Chapter 4
YOU’RE NOT THE ONE I’M MAD AT
Her intake form is in a subfolder labeled ACTIVE PATIENTS, which is almost funny—active being a word that apparently covers a lot of territory in Reid’s practice. Her phone number is right there on the form, ten digits between me and the woman my husband fucked on the couch I picked out.
I’m sitting in my car in the driveway of our house. Reid is inside. Through the kitchen window I can see him pacing, gesturing, smiling into the phone. The man who saves marriages, selling another round of salvation while recordings sit on a USB drive in my glove compartment.
I dial before I can talk myself out of it.
Three rings. Four. I’m about to hang up when the line clicks.
“Hello?” Her voice is guarded.
“Jenna, my name is Nadia Novak. I’m—”
“I know who you are.” Fast. Almost a whisper. Then silence—the pressurized kind, the kind that’s holding something back.
“We met at my husband’s book party,” I say. “You told me he changed your life.”
Nothing. I can hear her breathing—shallow, quick.
“You started to say something else,” I press. “You stopped yourself. And then you squeezed my arm like you were apologizing. I need to know what you were apologizing for.”
“Oh God.” Her voice splinters. “I’m so sorry. Nadia, I’m so sorry.”
There it is. The thing I came for. The confirmation I didn’t need because I already have recordings and timestamps and a USB drive full of evidence—but hearing it from her mouth, hearing the apology pour out of this woman I’ve never met, makes it real in a way that audio files don’t.
My husband. This woman. The couch I picked out.
“Tell me what happened,” I say.
“I can’t—you have to understand, I never planned—”
“Tell me.”
She takes a shaky breath. “I came to him because my marriage was falling apart. My husband had an emotional affair with his business partner and I was wrecked, and Reid was so—he made me feel like I was the only person in the room. Like everything I was feeling was valid and important. I’d never had anyone listen to me like that. ”
My fingers tighten on the steering wheel. Through the window, Reid shifts the phone to his other ear. Still smiling. Still pacing. Still the man who saves marriages.
“I was having a really hard session,” Jenna says.
“I’d been crying for most of it. My husband had just moved out.
And at the end, Reid asked if he could hug me.
Just—a hug. And I said yes. And when he put his arms around me I just...
” A breath. “I kissed him. I don’t know why.
I just did. And he kissed me back. And we—we had sex. On the couch. I’m so sorry.”
Something hot flares behind my ribs. Not at her. At him. At the man in my kitchen who held a sobbing woman in a professional setting and kissed her back instead of doing the one thing his entire career is supposed to be built on—holding the line.
“It felt so natural,” Jenna says, and her voice goes quiet, almost reverent.
“So good. Like my body had been starving and didn’t know it, and here was this person who actually saw me.
Afterward, he held my face and told me he’d never felt this way about a patient before.
That what happened between us was real. That I was different. ”
Different. The word is a knife, but it’s not pointed at Jenna. It’s pointed at my husband, who sat across from a woman in the worst moment of her life and instead of being her therapist, told her she was special.
“I believed him,” she says. “For weeks I believed I was special. That this brilliant, famous man had—I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Nadia, I—”
“Stop,” I say. Not harsh. Tired. “Stop apologizing to me.”
“But I slept with your husband—”
“I know what you did.”
I should be furious with this woman. I should be shaking, screaming, calling her every name I’ve stored up since I opened that folder on Reid’s computer. She slept with my husband. She kissed him first. She did something unforgivable.
But the fury won’t point at her. It keeps swinging back to Reid—to the man who built a career on trust and boundaries and the sacred space of the therapeutic relationship, and then sat in that sacred space and let a crying woman kiss him and kissed her back.
She was vulnerable. She was in pain. She was doing what people in pain do—reaching for the nearest source of warmth.
And my husband, the most famous marriage counselor in the country, the man who has told millions of fans that professional boundaries are the foundation of therapeutic trust—he should have stopped her.
Gently. Firmly. The way every therapist is trained to do, the way every licensing board in the country requires them to do. That’s the job. That’s the entire job.
He didn’t stop her. He kissed her back and told her she was different.
“And then?” My voice is steady. My hands are not. The steering wheel is the only thing keeping them from shaking apart.
“Then he ended it. Overnight. One session he’s telling me I’m extraordinary, the next he’s back to clinical distance, talking about transference and therapeutic boundaries like he’s reading from a textbook. Like I was the problem. Like none of it had happened.”
Reid, through the kitchen window, laughs again. I want to put my fist through the windshield.
“He told me it could never happen again,” she continues.
“That he was committed to his marriage—to you—and that our connection, while real, had to be processed as part of my therapeutic journey.” A bitter, broken laugh.
“He actually called it that. A therapeutic journey. I spent three months thinking I was crazy. That I’d thrown myself at my therapist and destroyed something. I couldn’t even look at myself.”
A pause. When her voice comes back, it’s different. Harder. Confused.
“But why are you calling me? Why aren’t you screaming at me?”
Because the screaming is all going one direction and it’s not at you.
“I understand you were vulnerable,” I say. “You were going through hell and you reached for someone who was supposed to help you. My husband should have been professional and stopped you. That’s his failing, not yours.”
