Chapter 6
LIGHTS! CAMERA! REVENGE!
“Five minutes to places, Mrs. Novak.”
The stagehand moves past me before I can respond, headset crackling, clipboard tucked under her arm.
Backstage smells like gaffer tape and the particular staleness of air recycled through industrial ducts for hours.
The concrete floor vibrates under my heels—twenty-five thousand bodies, twenty-five thousand seats, all of it humming through the foundation like a pulse.
The USB drive is in my left hand. The speech Reid approved is in my right.
Through a gap in the stage curtain I can see a wedge of the arena—a slice of seats, phone screens glowing in the dimmed house lights.
Jenna is out there. Third row, center aisle.
Close enough to reach the stage in thirty seconds.
Applause detonates through the curtain. Reid’s voice follows, booming through the backstage monitor on the wall to my left.
“Thank you! Thank you! Look at this room!” A beat—he’s letting them go, letting the applause swell before he rides it down. “Twenty-five thousand people. Twenty-five thousand. Do you know what that tells me? That tells me something important. That tells me you haven’t given up.”
Through the gap in the curtain I can see him—a slice of his body, mid-stage, jacket off, sleeves already rolled to the forearms. He paces to stage left, microphone in hand, moving the way he always moves in front of a crowd—loose, physical, taking up space like the stage was built around him.
“People always ask me—at airports, at restaurants, at the park where I run—” Laughter.
He grins, waits for it to die. “They ask me: What’s the secret?
What’s the secret to a great marriage? And you know what they really want?
They want the hack. They want me to say, ‘Go on a date night every Thursday and buy flowers on Sundays and you’re golden. ’ They want an easy answer.”
He swings back toward center stage, and through my slice of curtain I watch him plant his feet and point out at the audience.
“There is no easy answer. There is no hack. You want a marriage that works? You have to do the work. And the work—the real work, the work that nobody wants to do—is transparency.”
My teeth lock together. The jaw pain blooms instantly, radiating up both sides of my skull.
“I’m not talking about ‘how was your day, fine, how was yours.’ I’m not talking about sharing your Netflix password.
” Laughter again—bigger. He’s got them. “I’m talking about radical, uncomfortable, terrifying transparency.
The kind where you sit across from the person you love and you show them everything.
Not the highlight reel. Not the version you think they want.
Everything. The ugly parts. The scared parts.
The parts you’ve been hiding because you think they’ll leave if they see them. ”
He’s moving again—long strides to stage right, microphone close to his mouth, his voice dropping into the intimate register that makes twenty-five thousand people feel like he’s whispering to each of them individually.
Through the curtain gap I catch his profile—jaw set, eyes bright, his whole body radiating the kind of conviction that fills arenas and sells books and makes crying women on leather couches believe they’re different.
“Because here’s what twenty years of clinical practice has taught me.
” He stops. Holds the silence. The monitor captures twenty-five thousand people not breathing.
“Dishonesty—or simply not sharing what you need—is the crack line that destroys a marriage. Not the big betrayals. Not the dramatic explosions. The silence. The things you swallowed instead of said. The feelings you buried instead of shared. I have sat across from thousands of couples, thousands, and I will tell you—the ones sitting in my office with their marriage in pieces? They didn’t get there because of one terrible thing.
They got there because of a thousand small silences.
A thousand moments where somebody chose comfort over honesty.
And by the time they’re sitting across from me, the crack has become a canyon. ”
He lets the word hang. Canyon. Through the curtain I watch him press his fist to his chest—the signature gesture, the one from the book covers.
“But the couples who make it—the ones who come back a year later holding hands, five years later renewing vows—they made a different choice. They chose the hard conversation. They chose to be seen. And that—that—is the foundation. Not passion. Not compatibility. Not even love, not the way we usually mean it. Transparency.”
Applause swells through the monitor. He walks through it, pacing downstage, getting close to the front rows.
“And I don’t just teach this. I live it.
” His voice lifts—brighter, warmer, the showman becoming the husband.
“Fifteen years ago, I married a woman who terrified me. Not because she was scary. Because she was real. And she made me want to be real back. We made a promise—Nadia and I—that our marriage would be built on total transparency. That we would never choose comfort over truth. That we would show each other everything, even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.”
My fingernails cut crescents into my palm around the USB drive.
“And I am standing in front of you tonight as living proof that it works. Fifteen years. Not perfect—no marriage is perfect. But honest. Built on a foundation that doesn’t crack, because we never let the silence settle long enough to find the fault lines.”
He swings toward the wings. I can see his full face now through the curtain gap—flushed, grinning, radiating a conviction so total it’s almost beautiful. The man who saves marriages, selling the biggest lie of his career with every cell in his body.
