Chapter 2
HIDDEN FILES
“Just come. Four days. Wine, spa, no husbands. You’ve earned it.”
Harper’s voice fills my left ear through the earbud while I navigate Reid’s desktop.
He texted this morning—six words, no greeting: Can you find the book proposal I sent to Edgar O’Reilly on my computer?
Need it for my business manager. Not a question, really.
A task assignment. I’m on his payroll in everything but title.
“I don’t know,” I say, clicking through folders. “The Summit is in three weeks. There’s a million things to coordinate before—”
“Nadia. Listen to yourself. You’re coordinating his Summit. You’re managing his schedule. When was the last time you did something that was just for you?”
I don’t answer because I don’t have one.
Reid’s office smells like leather and the cedar diffuser his designer picked out—the scent of a man who has his life together.
Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind the desk, all five of his books displayed spine-out in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook.
Framed magazine covers. A photo of us from the Today show, his arm around me, both of us glowing with the kind of warmth you can buy from a good lighting crew.
“Napa,” Harper says again. “Say yes.”
“Maybe after the Summit.”
“You always say ‘after.’ After the book tour. After the taping schedule clears. After the rebrand. There’s always an after, and it never comes.”
She’s right, and I hate that she’s right, and I open the search bar and type O’Reilly because finding this proposal is easier than admitting that my best friend knows my life better than I do.
The results populate. Three files. The proposal is the second one—a PDF, exactly where he said it would be. I could grab it and close the laptop and go pour myself coffee and never think about this again.
But the first result isn’t the proposal. It’s a file path I don’t recognize, pulled from a directory I’ve never seen. Something nested deep—a folder inside a folder inside a folder, the digital equivalent of a locked drawer. The file name is a string of numbers. A date. Eleven months ago.
“Hold on,” I say to Harper. “Something weird just came up.”
“Weird how?”
I click an image file name O’Reilly.
A photo fills the screen. A woman. Dark hair, late thirties, sitting on a leather couch I know.
I know it because I picked it out—the cognac Chesterfield from Reid’s practice, the one I spent three weeks sourcing because he wanted something that said trustworthy and warm.
The woman is posed. She’s wearing an unbuttoned blouse and nothing underneath it.
She’s looking at the person taking the photo, biting her lip, and pinching her nipples.
My hand is still on the trackpad. I can feel my pulse in my fingertip.
I navigate up one level in the directory.
More files. Dozens of them. I open another.
A different woman—younger, redhead, fully nude, same couch.
Another. Blonde, posed on the edge of his desk.
Another. Same couch, different angle, a woman I almost recognize.
The timestamps span years. All taken in Reid’s office.
“Nadia? You still there?”
My throat has closed. I’m staring at the screen and the screen is staring back—all these women on the couch I chose, in the office I decorated, behind the door I’ve dropped off lunch at a hundred times.
The cedar diffuser is suddenly unbearable.
The smell isn’t calm anymore. It’s a cover.
It’s the smell of a room where things happen that need covering.
“Harper.” My voice sounds like someone else’s. Flat. Scraped clean. “You’re not going to believe what I just found. There are photos...”
“Photos of what?”
“Women.” I scroll through the folder. More thumbnails loading, rows of them. “Semi-nude. Nude. Sexual. In his office. On the couch from his practice.”
Silence. The kind that has weight.
“How many?” she asks.
I keep scrolling. The folder seems bottomless. I count thumbnails—twenty, thirty, more loading below. Different women, different dates, the same leather couch in every frame.
“Dozens,” I say. “At least.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Nadia—”
I close the folder. The desktop reappears—the photo of us from the Today show smiling at me like a taunt.
I open the folder again. Close it. My hands are doing things without my permission, clicking and unclicking, like if I open and close it enough times the contents will rearrange themselves into something I can survive.
The splinter from last night—the one that’s been pointed inward since he dropped the word perform on our kitchen floor—just hit an exposed nerve.
“What are you going to do?” Harper’s voice is careful now. The Napa energy is gone, replaced by something tight and controlled, the voice of a woman who knows she’s holding a grenade someone just handed her.
I look at the photo of us on the wall. Reid’s arm around me. My smile—warm, approachable, the secret weapon. The proof the method works.
“I don’t know,” I say.
But my body is already ahead of my brain. My jaw has locked. My hands have gone still on the keyboard. And somewhere behind my sternum, the thing that’s been quietly dying for years just flatlined.
I close Reid’s laptop. Open it again. The folder is still there. I haven’t hallucinated it. I haven’t manifested it from fifteen years of low-grade marital disappointment. It’s real. Dozens of women, real.
