TOWARD THE DISTANCE Chapter 16

Lily refused to leave quietly.

She planted her feet in the foyer and crossed her arms, her jaw set, her eyes blazing with the kind of fury that only comes when someone has been caught and cornered and has nothing left to lose.

"You can't just throw me out like this," she said, her voice shaking. "After everything —"

Cade didn't turn around. He was already walking back into the house, and he didn't stop.

"Cade! At least give me clothes! I can't go out like this —"

The security team arrived within minutes — two men in dark jackets, professional and silent. Lily thrashed against their grip, her bare feet slapping against the stone entryway.

"Cade! I'm leaving — I'm leaving right now — but at least give me something to wear!"

One of the guards looked back toward the house, uncertain. Cade's voice came from somewhere inside, calm and final:

"I don't want to hear anything about her again."

The iron gate closed behind Lily with a heavy, definitive clang.

She stood on the sidewalk, barefoot, wearing nothing but a thin slip of underwear, the cool air raising goosebumps across every inch of exposed skin. The neighborhood was quiet — expensive houses set back behind manicured hedges, the kind of street where nothing dramatic was supposed to happen.

But people noticed.

A woman walking her dog stopped and stared. A man washing his car in the driveway two houses down looked up and did a double take. A retired couple on their morning walk paused mid-stride.

"What on earth —"

"Is that girl okay? She's practically naked —"

"Did you hear what she said? She admitted it — she broke up someone's marriage —"

"Oh my God. She's just standing there. In the cold."

Lily heard all of it. Every whispered word, every horrified gasp. She felt the heat rush to her face — shame, humiliation, rage, all of it tangled together into something ugly and hot.

"Mind your own business," she snapped. "Or I'll call the police."

A neighbor who had just divorced her own cheating husband stepped forward, her expression tight with barely controlled fury. "You want to call the police? For what? For people seeing what you did?"

"I didn't do anything —"

"You just said it yourself. You broke up someone's marriage. We all heard you."

More people gathered. Word spread fast on this street — it always did. Within ten minutes, Lily was surrounded by a small, hostile crowd, most of them middle-aged women with decades of collective wisdom about exactly what kind of person stood barefoot on a sidewalk after being thrown out of a rich man's house.

Lily tried to disappear into the crowd — slipped between two women and started walking fast, her arms wrapped around herself. But a man she didn't recognize stumbled into her path, his eyes traveling over her in a way that made her skin crawl.

"Get away from me!" she shrieked, shoving him back. "Don't touch me!"

She ran. Down one street, then another, then into a narrow alley that dead-ended at a crumbling wall. She pressed her back against it, breathing hard, and listened.

Nothing. The footsteps had stopped. The crowd had moved on.

But she was lost. No phone. No wallet. No clothes. No idea where she was.

She wandered for hours — through empty streets, past shuttered shops, past a cluster of abandoned buildings that made her skin crawl. At one point, a stray dog found her and chased her for three blocks, barking so loudly she thought her heart would stop. She ducked into a side street to escape it, and by the time the barking faded, she had no idea which direction was home.

Lily finally stumbled back to her own apartment late that night — only after a concerned stranger spotted her shivering on a street corner and called the police, who drove her home.

The formal dismissal letter arrived at her door before she did.

Within a week, the video footage — taken by a dozen bystanders on their phones — spread across every social media platform in the country. Lily's face, her near-naked state, her own words screamed back at her in captions and comments.

Her reputation was destroyed overnight. Completely, permanently, and publicly.

Cade, for his part, didn't think about Lily again after that day. He sat alone in the living room until dawn, turning Elena's melted wedding ring over and over in his palm, and waited for someone to tell him where she had gone.

The call came the next morning.

"Mr. Harrington, we found a witness at the airport. Someone who says they saw your wife board a flight."