Silence on the line. I can hear her processing it—the permission to put the weight down, to stop carrying the shame of something that was never hers to carry alone.
“I need your help, Jenna. You’re not the only one he did this with.”
Her breath catches.
“I have a plan to take him down, and I need a woman who will come forward. Will you help me?”
Through the kitchen window, Reid sets his phone on the counter. Stretches and rolls his neck. My jaw aches from clenching.
“He’s still seeing patients, isn’t he?” Jenna says. “Right now. Other women sitting in that chair, crying about their husbands.”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me what you need.”
The attorney’s office is on the thirty-second floor of a building downtown, all glass and sharp angles.
The kind of place that charges four figures an hour and doesn’t apologize for it.
I picked Miranda Carlson because she’s handled three high-profile divorces that made the news and won all of them.
She has a reputation for being vicious in depositions, and right now vicious is exactly the frequency I’m tuned to.
She’s read the summary I sent ahead. Two pages. Timeline, the recordings, the hidden photo directory, the pattern. She absorbed it the way I imagine surgeons absorb X-rays—clinical, assessing, already mapping the incisions.
“The divorce itself is clean,” she says, turning a pen between her fingers.
“Infidelity with multiple partners, documented and timestamped. Any judge in this state will grant it. You’ll get the house, a significant share of assets, and given that his income is derived entirely from a personal brand you helped build for fifteen years, a strong case for ongoing support. ”
“I don’t care about ongoing support.” I’m sitting straight in the leather chair, my hands flat on my knees. The USB drive is on the desk between us, small and ordinary, like a grenade with the pin still in. “I care about what happens to his license.”
Miranda sets the pen down.
“Then we need to talk about the criminal side. What you’ve described isn’t just grounds for divorce.
A licensed therapist engaging in sexual relations with a patient is a felony.
It’s the most fundamental ethical violation in the profession.
The licensing board alone would end his career.
A criminal complaint could end a lot more than that. ”
The word hangs in the air between us. I let it.
“How do the timelines work?” I ask. “If I file everything at once.”
“The licensing board complaint, the criminal referral, and the divorce can all proceed simultaneously. Separate tracks, but the evidence overlaps. The recordings support all three.” She picks up the USB drive, turns it over in her fingers.
“You have him dead to rights, Nadia. The question is sequencing—when you file, what order, how you want this to unfold.”
“That’s what I want to talk about.” I lean forward.
“I don’t just want to file paperwork and wait for the system to grind through it.
I don’t want him to have time to get in front of this.
To call his publicist, spin the story, reframe the narrative the way he reframes everything.
I want it to hit all at once. I want him to wake up one morning and find out that his entire life is on fire. ”
Miranda’s eyes sharpen. She’s reading me—not the paperwork, not the evidence. Me. The woman sitting across from her who walked in looking like a brand ambassador and is now talking about controlled demolition.
“I have a plan,” I say. “And I need the legal side locked down before I execute it.”
“What kind of plan?”
I tell her.
Not all of it—not the details she doesn’t need, not the parts that belong to me and Caleb and nineteen days of careful, patient fury.
But enough. Enough for her to understand the scope.
Enough for her to see the shape of what I’m building and decide whether she wants to be standing next to it when it goes off.
Miranda doesn’t blink. The pen is on the desk. Her hands are folded. The silence stretches until I can hear the ventilation system breathing through the ceiling.
“I’m going to be direct with you,” she says. “As your attorney, I can’t advise you to do what you’ve just described.”
“I understand.”
“It’s a legally gray area. There are civil exposure risks. Possible claims from the women on the recordings. Reid himself could pursue action.” She pauses. Clicks her pen once. “That said—it’s your choice. I can advise against it, but I can’t make the decision for you.”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
She studies me for a long moment. Whatever she’s looking for, she finds it.
“Then here’s what I can do. I draft the divorce paperwork this week.
You review it. I prepare the licensing board complaint and the criminal referral simultaneously.
Everything is ready to file on the day you specify.
You give me a date, and by that morning—before he’s out of bed—the divorce is served, the complaint is submitted, and the referral is with the DA.
Whatever else you’ve set in motion, the legal architecture will be in place to support it. ”
“And the witness?”
“If she’s willing to cooperate with the board and the DA, her statement accelerates everything. Investigations that take months can move in weeks with a cooperating victim.”
“She’s willing.” I think of Jenna’s voice on the phone. The steel that replaced the shame. Tell me when.
“Good.” Miranda stands. Extends her hand. Her grip is firm and dry, the handshake of a woman who has taken apart powerful men before and slept just fine after. “I’ll have drafts to you by Friday. You set the timeline. I’ll make sure the machinery is ready when you pull the trigger.”
I take the USB drive off the desk and put it back in my pocket. It’s warm from sitting under the lamp, and the heat of it against my thigh feels like a pulse—something alive, something counting down.
The elevator doors open. I step in. My reflection stares back from the polished steel—a woman who walked into this building with evidence and is walking out with an arsenal. The numbers tick down. Thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty.
Miranda told me she can’t advise what I’m planning. She doesn’t need to. I’m done taking advice.
I’m giving orders now.