My Husband Cheated with His Patients (She Gets Revenge #11)

Prologue

The USB drive is warm from my hand. I’ve been holding it for twenty minutes—backstage, behind the curtain, in the dark—and the plastic has absorbed my body heat until it feels like part of me. A small, rectangular organ I grew specifically for tonight.

Twenty-five thousand people are on the other side of that curtain.

Two million more on the livestream. Every sponsor my husband has ever charmed, every network executive who’s ever shaken his hand, every woman who’s ever grabbed mine at a book signing and said your husband saved my marriage—they’re all out there.

Waiting. Leaning forward in their seats for the man who wrote the book on love.

Five of them, actually. Five books. Five bestsellers.

Five volumes of bullshit bound in hardcover and stacked on a table by the entrance of an arena that seats twenty-five thousand believers.

Caleb is beside me. Headset around his neck, laptop open on a road case, the broadcast feed glowing on the screen. His fingers hover over the board. He’s calm. I’m calm too, which is the part that should scare me and doesn’t.

My hands aren’t shaking. They shook for three weeks—through events, through dinners, through every smile I performed while carrying this drive in my pocket like a grenade with the pin half-out.

They shook when I found the recordings. They shook when I listened to them.

They shook when I heard my husband’s voice doing things with women who came to him crying, who trusted him, who sat in his chair and broke open their worst pain and let him hold it.

He held it, all right. Then he held them. On the couch in his office. The one I picked out.

My hands aren’t shaking now. They’re done with that.

Through the curtain I can hear him. That voice—warm, resonant, the one that fills arenas and living rooms and the ears of two million weekly viewers. He’s talking about trust. About honesty. About the courage it takes to show your partner who you really are.

He’s talking about me.

“Fifteen years,” he’s telling them. “Fifteen years, and our marriage is built on one thing: radical transparency.”

Caleb glances at me. I nod.

Here’s what twenty-five thousand people and two million viewers don’t know yet:

My husband—the most famous marriage counselor in the country, the man whose face is on a banner in this lobby in letters taller than me, the man who looked into a camera every week and told America that love is a choice—has been sleeping with his patients.

The women who came to him broken. The women who sat in his chair and cried about their husbands.

He listened to their pain and then he took them to the couch and added to it.

He recorded everything. He just never thought I’d listen.

Tonight, so will everyone else.

I press the USB drive into Caleb’s palm. His fingers close over mine—one second, steady and warm—and then he turns to the laptop and the broadcast feed and the switch that routes to every speaker in this building.

Through the curtain, my husband says my name. The applause starts.

I straighten my dress. I check my mic.

I step into the light. Tonight, I’m going to destroy my husband.