Chapter 1 - The Slap in the Foyer
The last thing my husband gave me after eight years of marriage was a slap across the face hard enough to split my lower lip.
The second-to-last thing he gave me was a crumpled black plastic garbage bag.
"Take what is yours and get out of my house," Chase Whitaker said coldly.
He stood in the marble foyer of the Highland Park home I had helped him buy, one hand still half-raised from hitting me.
Behind him, his twenty-six-year-old publicist Brielle Sutton leaned against the curved mahogany staircase wearing my cream silk robe.
It was my robe, tied around her waist inside my house while she stood beside my husband.
At least, all three of them had belonged to me when I woke up at six o’clock that morning.
Cold November rain hammered against the tall windows of our foyer, turning the glass black and making the gardens outside look drowned in the dark.
I touched my fingers to my mouth and tasted warm blood.
For one strange second, all I could think about was the red stain it would leave on the white cashmere collar of my sweater.
"Chase," I whispered, staring at the man I had loved for nearly a decade.
His handsome expression hardened into stone.
"Do not say my name like that," he snapped.
Brielle crossed her arms over the silk lapels of my robe and let out a soft sigh.
"I told you she would try to play the victim," Brielle said.
I looked past my husband at her bare feet resting on the bottom stair.
Her bright red toenail polish was chipped on her smallest toe, a stupid detail to notice while my entire life was collapsing around me, yet my mind held onto it anyway.
Perhaps the human brain chooses small things when the big things are too painful to survive all at once.
Chase pointed a rigid finger toward the heavy oak front door.
"I saw the pictures this afternoon, Vivian," he barked.
"Pictures of what," I asked evenly.
My stomach tightened into a cold knot as Brielle smiled from the stairs.
Chase pulled his cell phone from his trouser pocket, unlocked the screen, and shoved it six inches from my face.
There I was on the glowing screen, walking out of the DeSantis Logistics building in downtown Chicago six weeks earlier at nearly midnight.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in a charcoal wool coat walked beside me in the pouring rain, his hand resting lightly at my elbow as we stepped around steel construction barriers.
It was Matteo DeSantis.
Another photograph showed him opening the passenger door of my sedan at the curb, and a third showed the two of us standing close beneath the limestone awning while the storm fell beyond us.
From the deliberate angle of the camera lens across the street, the moment looked intimate, even though it had been nothing of the sort.
I had gone to that downtown office tower because Chase’s professional racing company, Whitaker Motorsports, was three weeks away from losing its primary corporate sponsor and defaulting on its garage lease.
Matteo owned the massive national freight company I was trying to convince to save my husband’s season.
Everyone in Chicago lowered their voices when they spoke the name of thirty-eight-year-old Matteo DeSantis, trading whispered stories about old dockside unions, vanished debts, and ruthless lessons delivered to men foolish enough to cross his family.
All I knew was that Matteo had listened to my sponsorship presentation for ninety minutes, asked smarter questions than any executive I had ever met, and walked me to my car at midnight because the parking garage elevator was broken.
"That meeting was strictly business to save your racing team, and you could have just asked me about it," I said.
"I did ask you, and I am not stupid," Chase scoffed as Brielle stepped down the stairs and rested her manicured hand on his shoulder.
Watching the way Chase immediately relaxed beneath her touch, something inside me finally understood what I had been refusing to see for months.
This ambush was not about the photographs at all, because the photographs were simply the permission Chase needed to justify what he was already doing behind my back.
I glanced toward the kitchen, where two half-empty wineglasses sat beside the sink, an open bottle of bourbon rested on the counter, and our silver wedding photograph had been removed from the fireplace mantel.
"Are you sleeping with her, Chase," I asked quietly.
"Yes, we have been together for four months," Brielle answered for him, her voice entering the quiet room with gentle satisfaction.
Four months ago, I had been packing Chase’s nutrition meals, scheduling his physical therapy, and recording every medical limitation and technical adjustment in three handwritten journals so he could make his comeback after the fiery crash that had nearly ended his career two years earlier.
When Chase tossed an unsigned manila envelope of divorce papers onto the floor and I reminded him that I had slept in a hospital chair beside his bed for thirty-nine nights and sold my own car to pay for his recovery when nobody else believed he could race again, his palm struck my face a second time and knocked my shoulder hard into the wall.
"Look what you made me do," Chase breathed heavily, his brief flash of shock twisting instantly into anger.
Those six words killed the last fragile piece of love inside me that eight years of disappointment had not destroyed.
I pushed myself upright against the wall, left his black garbage bag untouched on the marble floor, picked up only my leather satchel containing my three handwritten telemetry journals, and pulled open the front door into the storm.
May you like
As I walked down the rain-swept stone steps, the headlights of a matte-black Maybach idling at the end of our driveway blazed on, illuminating Matteo DeSantis standing beside the open rear door with an umbrella in one hand and a blue leather folder in the other.
Matteo looked past me at the blood dripping from my split lip, looked up at Chase standing frozen in the doorway with Brielle in my robe behind him, and without saying a single word, Matteo tore the twelve-million-dollar Whitaker Motorsports sponsorship contract cleanly in half and dropped the pieces into the flooded gutter.
