My Husband Cheated on Me with My Mother (Wives Who Bite Back #9)

1. The Torn Dress

Chapter one

The Torn Dress

My husband was fucking my mother, and she was wearing my wedding dress.

My right hand went completely numb against the brass doorknob. The cold metal bit into my palm, though the sensation felt like it belonged to someone else. The seconds stretched out, agonizingly slow. I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t move. I could barely form a thought.

The guest room door was cracked open a single inch. It was enough.

Marcus’s expensive cologne coated the back of my throat.

The sharp scent of vetiver and cedar—the smell I had woken up next to for four years—tangled with the cloying tuberose perfume my mother bathed in.

For the last six months, that specific combination of scents lingering in the kitchen or the living room meant family.

It meant a village. It meant safety for the child growing inside me.

Now, it settled in my lungs like toxic ash.

A sickening thud echoed in the corridor. The heavy oak headboard slammed against the drywall. Wood on paint. Wood on paint. A rhythmic destruction of my reality.

“Yes, Marcus, yes!” my mother screamed. “Harder!”

Through the narrow gap in the door frame, I saw my mother lying on her stomach, holding on to the guest pillows I had fluffed just yesterday.

Her sleek, platinum-blonde bob was undone, her hair tumbling down her shoulders.

And stretched across her Pilates-toned back was the delicate Chantilly lace of my bridal gown.

Marcus fisted his hands into the fabric of the bodice to anchor his weight. “Yeah,” he groaned, tightening his hold on the material. “Yeah, just like that. Squeeze your cunt around me. Fuck, that feels so good.”

A sharp, distinct ripping sound cut through the room. The antique silk threads of the dress snapped under his grip.

My brain short-circuited. I had paid a preservationist a small fortune to treat that lace. It had been sealed inside a pristine white box, wrapped in layers of acid-free tissue paper, and stored in the furthest, darkest corner of the attic.

What struck me in that moment was the sheer logistical nightmare that led to this.

To wear that dress, my mother would have had to wait until I left the house.

She would have had to pull down the heavy attic stairs, take a box cutter to the packing tape, unearth the tissue paper, and intentionally squeeze her fifty-year-old body into my sacred memory.

My mother was a practical woman. She wouldn’t have gone to this much effort just to wear it once. This was certainly not an isolated incident.

I tore my gaze away from the crack in the door and stared blindly down at the hallway floor.

The intricate pattern of the Persian runner blurred into a bruised crimson streak.

I dug my fingernails so deeply into my palms that I could have sworn I drew blood.

I needed the pain. I needed a sharp anchor to prove I still existed.

I felt like I was floating somewhere near the ceiling, watching a stranger’s life implode.

Only thirty minutes ago, a blown transformer had plunged the local children’s shelter into darkness.

The director had sent the volunteers home early.

I had decided to come home on my own instead of waiting for Marcus to pick me up from work as usual.

I had instead dipped into my strict, cash-only grocery allowance and hailed a cab.

I’d walked up the pristine concrete driveway with the silent steps of a considerate daughter. Then, I’d slid my house key into the deadbolt with agonizing slowness. My mother had been so helpful to me since she moved in with us, I thought. I hadn’t wanted to wake her from her afternoon nap.

And now this. Now, the truth was unfolding in front of me in nauseating detail, reeking of sex and rot.

“You just have to let me stay with you, El. We can set up the nursery together. I’ve dreamed about this my whole life.”

My mother’s voice rang in my ears. The memory of her sweet, manipulative plea—delivered over a cup of chamomile tea six months ago—collided violently with the wet, guttural slaps of skin echoing from the bedroom.

I’d believed her. I’d genuinely believed my mother was my best friend.

When I peed on the stick and saw those two pink lines, she was the first person I called.

I wept in her arms, both thrilled and terrified.

“I just don’t know, Mom. I don’t know if I can be a good mother.”

“Of course you can, sweetheart. And I’ll be right there, by your side.”

She hadn’t come to hold my hand. She hadn’t come for the nursery. She’d come for the master of the house.

The rhythm on the bed abruptly shifted. Marcus adjusted his grip on the ruined lace of my gown and let out a low, breathy groan.

“God, you’re tight,” Marcus rasped, his voice dripping with an arrogant satisfaction I recognized intimately. “Elena is a fucking whale right now. It’s like sleeping next to a waterbed. You are perfect, Sylvia.”

Sylvia let out a breathless, triumphant laugh.

The sound of my mother laughing at my pregnant body almost cracked me open.

She’d never once suggested there might be something wrong with me.

On the contrary, she always encouraged me to eat more.

