Chapter 1
SMILE!
“Tell your husband he saved my marriage.”
The woman grabs both my hands when she says it. Squeezes hard. Her mascara is holding on by sheer determination, and she’s looking at me like I’m a saint by association. Like being married to Reid makes me holy, too.
“I will,” I say. “He’ll be so thrilled to hear that.”
The woman beams. She pulls me into a hug I didn’t agree to but can’t refuse, and over her shoulder I catch our reflection in the lobby mirror—her clutching me, me with my arms half-raised, my smile perfect and automatic and completely disconnected from anything happening inside my body.
My cheeks ache. Four hours of smiling will do that.
I used to ice my face after these events, back when Reid’s second book hit the Times list and suddenly there were launch parties and galas and a publicist who called me “the secret weapon.” Now I don’t bother.
The soreness just lives in my face like a roommate I’ve stopped asking to leave.
The woman finally lets go. “Fifteen years,” she says, shaking her head. “Fifteen years and you two still look at each other like that. It gives me hope.”
“That’s so sweet,” I say. And I think: Like what? What do you think you’re seeing when you look at us? Can’t you see past the artifice?
Reid’s hand finds my lower back. Right on cue. He’s been working the other side of the room, but his radar is flawless—the second a fan engages me, he materializes. His fingers press into the fabric of my dress, firm enough to steer, gentle enough to look tender.
“This is my better half,” he says. “Nadia is the reason any of this works. I’m just the guy who writes it down.”
He winks at the woman. She laughs. I laugh too. We’ve done this exact exchange—word for word—at hundreds of events.
The woman drifts away glowing, and Reid drops his hand from my back.
“The Post reviewer is by the bar,” he says. Not to me, exactly. More like a status update directed at the air near my ear. “I’m going to go close that.” Then he’s gone, cutting through the crowd, and I’m standing alone with a champagne glass and the phantom pressure of his fingers on my spine.
Reid’s fifth book—Love Is a Practice—is stacked on a table near the entrance. Our photo on the back. Both of us smiling. The photographer got that shot in three takes.
I find a quiet spot near a column and slip my left heel off for three seconds of relief. A waiter passes and I swap my empty glass for a full one. Thirty seconds where nobody needs me to be Reid’s wife. I take them.
When I married Reid, he was a therapist with a small practice and a big idea for a book.
I was twenty-six, and I thought we’d have a nice life—dinner parties, maybe a book tour, the kind of quiet success that lets you sleep in on Saturdays.
I didn’t picture this. Five books, millions of livestream viewers, a banner in this lobby that says THE MAN WHO SAVES MARRIAGES in letters taller than me.
I didn’t sign up to be a brand asset. I signed up to be a wife.
I signed up to be a wife with her own career, not become an appendage to Reid’s career.
But the brand grew, and I grew into it, and now I’m forty-one, three champagnes deep at a party for a book about love, and I can’t remember the last conversation my husband and I had that wasn’t logistics.
I certainly don’t remember the last time he told me he loved me, unless it was in front of people he wanted to impress.
When’s the next taping. What I should wear to the Summit.
Whether the updated head shots look warm enough.
“Nadia!” A couple I half-recognize from a previous event waves me over. I slide my heel back on and cross the room. More smiles. My cheeks scream.
“You two are such an inspiration,” the wife says.
“Oh, stop,” I say, waving my hand.
“No, really. I told Mark—I said, that’s the kind of marriage I want. That’s the real deal.”
Mark nods earnestly. I thank them. I do not say: You’re looking at a woman who ate dinner alone four nights this week. I do not say: Some nights I sit in the bathtub and try to remember the last time he touched me when there wasn’t a photographer in the room.
I say: “We’re so lucky. Fifteen years and counting.”
Mark and his wife beam. I beam back. My jaw pops quietly on the left side, the way it does when I’ve been clenching without noticing.
Reid’s across the room, mid-conversation with a network executive. The executive turns to grab a drink from a passing tray, and Reid’s expression drops. Fast. Not into sadness—into nothing. The warmth just switches off. His face goes flat, his eyes drift to his phone. One second. Two.
The executive turns back. Reid’s smile fires up again. Instant. Seamless. Like a light on a motion sensor.
Nobody sees it but me. That used to feel special—like I had access to the real him. Now I’m not sure the unguarded version is a person. I think it might just be a blank space where a person used to be.
I finish my champagne. The party’s thinning out.
That’s when a woman approaches me near the coat check.
She’s mid-forties, blonde, pretty in a deliberate way—hair blown out, makeup precise. She’s holding a copy of the book against her chest like armor.
“Mrs.—“ She stops. Swallows. “Nadia. I’m sorry, is it okay if I call you Nadia?”
“Of course.” I shift my weight. My feet are past pain and into numbness, which is almost a relief.
“I just wanted to tell you—“ Her voice catches. She presses her lips together, steadies herself. “Your husband changed my life. I was in his practice for six months and he...” A pause. A visible edit, something swallowed mid-sentence. “He really helped me.”
There’s a fracture in that pause. A tiny gap between what she meant to say and what she actually said.
Her eyes are doing something I can’t read—grateful and something else.
Something that looks like it hurts. I’m acutely aware that she’s looking at me like she’s expecting me to understand something that I am clueless about.
