Chapter 3
THE UGLY TRUTH
Caleb is already in a booth when I arrive at the diner.
He stands up when he sees me, and it strikes me that Reid hasn’t done that in years.
A small thing. The kind of thing you stop noticing until someone else does it and the absence retroactively fills in like a bruise developing hours after the hit.
“Thanks for coming,” I say, sliding into the seat across from him.
“Nadia, you said private and not the studio.” He glances around—two old men at the counter, a mom wrestling a toddler into a booster seat. Nobody from Reid’s orbit. “That’s not a casual coffee invitation. What’s going on?”
I open my mouth. Close it. My phone is in my hand—screenshots of the folder loaded and ready—but my thumb won’t move toward the screen.
Because here’s the thing about trust when your life has just detonated: you don’t know who’s holding a fire extinguisher and who’s holding a match.
Caleb has worked for Reid for years. The man pays his salary, built his career in broadcast production.
If I show him what’s on this phone and he walks straight to Reid’s office tomorrow morning—
“Nadia?”
“I need to ask you something first.” My voice comes out thinner than I want. “And I need you to be honest with me. Not professional-honest. Not polite-honest. Honest honest.”
He sets his coffee down. Gives me his full attention, and there’s nothing rehearsed about it—no tilt of the head, no practiced empathy. He’s just looking at me. Waiting.
“Ask me,” he says.
“If I tell you something about Reid—something bad—are you going to go to him?”
The question changes the air between us. I watch his face for the calculation—the mental math of loyalty, employment, self-preservation. His expression doesn’t shift. Doesn’t flicker. Whatever he’s about to say, it came without effort.
“No,” he says. “I’m not.”
“You work for him.”
“I work on the show. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Nadia.” He leans forward, forearms on the table.
“I’ve spent four years watching that man from the other side of a camera.
The version with the lights on and the version with the lights off—they’re two different people.
And you’re the one holding it all together while he treats you like an accessory.
” A pause. “Whatever you’re about to tell me—I’m here for you. Not him.”
My fingers are trembling around the phone. I can feel my heartbeat in my wrists. The waitress drifts by and refills his coffee without asking, and the normalcy of it—the sloshing carafe, the here you go hon—almost makes me laugh. Or cry. The distance between the two has gotten very small.
“Okay,” I say. And I unlock the phone.
I turn it toward him and slide it across the table. He picks it up. Scrolls.
The first few photos are the ones from the hidden folder—women, semi-nude, posed on the cognac Chesterfield from Reid’s practice.
The couch I picked out. He scrolls past those with his jaw going tighter and tighter.
Then he reaches the one that made me put my fist through a sofa cushion last night at two in the morning.
A woman, kneeling between a man’s legs. You can’t see the man’s face.
But you can see his trousers—navy wool, single pleat, the custom pair I picked up from Reid’s tailor in October because he needed something camera-ready for the fall press tour.
I ironed those pants. I hung them in his closet.
“These are from his office,” Caleb says. His voice is flat. Controlled. “That’s the couch from his practice.”
“I know. I picked it out.”
He sets the phone face-down on the table and looks at me. His mouth is a hard line. Whatever’s behind his eyes, it isn’t surprise.
“He sent me to his computer to find a book proposal,” I say. “The search pulled up a hidden directory. Dozens of photos. Different women, going back years.”
Caleb is quiet long enough that the toddler at the next table shrieks, and neither of us flinches.
“Nadia, there’s something you need to know about his office setup.
” His voice has recalibrated—lower, more precise.
“Reid records all his sessions. Audio. Every patient signs a consent form—he tells them it’s for clinical review and liability protection.
I helped him configure the system four years ago.
The recordings are stored on a server connected to his home office computer. ”
The words hit me in sequence, each one a stair down into something darker.
“The same computer where I found the photos,” I say.
“Same machine. Different directory. Password-protected, but—” A grim, thin smile. “He never changed the default. I set it up as Admin1234 because it was temporary, told him three times to update it. As far as I know, he never bothered.”
“If he was sleeping with these women in his office—”
“Then the audio captured everything.”
The diner noise keeps going—silverware, the cook calling an order, normal Tuesday-morning sounds happening around a conversation that is rearranging my entire life. I stare at him. The coffee in front of me is going cold. I haven’t touched it.
“Reid is out tonight,” I say. “A speaking engagement. He’ll be gone until at least eleven.”
Caleb pulls a napkin from the dispenser. His handwriting is neat, small—the directory path on one line, the password below it. He slides it across the table.
“Call me when you’re at the computer,” he says. “I’ll walk you through the server.”
I fold the napkin and put it in my jacket pocket. Thin paper, almost weightless, for something that might contain the end of everything.
“Tonight,” I say.
Reid’s home office. Door locked. Seven-fifteen. He kissed my cheek on the way out an hour ago—dry, automatic—and told me not to wait up. I smiled. Said good luck. Watched his taillights disappear like a woman who isn’t about to crack open his server.