“Don’t confront him,” Harper says. She’s moved from shock to strategy faster than I expected, and I’m grateful because my own brain is still buffering. “Not yet. Not until you know more.”
“I know enough.” I’m pacing his office now, earbud in, arms crossed over my chest like I’m holding my ribs together. “I know my husband has a folder of naked women on his computer. Women he sees professionally. Women who come to him because their marriages are falling apart.”
“Which is exactly why you can’t go in hot. He’ll have an answer for everything. He always does.”
She’s right. Reid could explain away a body on the floor.
He’d call it a therapeutic exercise, cite a study, reference a chapter in his own book.
He’d use that voice—the one from the podcast, the keynote, the couch across from crying women—and he’d reframe the entire conversation until I was the one apologizing for snooping.
I wasn’t snooping. He sent me to his computer. He told me to search for a file. He handed me the keys and forgot what was parked in the garage.
“If I ask him about the photos, he’ll delete them,” I say. “Tonight. While I’m asleep. He’ll wipe the folder and then it’s his word against mine and his word is worth five bestselling books and a television show.”
“So you need proof he can’t delete.”
“I need to understand what I’m looking at. Are these women he’s sleeping with? Are they patients? Are they—” I stop pacing. The couch. The same couch in every photo. His practice. His office. “They’re patients, Harper. They have to be. Who else would be on that couch?”
“Jesus.”
I press my palm flat against his desk. Cool wood. Steady. I need something steady because my insides are liquid. I can feel the champagne from last night trying to make a comeback, a sour tide rising in my chest.
The woman from the event surfaces. The blonde in the green dress. Your husband changed my life. The pause before helped. The way she touched my arm—not grateful, apologetic. Like she was sorry for something she couldn’t name.
She wasn’t sorry for taking his time. She was sorry for taking him.
“There was a woman at the event last night,” I say. “She told me Reid changed her life. She’d been in his practice. She got emotional, and then she just—left. Practically ran out. And when I asked Reid about her, his thumb stopped scrolling for half a second and he said she didn’t ring a bell.”
“Half a second.”
“Half a second. Then back to his phone.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not nothing.”
The house is silent around me. Reid’s office, Reid’s desk, Reid’s bookshelves full of Reid’s books about love and fidelity and commitment.
I’m standing in the temple of a man who tells women how to trust their husbands while storing their naked photos in a hidden folder on his home computer.
The hypocrisy is so enormous it’s almost architectural.
Load-bearing walls of bullshit holding up a cathedral of lies.
“Is there anyone at the show?” Harper asks. “Someone you trust? Someone who might have seen something?”
Caleb. The name rises before I even think it.
He runs the technical side of Reid’s show—cameras, livestream, the whole production.
He’s been there for years. He’s always been different from the rest of Reid’s team.
Not deferential. Not starstruck. When he talks to me, he asks questions that aren’t about Reid.
He remembers things—that I mentioned wanting to take a pottery class, that my sister had surgery last spring.
He looks at me like I’m a person, not a brand extension.
I’ve caught him looking at me other ways too. Not leering—something quieter and steadier than that. Something that makes my neck warm when I notice it.
“Caleb,” I say. “He runs the show.”
“Do you trust him?”
I think about what trust means right now. An hour ago it meant something theoretical. Now it means: Will this person go straight to Reid and tell him his wife found the folder?
“I think so,” I say. “I’m not sure.”
“Then find out. But be careful. If Reid knows you’ve seen those photos—”
“He’ll burn it all down before I can.”
“Exactly.”
We hang up. I stand in Reid’s office and listen to the house breathe.
The central air clicks on. The refrigerator hums from the kitchen.
Normal sounds in a house that isn’t normal anymore—a house that’s been hiding things in its walls, and I was too busy smiling for cameras to knock on the drywall and listen for hollow spots.
I take out my phone. My fingers are trembling. I type the message to Caleb three times before I get it right. The first draft is too long. The second is too vague. The third is five words and a question mark.
Can we meet? Somewhere private. Not the studio.
I hit send. I watch the screen. The delivered receipt appears. Then the dots. He’s typing.
His response comes in under a minute. Four words.
Name the place.
I lock Reid’s laptop. I leave his office. I close the door behind me and the click sounds exactly like the one Reid made last night when he walked away from me in the kitchen—quiet, final, a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence I didn’t know I was writing.
Except this time, I’m the one closing the door.
And I’m not going to bed. I’m going to find out what’s behind it.