Cancelled by My Billionaire Husband (Wives Betrayed #15)

CHAPTER 1

JULIET

There’s a curtain in the backstage corridor of the Grand Palmer Convention Center with my name on it.

Not literally. Literally it has a laminated sign that says TALENT HOLDING — C, which is corporate for “the hallway where we put the people we don’t know what to do with.

” But I’ve claimed it. There’s a folding chair, a plate of shrimp skewers I stole off a passing tray, and a heavy velvet drape between me and eight thousand creators filming themselves reacting to the carpet.

I’ve been coming to Loop events since Loop was eleven employees and a server that caught fire. I helped make this place matter. I stood on stages when the stages were pallets. So I’ve earned the right to eat shrimp behind a curtain like a woman in witness protection.

“Found you.”

Denver parts the drape and slips in, and the noise of the convention floor drops to a hum. He’s in the good suit, the one he wears when investors are in the building. Forty-one years old and he still gets a crease between his brows when he’s looking for me, even when I’ve been gone forty minutes.

“You used to love this,” he says.

“I used to attend parties where nobody filmed me chewing.”

He takes a skewer off my plate without asking, which is the correct answer, and eats it standing over me. “They’re not filming you. They’re filming themselves near you. It’s different.”

“It’s worse. At least when they film me I get to control my own face.”

“Since when do you control your face?”

“Since always. My face is a precision instrument. It’s been reviewed.”

He laughs, steals a second skewer, kisses me with shrimp breath.

Eleven years married and he still kisses me like he expects to get away with it.

I let him. This is the part nobody clips.

This is the marriage, the actual one: stolen shellfish and a curtain and a man who flew home from Singapore last week and fell asleep on me mid-sentence.

“Twenty minutes,” he says. “Anniversary segment. You, me, the founders’ video. Then you can go back to being a swamp creature.”

“I’m not a swamp creature. I’m a heritage brand.”

“You’re my heritage brand.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and the crease is gone, and for a second I think about staying behind this curtain until the building empties.

I’ve done it before. In 2019 I hid in a supply closet through an entire keynote and Denver told the audience I was “decompressing in a sensorily appropriate environment,” which is founder-speak for my wife is in a closet and we’re all going to be cool about it.

“Twenty minutes,” I agree. “Then the swamp.”

He ducks back out and a kid immediately replaces him. Twenty-two, maybe. A cropped hoodie and a ring light clipped to her phone like an oxygen tank. She hovers at the edge of my curtain kingdom with her mouth open.

“Oh my god. You’re Juliet Farrell.”

“I’m a woman eating shrimp in a hallway.”

“Can I—” She holds up the phone, then stops. Actually stops. Lowers it. “Sorry. My sister would kill me if I didn’t. You don’t have to.”

This is the part I still love. This exact kid. I stand, brush off my skirt, take the phone from her hand, and frame the shot myself because if we’re doing this we’re doing it properly.

“Chin down,” I tell her. “The light here is a crime.”

We take three. She tells me she does comedy commentary, fifty thousand followers, and she watched my old specials in high school and they’re the reason she started.

I tell her the only rule that matters: don’t let the numbers talk you out of the jokes that scare you.

She nods so hard her ring light wobbles, and then she’s gone, and I’m standing there feeling warm about the whole enterprise, which lasts a solid ninety seconds.

The curtain gets yanked open before he can answer, and the noise floods back in, and standing in the corridor with an entourage the size of a small wedding party is Zelda Krueger.

You’ve seen Zelda. Everyone’s seen Zelda.

She’s the flagship face of Loop Live now, the big live-streaming expansion this whole convention exists to worship.

There are banners of her cheekbones hanging off the parking garage.

She built an audience out of beauty tutorials and then detonated it into confessionals, feuds, livestreamed breakups, and a level of radical transparency that makes a colonoscopy look coy.

She’s twenty-nine. She’s beautiful in a sense that reads engineered until you meet her and realize the engineering is all in the timing.

She knows exactly where every camera is. She’s never been surprised by a lens.

“Juliet.” She crosses the corridor and hugs me, hard, perfume and camera light. Her people are already filming. “You have no idea what you meant to me growing up.”

“Please don’t say growing up. I’m trying to enjoy my evening.”

She laughs, delighted. One beat too late, I realize why. That’s a clip. That’s a clip right now. The legend is funny and sharp! I can feel the caption writing itself.

Then she turns to Denver, and something in her whole body reorganizes around him.

“Look at you,” she says, and smooths his lapel. Just reaches up and does it, before anyone asks, her fingers flat against his chest for a half-second longer than a lapel requires. “You clean up okay for a guy who used to keynote in hoodies.”

“You’re here early,” Denver says. “Rehearsal’s tomorrow.”

“I don’t rehearse. I arrive.” She says it to him, but her eyes cut to me, checking whether I’ve registered it. I’ve registered it alright.

