Iris Webb POV
The basement apartment smells like mold and old carpet. There's one small window at street level where Iris can see people's feet as they walk by. Just feet. Shoes. The bottom half of a world she's no longer part of.
She sets down her suitcase. That's all she brought. One suitcase of clothes and her laptop. Everything else from her life before feels like it belongs to someone else.
Her father stands in the doorway looking like he wants to cry.
"Let me help you," he says. "Let me at least set up the bed. Your mother can come tomorrow and we can make this place feel like home."
Home. The word feels impossible.
"I need to be alone," Iris says quietly. "I need to figure things out without anyone watching."
Her father's jaw tightens. He doesn't understand. He wants to fix this. He wants to take her back to their house and surround her with family until the pain goes away. But the pain won't go away. It'll just find new places to hide.
"Iris, you're going through something that no one should go through alone."
She doesn't answer him because he's right and she can't handle being right about anything anymore. Being right was supposed to be her thing. Being smart. Being capable. Being the kind of woman that a billionaire would want forever.
Look where that got her.
Her father leaves money on the kitchen counter. Five thousand dollars. It sits there like an apology from someone who can't fix what's broken.
Two days later, Iris starts working at a diner called Mel's on the corner of her block. The manager is a woman named Patricia who has a cigarette permanently tucked behind her ear and doesn't recognize Iris from anywhere. That's the point.
Iris wears a name tag that says her name is just Iris, no last name. She serves coffee and eggs and burgers to people who don't care who she is. They don't know she went to Yale. They don't know she was a corporate strategist. They don't know she was supposed to be Mrs. Grant Sullivan.
She's just the quiet girl who refills their water and doesn't mess up their orders.
The money her father left lasts three weeks. By week four, she's living off tips. Mostly cash. Never enough. Always just enough to survive.
She wears the same black pants every day. Different shirts but the same pants. She washes them in the sink and hangs them to dry over the back of a chair. She wears her hair in a bun so she doesn't have to think about it. She puts on minimal makeup because she's trying to become invisible and invisible people don't wear lipstick.
Invisible people don't take up space.
At night, she scrolls through LinkedIn.
Sarah from her old company got promoted. The photo shows her at some fancy dinner with people Iris used to know. Nobody mentions Iris in the comments. Nobody asks where she went. They just congratulate Sarah and move on.
Marcus is now head of a new division at a startup. Iris recognizes some of the people in the photo from the wedding. People who saw her destroyed and just kept walking.
Her former team had a happy hour. There's a photo on Instagram. Twelve people smiling. Celebrating something. Having fun. Living their lives like Iris never existed.
She unfollows everyone.
It's easier to not exist than to watch everyone else continue existing without her.
Week six, she looks in the mirror and doesn't recognize the person staring back.
Her face is thinner. Her eyes are sunken. Her skin has gone gray in a way that has nothing to do with makeup. She looks like someone who's been erased. Like someone who's slowly disappearing from the world.
Some days that's exactly what she wants.
Week eight, her mother shows up at the diner.
She's wearing a dress that costs more than Iris makes in a month and she's looking around like she can't believe this is where her daughter works. Iris is serving a table in the corner. She sees her mother come in and her whole body goes rigid.
"Iris," her mother says. She's crying. "Sweetheart, you can't keep living like this. Come home. Come stay with us. We can get you help."
Help. Like she's broken. Like she's sick.
"I'm fine," Iris says quietly. "I'm fine here."
"You're not fine. You're disappearing. I can see it. Your father can see it. Everyone can see it."
But that's the thing. Nobody can see it because nobody's looking. Nobody cares. She's already been erased.
"Mom, I need to get back to work."
Her mother leaves looking defeated. She doesn't come back.
By month three, Iris has stopped checking LinkedIn. She's stopped scrolling through Instagram. She's stopped trying to stay connected to a world that's already moved on without her. There's no point. Nothing in that world wants her anymore.
The wedding dress is still in a box under her bed.
She hasn't looked at it since she threw it in the corner of that hotel room. She knows she should burn it. Throw it away. Stop letting it take up space in her life the way it's taking up space in her apartment.
But burning it would be accepting that the wedding actually happened. That all of it was real. That Grant actually stood up in front of eight hundred people and said her love wasn't good enough.
Better to just let it sit there. Let it rot. Let it become as invisible as everything else.
Week sixteen of her new life.
Iris wakes up and immediately runs to the bathroom.
Her stomach churns. Her body convulses. And before she can understand what's happening, she's throwing up into a toilet in a basement apartment in Queens that she rents for 800 dollars a month that she can barely afford.
She's sick for ten minutes. Then she sits on the tile floor trying to catch her breath.
She hasn't been sick since the hotel room. She's barely been eating. Working at a diner has actually made her eat less because she sees too much food and it makes her nauseated just thinking about it.
This is different. This feels worse.
She pulls herself up and splashes water on her face. She looks in the mirror at her hollow cheeks and her dull eyes and wonders if she's dying. If her body is finally giving up because her mind already did.
She calls in sick to the diner. Patricia tells her not to come back if she's contagious. Iris agrees. Everything about her is probably contagious anyway.
She lies in bed for the rest of the day. Her stomach feels tight. Wrong. Like something's shifted in a way she doesn't understand.
By evening, she throws up again.
And again.
By night, she's throwing up so much that there's nothing left in her stomach and she's just dry heaving into the toilet, her body desperate to get something out.
She's dying. She's pretty sure she's dying. Some part of her thinks that would be okay. At least it would be an ending. At least she wouldn't have to keep living like this.
Around midnight, she makes it back to bed.
She pulls her laptop toward her and types pregnancy symptoms into Google with hands that are shaking so hard she has to go back and fix the letters.
Morning sickness. Nausea. Sensitivity to smells.
The symptoms jump out at her.
No. No, that's not possible. She and Grant only slept together that one time before the wedding. Just once. The night after he proposed. And he used protection. She's sure he did. She remembers.
Or does she? The memories are foggy now. Everything from those last months before the wedding feels like it happened to someone else.
Her period. When was her last period?
She tries to count back and realizes she can't. She's been so focused on survival that she hasn't been paying attention to things like that. Her body has been a vehicle to get her to and from work. That's all. Nothing more.
She gets out of bed on shaking legs and goes to the corner store down the street. The same one where she bought the three pregnancy tests that changed everything. The same one where she felt her world end in a bathroom that smelled like other people's despair.
She buys four pregnancy tests this time.
Back in the apartment, she takes the first one with the same fear she felt four months ago when she discovered her life had already ended in ways she didn't know were possible.
Two lines.
Positive.
She takes the second one immediately. And the third. And the fourth.
All of them positive.
Iris sinks to the floor of her bathroom and realizes that the pain she's been feeling for four months wasn't the worst thing that could happen to her.
It was just the beginning.
Because now she's not just a woman whose fiancé destroyed her in public.
Now she's a pregnant woman. Alone. Broke. Invisible.
And she has no idea what to do next.