My Husband Cheated with an Influencer (She Gets Revenge #16)

Prologue

The pearls are cold against my collarbone.

My husband bought it for one. With my grandmother’s money.

My grandmother wore these pearls the night she told my grandfather she was pregnant.

Wore them to every anniversary dinner for forty-one years.

Left them to me in the same will that left me the cabin—the cabin with the dock and the birch trees and the water at dawn, flat and silver, before anyone else was awake.

We have to sell the cabin, Bridgette. The property taxes alone are eating us alive. The foundation needs work. I ran the numbers—it doesn’t make sense to hold onto it.

And I believed him. I sat at our kitchen table and looked at his spreadsheet and felt my throat close around the only place that still smelled like my grandmother’s perfume, and I believed him.

Because he’s my husband and he’s good with money and the numbers made sense and he held my hand and said for when we have kids and I signed the papers.

Four hundred and thirty thousand dollars. My grandmother’s dock. My grandmother’s birch trees. My grandmother’s morning water.

And he bought his mistress a four-hundred-and-ten-thousand-dollar luxury condo and spent another sixty-eight thousand renovating it with custom cabinetry and imported Italian tile and a marble kitchen where she films herself drinking coffee and thanks the universe for providing.

The cabin was too expensive to maintain. But a condo for his girlfriend? That he could afford. With my inheritance. Through a shell company with our home address on the filing, while he climbed into bed next to me every night and I never smelled her perfume because I was too busy trusting him.

The universe didn’t provide it. My dead grandmother did.

And the woman living in it—this content creator, this dreamer, this upstart who poses with coffee cups and calls herself living proof—she’s not some innocent bystander.

She’s fucking my husband for the lifestyle she wants, and she’s too stupid or too delusional to wonder where the money comes from.

If Randall can’t see what she is, that’s his problem.

If she thinks a man who steals from his own wife is a grand prize, she’s even dumber than her captions.

She thinks the universe provides? Fine. Tonight this wife takes it all back.

I loved him. That’s the part that makes my vision go red at the edges, because it would be easier if I hadn’t.

If he’d been cruel or distant or obviously rotten, I could file this under bad judgment and move on.

But he wasn’t. He drove twenty minutes out of his way to bring me my favorite meal.

He squeezed my hand across our kitchen counter and promised me Thursdays.

He kissed my forehead in the hallway and said don’t wait up and I closed my eyes because it felt like love, and the whole time—the whole time—he was running the numbers on how to take everything my grandmother left me and hand it to a woman who photographs her breakfast.

He didn’t fall into this. He built it. Step by step, dollar by dollar, lie by lie, while I straightened his tie every morning and never once saw what was underneath it.

I’m done. Two months of smiling across tables and swallowing lies and lying next to him in the dark while his hand found my hip like nothing was wrong.

Two months of performing a marriage he killed two years ago.

I am so far past done that the woman who planned rosemary chicken and candles for this man feels like a stranger I’d pity if I had the time.

Gail Chambers’s folder is in my bag. Every transaction. Every transfer. Every dollar from my grandmother’s cabin to his girlfriend’s marble countertops, documented and time-stamped. His career is in that folder. His reputation. His whole careful, smug, perfectly managed life.

Fourth floor. The hallway is quiet and her door is ajar.

I push the door open and I finally see Sienna up close. She’s smaller than her photos. Dark hair, silk robe, face clean and glowing—ready for him. Because this is routine. Because they have a whole life in here that runs on my grandmother’s money and my ignorance.

“Randall?” Her eyes land on me and her mouth opens in surprise. She has no idea the hell I’m going to rain on her life.

“No.” I touch the pearls at my throat. “His wife.”