Caleb picks up on the first ring.
The napkin is beside the keyboard. I type the directory path, enter the password—Admin1234, capital A—and a directory opens. Files organized by date. Dozens of them. No names, just timestamps stretching back months.
“Pick one,” Caleb says. “Anywhere.”
Three months ago. A random file. I click, and audio fills the room through the laptop speakers.
Reid’s voice. The warm one—the podcast voice, the keynote voice, the one two million people tune in to hear every week.
He’s doing a session—I can hear a woman talking, halting, tearful.
Her husband. Trust. The usual wreckage people bring to Reid’s chair.
Reid responds with that perfect cadence, the rhythmic empathy he’s built a career on, and for a minute it’s just therapy. A man doing his job.
Then the session shifts.
His tone changes—drops lower, goes softer, loses the clinical edges.
Her voice changes too. The tears stop. There’s a murmur I can’t make out, and then a long silence that isn’t silence at all.
Movement. Breathing. A gasp that has nothing to do with sadness.
And then my husband’s voice, stripped of every professional pretense, saying things I haven’t heard him say in years.
He’s never talked to me like that—low, hungry, present in a way he hasn’t been present in our bedroom since before I can remember.
The audio keeps going. I don’t need a visual.
I can hear moaning—hers, then his. The creak of leather.
Skin against skin. My husband’s breath coming hard and fast through the laptop speakers while I sit in his chair in his office in the house I made into a home for him.
The man who tells women how to save their marriages, fucking one of them on the couch I sourced from a showroom in SoHo because he wanted something that said trustworthy.
“Nadia?” Caleb’s voice through the phone. “What are you hearing?”
“Enough,” I say.
I close the file. Open another. Different date, different woman, same trajectory.
Therapy to tears to the shift—that unmistakable drop in his voice, the moment Reid the Therapist steps offstage and Reid the Man steps on.
Every recording follows the pattern like sheet music.
Same key, same tempo, different instrument.
I open a file from five months ago. The woman’s voice stops me cold.
I know it. I heard it three feet from me at the book party, cracking on the word helped while she gripped my arm like she owed me a debt she couldn’t name.
The blonde in the green dress, the one with the apology in her eyes and the sentence she couldn’t finish.
Now I’m hearing the rest of that sentence.
All of it—the words, the sounds, the whole ugly truth she swallowed at that party.
She came to my husband because her marriage was falling apart, and he put her back together with his hands and his mouth and then sent her home to the husband she was trying to save.
Then she showed up at his book party and squeezed my arm and told me I was lucky while the word helped stuck in her throat like a bone.
I count files. Different voices, different dates. Seven women in six months—and that’s just what’s on this server. Just the chapter he bothered to archive.
“Seven,” I tell Caleb. “Seven women in six months.”
His exhale comes through the phone long and controlled.
“His annual Summit is in three weeks,” he says. “The theme is Radical Transparency.”
The laugh that comes out of me isn’t a laugh. It’s something feral and broken—the sound of a woman whose husband wrote five books about fidelity and has been fucking his patients while they’re paying him to give them marriage advice. The irony is so obscene it’s almost elegant, in a twisted way.
Caleb walks me through the copy. USB drive from Reid’s desk drawer—still in the plastic packaging.
I unwrap it, drag the files, watch the progress bar crawl while I sit in my husband’s chair and stare at the framed photo on his desk.
The two of us at a charity gala. His arm around my waist. Both of us radiant.
I’m trying to remember if I was happy in that photo or if I was already faking it by then.
The bar completes. I eject the drive. Put everything back exactly where it was.
In the garage, engine off, I press the USB drive against the steering wheel and feel its edges bite into my palm.
Caleb is still on the line. The house looms behind me through the rearview mirror—dark windows, manicured hedging, the front door I’ve walked through ten thousand times believing I knew what was inside.
“Two million people watch the Summit livestream,” he says. “Twenty-five thousand in the arena. Every sponsor he has will be in that building.”
“And he’ll be on stage talking about radical transparency.”
“I run the broadcast feed, Nadia. Screens, speakers, livestream—it all routes through my board.”
I close my eyes. The garage is dark and cold and my breath fogs in front of me, but something behind my ribs is burning.
Not grief. Grief was yesterday. This is the clean, white-hot clarity that comes after grief burns itself out—nothing left but the precise understanding of what needs to happen next.
“I want everyone to hear what I just heard,” I say.
“I can make that happen.”
Neither of us hangs up. The line stays open and I can hear him breathing—steady, close.
“Nadia.” A different voice now. Quiet. Stripped of anything professional. “I need you to know something. The person I’m doing this for is you. Not justice. Not those women. You.”
The USB drive digs into my palm.
“I know,” I say. “Thank you.”
The line goes dead. I sit in the dark with the drive in my fist and the taste of adrenaline on my tongue and twenty-one days between me and the most honest thing my marriage will ever produce.
I’ve been performing for fifteen years. Three more weeks is nothing—not when I finally get to choose my own closing night.