“For the baby’s health,” she always said.

But she’d been waging a covert war against my changing shape, using her own figure as a weapon. And she had won.

Bile flooded the back of my tongue. Both of my hands flew upward, and my purse dropped to my elbow.

I clamped my palms over my mouth to trap the scream clawing up my throat, pressing inward until my teeth cut into the soft tissue inside my cheeks.

The sharp, metallic taste of my own blood grounded me.

I had to move backward. I had to get out of this house.

My legs fought the motion, heavy and unresponsive with shock. My lungs screamed for air, but I refused to breathe. The air in this house belonged to them. It was tainted with their sweat, their fluids, their betrayal.

I slid my left foot backward across the rug. The sole of my maternity flat caught the edge of the carpet. My heel slipped off the fabric and touched a bare floorboard. The wood protested under my sudden weight with an agonizing creak.

The sound snapped through the quiet hallway like a gunshot.

I froze. My heart hammered a bruising cadence against my ribs.

Cold sweat instantly bloomed across the back of my neck.

I waited for the headboard to stop. I waited for the harsh silence of discovery.

I waited for Marcus to pull away, for Sylvia to turn her sleek platinum head toward the door and meet my eye.

The headboard kept thudding. Wood on paint. Wood on paint.

They hadn’t heard it. They were entirely consumed by their own depravity.

I took another agonizing step backward. Then another. The distance to the front door seemed to stretch into miles. I turned my back to the guest room and faced the long expanse of the corridor.

Framed photographs lined the walls. They mocked me as I crept past them.

There was Marcus in his custom tuxedo, kissing my cheek on our wedding day.

The very day I wore the dress currently being ripped apart on the guest bed.

There was a photo of me standing in the center of this exact hallway, proudly holding up the black-and-white ultrasound picture of our daughter.

And there, hanging directly beneath the recessed lighting, was Sylvia. She was standing between Marcus and me on Thanksgiving, holding a glass of expensive red wine, beaming for the camera.

A perfectly curated, suffocating lie. My entire adult life was a stage play, and I was the only idiot in the cast who didn’t know the script.

I reached the entryway. The walls pressed inward, shrinking the space until the high vaulted ceiling felt like it would crush me.

The AC kicked on, blasting freezing air down the back of my dress, but I was burning up from the inside.

I slammed my shoulder against the plaster beside the front door, using the walls of the house I didn’t own to keep my trembling legs upright.

My hands shook violently. I reached for the brass deadbolt, but my sweaty skin slipped against the cold metal. The lock rattled. It was a terrifyingly loud clink of metal on metal that sounded like a bomb going off in the silence of the foyer.

I seized the deadbolt and pulled the front door open. The hinges whined softly. I slipped through the narrow gap, stepped out onto the front porch, and pulled the heavy oak shut behind me. The latch caught with a definitive click.

And just like that, I was outside. The afternoon sun hit me so hard I almost keeled over on the spot.

The flawless lawns of our upscale neighborhood glared back at me in aggressive green.

The suffocating perfection of the suburban street offered no cover.

There were no shadows to hide in. Every blade of grass, every perfectly trimmed hedge, every gleaming BMW parked in a driveway felt like a spotlight pointed directly at my humiliation.

My chest caved inward, folding me in half as I gasped for air, but my throat had swollen shut entirely. Black spots danced at the edges of my vision. The world narrowed to the agonizingly bright pavement directly beneath my feet.

I stumbled down the concrete driveway. My knees buckled.

Pitching forward, completely disoriented, I caught my balance just in time.

The neighborhood was entirely too quiet.

Across the street, a neighbor’s automated sprinkler system hissed over a bed of blooming blue hydrangeas.

The sound of the water—psst, psst, psst—mimicked the terrible, wet tearing of lace.

My ears rang. The heat radiating off the dark asphalt burned through the thin soles of my flats, seeping up my legs. I needed to get away from the house. If they looked out the window, or if Sylvia wanted a glass of water and walked past the glass panels of the front door, they would see me.

I pushed my legs to run, but my center of gravity was entirely off. Carrying a six-month belly required a delicate balance I no longer had.

I tripped over my own feet. The world spun in a nauseating kaleidoscope of brutal blue sky and gray pavement.

I careened off the edge of the concrete curb. My balance vanished completely.

I plunged directly into the asphalt of the street without turning my head. My hands instinctively flew off my purse and dropped to cover my stomach. I was desperate to take the brunt of the fall on my knees or elbows, desperate to protect the only thing I had left.

A massive shadow filled my crumbling line of sight.

The deafening screech of burning tires ripped through the silence.