“I’m so glad,” I say. Automatic. Warm. “That means the world to him.”
She nods. Too quickly. Then she reaches out and squeezes my arm. Not the way the hand-grabber did earlier—not grateful. Almost... apologetic. Like she’s sorry about something she won’t say.
“You’re very lucky,” she says softly.
Then she walks away. Fast. Doesn’t stop at the book table, doesn’t look for Reid. She pushes through the glass doors and disappears into the night, and I’m standing there with an empty glass and a feeling lodged in my throat like a fish bone.
I don’t know what just happened.
But my body does. Something in my chest tightens—a fist closing around nothing. I file her away. The pause. The edit. The almost-apology.
A splinter slides under my skin. Small. Sharp. I can’t reach it yet.
The car ride home is fifteen minutes of Reid scrolling his phone.
I drive because I always drive after events—he needs both thumbs free for email. The city slides past the windows, and I’m replaying the woman’s face. The pause. The way she touched my arm like she owed me something.
“There was a woman tonight,” I say, keeping my eyes on the road. “Near the end. She said she’d been in your practice. Got pretty emotional.”
Reid doesn’t look up. “They always do. Which one?”
“Blonde. Mid-forties. Green dress.”
His thumb stops scrolling. Half a second. Then it resumes.
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he says. “I see a lot of patients, Nadia.”
He says my name like he’s correcting me for a mistake I made. I take the exit toward home and let the silence fill the car.
The garage door opens and swallows us. Inside, the house is immaculate and the kitchen smells like the candle I left burning—something woodsy and expensive that I bought because the house needed to smell like something since it stopped smelling like home.
Reid drops his keys on the counter. Loosens his tie. I pour a glass of water because I’ve had enough champagne and I’m trying not to be the woman who keeps drinking alone after parties. Not tonight. Some nights I am that woman. Tonight I have a fish bone in my throat that won’t dissolve.
“The party went well,” I say, leaning against the island. “Janet said pre-orders are already—”
“Mmhm.”
He’s six feet away. Might as well be six miles. The warmth is off and underneath is just... nothing. The same blank I saw at the party when the executive turned away.
“Reid.”
“What.” Not a question. A complaint.
“I’m talking to you.”
He sighs. Not dramatic—tired. Which is worse. Drama is engagement. Tiredness is dismissal. He sets his phone on the counter, and I can see the effort it costs him, the micro-resentment of being asked to be present in his own kitchen with his own wife.
“I’m listening,” he says. He isn’t.
“You’ve barely looked at me since we got in the car.”
“Nadia.” There it is again. The period. “I’ve been ‘on’ for four hours.
Four hours of being touched and thanked and photographed and asked the same questions by people who think they know me because they read the jacket copy.
” He pulls the tie free and drops it on the counter.
“I don’t have the energy to perform for you too. ”
The word hits the tile floor and just lies there.
Perform.
I stare at him. He’s already picking up his phone again. He said it and kept moving, like it was nothing—a fact, not a grenade.
“Perform,” I repeat.
“What?”
“You said perform. You just told me that talking to your wife is a performance.”
He blinks. For one second I see it register—the shape of what he said, the weight of it. Then his jaw sets, and he does what Reid always does when he’s caught. He reframes.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it. I meant I’m drained. I gave everything I had tonight and I don’t have anything left. That’s not about you.”
“It’s literally about me. You just said you don’t have the energy to perform for me. Like I’m another fan at the party. Like being in this kitchen is the same as being on that stage.”
“You’re twisting my words.”
“I’m repeating your words.”
His nostrils flare. He picks up his tie from the counter, folds it once—a controlled, precise gesture that’s more threatening than slamming a fist. Reid doesn’t explode. Reid compresses.
“I’m not doing this tonight,” he says. Flat. Final. “I have a production meeting at seven. The Summit is in three weeks and I need to sleep.”
He walks past me. Not close enough to touch. Not far enough to be dramatic. Just exactly the distance that says you are furniture to me right now.
His footsteps on the stairs. The bedroom door clicking shut. Not a slam—a click. A slam is passion. A click is annoyed disinterest.
I stand in the kitchen holding my water glass with both hands. The candle throws shadows across the granite.
Perform.
I set the glass down. It hits the counter too hard and a crack races up the side—a hairline fracture, the water already beginning to weep through. I watch it bleed onto the granite and I don’t clean it up.
I think about calling someone. My sister.
My old roommate Peggy. A therapist. But what do I say?
My husband is the most famous marriage counselor in the country and our marriage is just a very expensive production?
Reid would never agree to see someone—he is the someone.
Admitting we need help would be admitting the brand is a lie, and the brand pays for this house, this kitchen, these countertops I’m leaning on while his cracked glass bleeds water between my fingers.
So I stay. I adjust. I tell myself this is what long marriages feel like.
I turn off the kitchen light. The woman from the party floats through my head—the pause, the apology in her touch, the way she couldn’t finish her sentence.
And the word perform is still on the kitchen floor where he dropped it, and something about hearing it in his voice, in this house, after fifteen years of learning exactly how wide to smile—something has shifted.
The splinter isn’t under my skin anymore.
It’s pointed inward. And it’s starting to dig.