A Loop Live interviewer materializes with a rig, and suddenly the three of us are a segment. The interviewer is twenty-four and vibrating. Zelda pulls Denver in by the elbow.

“We’re doing the thing where Denver pretends he doesn’t love the attention,” Zelda tells the camera.

“I don’t love the attention,” Denver says, which is true.

“He loves it.” Zelda leans into his shoulder, easy, practiced, camera-ready. “Denver’s basically my work husband. Internet husband.” A beat, perfectly timed, straight into the lens. “Juliet gets the legal version.”

The interviewer laughs so hard the rig shakes. Denver rolls his eyes, because this is the Zelda brand, this is what she does. She’s outrageous. It’s literally her job description. Loop Live is betting the whole rollout on this woman being outrageous.

I don’t laugh.

Zelda notices. There’s a flicker at the corner of her mouth, and then she’s hugging me again goodbye and telling the camera “she’s iconic, she’s everything,” and then the wedding party sweeps her off down the corridor toward the main stage, where eight thousand people are about to lose their minds.

Denver finds me twenty minutes later for the anniversary segment, and I smile.

I tell the story about the server fire, how Denver carried the backup drive out of the office in a laundry basket while our first engineer cried into a pizza.

The audience loves it. They always love it.

It’s the version of Loop history everyone can agree on, back when the site was a toy and I was the toy’s loudest user, back when being on this platform meant you were somebody’s weird favorite and not a demographic.

I say “we” a lot up there. For a long time it was a we, even if the cap table says otherwise. Denver holds my hand on stage. He’s the same man on stage as off. It turns out that’s a mixed blessing, but I don’t know that yet.

We’re in the car heading home before I say it.

“She wants you.”

Denver’s watching something on his phone, some metrics dashboard, the light of it on his face. “Who?”

“Zelda.”

“Zelda wants the camera currently pointed at her.”

“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

He puts the phone down. Gives me his full attention, which he does the way other men clear a room. “The lapel thing?”

“The lapel thing. The work husband thing. That look she does. The one that says she’s already picked the house.”

“She does that look at everyone. The interviewer. The shrimp guy.” He takes my hand. “She’s ridiculous and she’s harmless. She makes jokes that would sink anyone else’s career and they float hers. That’s the trick.”

“And you don’t think the trick has a target?”

“I think you just spent three hours being filmed by strangers and now everyone’s a threat.” He says it gently. He’s not wrong, exactly. That’s the problem with Denver. He’s never entirely wrong.

I look out the window at the city going by and I let it go, because he’s right that I hate these events, and he’s right that I come home from them suspicious of the entire human species, and we’ve had this exact fight about waiters.

A waiter once comped my dessert and I spent the ride home constructing an entire theory about it.

The dessert turned out to be about the restaurant’s anniversary.

I keep that one in my pocket for emergencies.

“Fine,” I say. “Ridiculous and harmless.”

“Ridiculous and harmless,” he agrees, and kisses my knuckles, and goes back to his dashboard.

By the time we get home, Zelda has posted.

I see it because my phone goes off eleven times in the kitchen while I’m getting water. Maya, my producer, sends it with no comment. My sister sends it with nine question marks. Three creator friends send it with some version of oh no.

It’s a photo from tonight, backstage, professional quality, already color-graded.

Zelda in the middle, luminous. Denver on one side, mid-laugh at something.

Me on the other, holding a shrimp skewer, caught between expressions, looking like a woman who’s just realized the wedding photographer is drunk.

The caption reads: The Farrell marriage finally lets me in.

I stand in my kitchen.

The view counter spins while I watch. It’s already moving faster than anything I’ve posted in two years.

The comments are a wall of skull emojis and oh it’s happening and Zelda really said legal version.

Someone has already clipped the backstage interview.

Someone has already stitched it. The internet is doing what the internet does, which is take one woman’s joke and build a house out of it overnight.

Denver comes in for water and sees my face.

“What?”

I show him. He reads it, and I wait, and this is the moment I’ll think about later, the fork in the whole road. He looks for the reasonable reading.

“It’s her brand,” he says. “It’s a caption. Everyone in that photo is in on it.”

“I’m not in on it.”

“You want me to call her?” And he means it; he’d do it, he’d call her right now in his socks.

That’s the thing about Denver that makes all of this so much worse, in the end.

He’s not a coward. He’s not cruel. He loves me in a way I’ve never doubted.

He just believes, down in the bone, that attention is nothing.

It comes, it goes, you don’t build your life around it, and you definitely don’t fight it.

“No,” I say. “Don’t call her. It’s only a caption.”

I give him the reasonable reading because he’s my husband and it’s midnight and I have shrimp skewer in my teeth.

In the morning it’s on the front page of Loop, and the trend already has a name.

They’re calling her the internet wife.