Encore for the Ex-Wife

Five years into my marriage with Adrian Vaughn, he brought his piano accompanist home.

He cornered me at the funeral home, just moments after my mother’s cremation, to tell me he wanted a divorce. The scent of wilting lilies and antiseptic hung in the air, a sickening cocktail.

“I connect with someone like Hailey,” he said, his voice devoid of the warmth I once cherished. “Someone with an artist’s soul. Being with you, Cora… it’s just dull.”

Grief was a physical weight, a stone in my chest. I could barely breathe, let alone process his words. Tears I thought I’d run out of pricked at my eyes again. “Can’t we talk about this another day?”

A cruel, dismissive smile touched his lips. “No. Today.”

I took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded, the fight draining out of me. “Fine.”

What he didn’t know was that “Aria,” the anonymous, masked pianist currently taking the classical music world by storm, was me. And that next month, my debut tour was scheduled to begin, where I would finally show my face.

Later, much later, Adrian would be laid up in a hospital bed after a car wreck, his arm in a plaster cast. He’d find me on the day of my wedding, his eyes wild with desperation, and cry, “Can’t it be another day?”

And I, echoing the ghost of his past cruelty, would look at him with a cold smile and say, “No. Today.”


1

Adrian was a pianist. It was the core of his identity. In the years we were married, his life was a blur of concert halls and international tours. Our home was little more than a place for him to store his things between flights.

A few weeks ago, he had a performance in our city. I didn’t tell him I was going; I bought a ticket online and slipped into a seat in the back, just wanting to feel close to him for a night. But as I was leaving the venue, I heard the familiar banter of his friends echoing from the green room.

“Damn, Adrian,” one of them crowed, “you’re really getting the full service from that accompanist of yours. Hailey’s what, twenty-two? You lucky bastard.”

A young woman’s voice, feigning modesty, followed. “Adrian is the brilliant one. I’m just happy to be near him…”

Before she could finish, Adrian’s voice, the voice I knew better than my own, cut in. “Alright, guys, lay off. Hailey’s sensitive. Don’t want to scare her away.”

The jeering continued. “Ooh, protective, are we? What about the ball and chain at home? Isn’t she going to lose her mind when she finds out?”

The air went still for a second. Then came Adrian’s cold, dismissive laugh.

“Why would you even bring her up? She’s the housekeeper’s daughter. Do you really think I don’t come home because I’m busy? The woman is a bore. Seeing her face is a chore. I’m ending it as soon as I get back.”

The world went flat and gray. I don’t remember walking home. I remember the buzzing in my ears, the way the streetlights smeared into meaningless streaks of light. Then, the phone rang. It was the hospital. My mother was gone.

I knew it was coming. The cancer had been relentless. But for both blows to land on the same day felt like a special kind of cosmic cruelty.

There was no time to process Adrian’s betrayal. I threw myself into the grim logistics of death, the endless paperwork and phone calls. The funeral was a blur of hushed condolences and sympathetic looks from people I barely knew.

I had just walked out of the chapel, clutching the small, heavy box of my mother’s ashes, when I saw him.

He wasn’t there for my mother. He was there for himself. And standing beside him, her hand clutching his arm, was the other woman.

Hailey. She looked at me with wide, supposedly innocent eyes, pressing herself into Adrian’s side as if I were a threat. He instinctively stepped forward, shielding her. The gesture was a gut punch, a perfect, painful mirror of a time long ago when he had shielded me from the snickering heirs and heiresses who called me the charity case, the girl from the wrong side of town.

Back then, I was the one he protected.

“Cora,” he started, his voice clipped and businesslike. “I brought Hailey here today because I wanted to be direct. We’re getting a divorce.”

He continued, his words like polished stones, smooth and hard. “We were young. I made a mistake. I’ve realized the kind of woman I need is someone who understands art, who is graceful, who understands me. You can’t offer any of that.” He softened his gaze, turning it to the girl beside him. “You came to my family’s house from nothing. You never learned an instrument, your whole personality is just… small. I admire someone with an artist’s soul, like Hailey. Being with you is just plain boring.”

The man I married, or the man I thought I’d married, was there in the gentle look he gave her. But it wasn’t for me. Not anymore.

My eyes, already raw from weeping, filled again. “Can’t we talk about this another day? Today is my mom’s…”

I thought he might, for her sake. My mother had practically raised him, had cooked his favorite meals and soothed his childhood fevers.

But he cut me off with that cold smile. “No. Today.”

A bitter taste filled my mouth. I forced it down, drew a breath that felt like swallowing glass, and met his gaze.

“Fine.”

2

My mother was the Vaughns’ housekeeper. To keep me close, she brought me with her to their sprawling house after school every day. I became a permanent fixture, Adrian’s shadow and his study partner. We were two halves of a whole, our lives intertwined in a way no one else could understand. When he told his parents he wanted to marry me, they weren’t thrilled, but they agreed. His mother, especially, had watched me grow up. She knew my character, even if my bank account was empty.

The Vaughns had been good to us. When my mother got sick, they paid for the best doctors, the most advanced treatments. They gave her a chance she never would have had otherwise.

Download the MotoNovel app, Search 【 242185 】reads the whole book.