketthe screen was black. Dead.

He walked into the master bedroom. Daphne wasn't there. He didn't think much of it. Lately, she had taken to sleeping in the guest room. He assumed his erratic hours and the smell of whiskey and stress clinging to him were disturbing her peace.

After a scalding shower, driven by a gnawing, nameless anxiety in his gut, Holden stood outside the guest room door. He raised his hand to knock, but smelling the faint trace of alcohol that the soap hadn't washed away, he hesitated.

Daphne had been so cold to him these past few days.

He knew she was punishing him for running himself ragged over Jocelyn's mess. But Jocelyn had carried the weight of his darkest impulses when he had nothing left to give, and he couldn't just watch her drown.

The timeline he had given Daphne wasn't the truth. Jocelyn had been in his life long before he confessed to it.

Back then, Daphne was drowning in clinical depression. Holden was trying to build a corporate empire from the ground up while simultaneously keeping the woman he loved from jumping off a balcony. A man made of iron would have broken under that pressure. He needed a release valve.

And Jocelyn had simply offered herself up.

Even now, Holden couldn't rationalize it. There were a million ways to vent stress, but his mind had short-circuited, and he had taken Jocelyn to bed.

What was done was done. Agonizing over it now was pointless.

Holden let out a breath so faint it wouldn't have disturbed a feather. He was terrified of waking Daphne, terrified of dragging them back to the apocalyptic screaming matches of six months ago.

So he let her hide from him.

Even now, he just stood outside her door in the dark, silent and bowed, like a sinner at an empty altar.

He didn't know how long he stood there before the sharp creak of a floorboard from inside the room startled him. Panicking like a teenager caught out after curfew, he scrambled back to the master bedroom, completely forgetting his dead phone sitting on the coffee table.

He stared at the ceiling all night. Just as the sky outside the window began to turn a bruised gray, sleep finally started to pull him under.

Then, the frantic buzzing of the doorbell shattered the quiet.

Holden threw on a shirt, grabbed his phone, and plugged it into the kitchen wall. Massaging his throbbing temples, he walked to the door.

The video monitor showed Jocelyn's tear-stained face. It was like a shot of adrenaline straight to Holden's heart. He ripped the door open and stepped out, physically blocking her from seeing inside the apartment.

"What are you doing here? Why are you here? Who told you where I live?"

Faced with the machine-gun fire of his anger, Jocelyns bottom lip trembled. "Holden..."

Whatever she was about to say was cut off as Holden grabbed her elbow and practically shoved her down the hallway toward the elevators.

After finally getting rid of her, Holden slipped back inside the apartment. He crept to the guest room door and pressed his ear against the wood. Silence.

His racing heart finally slowed.

Any trace of sleep was gone now. He went to the kitchen, unplugged his phone, and walked into his study to start the day's emails.

As the screen booted up, a flood of notifications battered the screen.

But Holden only saw one. A single text from Daphne, sent yesterday afternoon.

[Holden, we're done.]