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 whatever belongs to you and get out of my house before I throw you onto the lawn myself," Chase Whitaker said coldly.
He stood in the marble foyer of the Highland Park estate I had helped him buy, his right hand still half-raised from striking me.
Ten feet behind him, his twenty-six-year-old publicist Brielle Sutton leaned casually against the curved mahogany staircase while wearing my favorite cream silk robe.
It was my robe, tied around her waist inside my house while she stood behind my husband.
At least, all three of them had belonged to me when I woke up at six o’clock that morning.
Freezing November rain hammered against the tall leaded windows of our foyer, turning the glass black and making the manicured gardens outside look drowned in the dark.
I touched two fingers to my mouth and tasted warm blood.
For one strange, suspended second, all my stunned brain could focus on was the crimson drop that fell onto the white cashmere collar of my sweater.
"Chase," I whispered, still struggling to comprehend the violence in the eyes of the man I had loved since my twenties.
His handsome, angular expression hardened into stone.
"Do not say my name like that, Vivian," he snapped.
Brielle folded her arms over the silk lapels of my robe and let out a soft, mocking sigh.
"I told you ten minutes ago that the second you confronted her, she would try to play the helpless victim," Brielle said.
I looked past my husband’s shoulder at her bare feet resting on the bottom step.
Her bright red toenail polish was chipped on her smallest left toe, a tiny and absurd detail for my mind to latch onto while my entire eight-year marriage was collapsing around my ears.
Perhaps the human mind reaches for small, ugly details when the truth in front of it is too massive to survive all at once.
Chase pointed a rigid finger toward the front oak doors.
"I saw the photographs this afternoon, Vivian, so do not insult my intelligence by lying," he barked.
"Photographs of what, Chase," I asked while keeping my hand pressed to my bleeding lip.
My stomach tightened into a cold knot as Brielle curled her painted lips into a slow smile.
Chase yanked his smartphone out of his trouser pocket, unlocked the screen, and shoved it six inches from my face.
On the glowing display was a high-resolution telephoto picture of me walking out of the DeSantis Logistics headquarters tower in downtown Chicago six weeks earlier at nearly midnight.
Walking beside me in the pouring rain was a tall, broad-shouldered man in a tailored charcoal overcoat, his strong hand resting lightly against my elbow to guide me around a set of steel construction barriers.
It was Matteo DeSantis.
A second photograph showed him holding open the passenger door of my sedan at the curb, and a third captured the two of us standing close beneath the limestone awning while the storm raged behind us.
From the deliberate angle of the camera lens across the street, the moment looked secret and intimate, even though it had been nothing of the sort.
I had gone to that downtown tower at ten o’clock at night because Chase’s professional racing team, Whitaker Motorsports, was three weeks away from losing its primary corporate sponsor and defaulting on its garage lease.
Officially, thirty-eight-year-old Matteo DeSantis was the billionaire chief executive of an empire spanning national freight logistics, heavy construction, luxury hospitality, and Chicago commercial real estate.
Unofficially, powerful men in Illinois lowered their voices to a whisper whenever the DeSantis family name was spoken at a dinner table, trading rumors of old dockside unions, vanished debts, and ruthless lessons delivered to anyone foolish enough to cross Matteo.
Matteo had listened to my sponsorship pitch for ninety minutes when every bank in Chicago had refused to take Chase’s calls, and when our meeting ended at midnight, he had walked me to my car simply because the subterranean garage elevator had broken down.
"That meeting was strictly business to save your racing season, Chase, and if you had just asked me where I was that night I would have shown you the pitch deck," I said evenly.
"He did ask you, sweetheart, and you told him you were working late with your accountant," Brielle laughed from the stairs before stepping down to rest her manicured hand possessively against Chase’s shoulder.
Watching the way Chase’s tense shoulders immediately relaxed beneath her familiar touch, something cold and quiet clicked into place inside my chest.
This ambush was never about those photographs downtown.
The photographs were merely the excuse Chase had been praying for so he wouldn’t have to feel like a monster for what he was already doing behind my back.
I glanced past the foyer archway toward the kitchen, where two half-empty red wineglasses sat beside the sink, an open bottle of bourbon rested on the island, and our silver-framed wedding portrait had already been stripped from the fireplace mantel.
"Have you been sleeping with her, Chase," I asked, my voice dropping into a dead calm.
"You do not get to interrogate me in my own house after sneaking around with a man like Matteo DeSantis," Chase scoffed, though he refused to meet my eyes.
"Yes, Vivian, we have been sleeping together for four months," Brielle answered for him, delivering the words with gentle, venomous satisfaction.
Four months ago, I had been packing Chase’s measured nutrition meals, scheduling his neurological physical therapy, and reviewing track telemetry until three in the morning while he prepared for his comeback season after the fiery crash that had nearly ended his life two years earlier.
I had slept in a vinyl chair beside his ICU bed for thirty-nine straight nights, sold my own late mother’s vintage coupe to pay for his private rehabilitation clinic, and recorded every single medical limitation and suspension adjustment in three leather-bound journals so he would never black out behind the wheel again.
When Chase tossed an unsigned manila divorce packet onto the marble floor at my feet and I reminded him that I was the only person in Chicago who had believed he could race again when his own sponsors left him for dead, his palm struck my face a second time and knocked my shoulder hard into the wall.
"Look what you made me do with your mouth, Vivian, always acting like you own my comeback," Chase breathed heavily, staring at his red knuckles before his brief flash of shame twisted right back into rage.
Those six words—look what you made me do—killed the last fragile ember of love in my heart that eight years of selfishness had failed to extinguish.
I pushed myself upright against the wallpaper, ignored the black garbage bag at my feet, picked up only my leather laptop satchel containing my three handwritten telemetry journals from the hall bench, and pulled open the heavy front door into the storm.
"You are going to beg me to let you back inside this door before midnight, Vivian," Chase shouted after me as I walked down the rain-swept stone steps.
May you like
He stopped shouting the instant the headlights of a massive, matte-black Maybach sedan idling at the end of our flooded driveway snapped on, illuminating a tall man in a charcoal overcoat standing beside the open rear door with an umbrella in one hand and a blue leather contract folder in the other.
Matteo DeSantis looked past me through the open foyer doorway at the blood dripping from my split lip onto my white collar, looked at Chase standing frozen in the light 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 at Chase’s gate.