“So tonight I want to give you something rare. I’m not just going to tell you about radical transparency—I’m going to show you. Because the woman who has lived these principles beside me for fifteen years is here. And she has something to say.”
His voice lifts into the ringmaster register.
“Ladies and gentlemen—my wife, my partner, my proof that this works—Nadia!”
The applause hits the curtain like a pressure wave. The stagehand gestures. Light slices across the backstage floor.
I fold Reid’s speech and slide it into my pocket next to the USB drive. My fingers brush both—the script and the bomb, side by side.
The light widens. Stage heat replaces backstage cold, dry and electric against my skin. Reid is center stage, arm extended, smile blazing. I cross the distance and take his hand. His thumb brushes my knuckles. He kisses my temple.
The microphone waits.
The podium is warm under my hands—the lights have been beating down on it for thirty minutes, and the heat soaks into my palms and up through my wrists.
The arena is an ocean of darkness because of all the lights.
Stage lights turn everything beyond that into shapes and phone screens and the occasional camera flash.
The silence is physical—twenty-five thousand people, leaning forward, waiting.
“Thank you so much for being here tonight.” My voice fills the arena. Steady. Clear. A voice I’ve never heard come out of my own mouth. “I—it’s a little overwhelming, looking out at all of you.”
A warm ripple of laughter. Reid is three feet to my left. I can feel his presence—relaxed, proud, the husband-on-display posture he’s perfected over a decade of shared stages.
“Reid asked me to come out here and talk about transparency. And he’s right—it should be the foundation of every marriage.
Every relationship.” The words from his script come easily; I’ve rehearsed them for three weeks.
“Communicating honestly and with vulnerability is what makes a couple stronger. It’s what makes a marriage something worth fighting for. ”
A pause. The audience settles deeper into the silence. I can feel the heat of the stage lights on my scalp, the bridge of my nose, the tops of my bare shoulders.
“So I want to be transparent with you tonight.”
The first deviation. Small. Almost nothing. Reid doesn’t react—the sentence could still go anywhere, could still land inside the bounds of the speech he approved.
“Six weeks ago, I realized my husband was not being honest or transparent with me.”
Silence. Not the warm, receptive silence from before. A different silence—the held-breath kind, the kind that has a texture, rough and electric, scraping against every surface in the arena. I let it stretch. Three seconds. Four.
“I found evidence that my husband has been having affairs.” My grip tightens on the podium. “With his patients.”
Gasps tear through the arena—not one but dozens layered on top of each other, rippling outward from the front rows into the darkness like a stone dropped into still water. Phone screens lift everywhere. The light in the room multiplies.
“Nadia.” His stage whisper reaches me from where he’s standing on the other side of the stage, pitched below the mic’s reach. “What are you doing?”
I don’t look at him.
“I’ve spoken to one of the women my husband saw in his practice. Let me tell you how he”—I lift both hands from the podium, curl my fingers in the air “helped her.”
“She came to him because her marriage was falling apart. She sat in his chair and she cried, and he listened, and he made her feel safe. He made her feel seen. And then he slept with her. On the couch in his office. And afterward, he held her face and told her she was different. That he’d never felt this way about a patient before.
” The word patient drops into the silence and detonates.
“Then he went home and had dinner with me. And she spent three months believing she was crazy.”
The murmur rising through the arena is something I’ve never heard—twenty-five thousand people processing a reality that is rearranging itself inside their heads in real time. The sound of a building full of faith cracking down the middle.
My phone is in my left hand. One word typed. Addressed to Caleb.
Now.
The arena speakers crack to life. A woman’s voice—tearful, halting, talking about her husband. Then Reid’s voice, warm, attentive, the podcast cadence. A therapy session playing at full volume through every speaker in the building.
Then the session shifts. His tone drops.
Goes thick. The clinical edges dissolve.
Her crying stops. Movement. Breathing that changes rhythm.
A gasp that has nothing to do with sadness.
My husband’s voice stripped of every pretense—low, hungry, present in a way he hasn’t been present in our bedroom since before I can remember—saying things to a crying patient that twenty-five thousand people are now hearing in high definition. Come for me, baby.
Ten seconds. Leather creaking. Skin. Breathing that sharpens past the point of ambiguity.
“That’s a LIE!”
A man’s voice from the middle of the house. Loud. Outraged. A believer defending his prophet.
A woman stands. Blonde. She pushes past the knees beside her and half-runs to the aisle, shaking so hard I can see it from the stage, but she’s moving fast—reaching the stairs, climbing them, crossing the stage floor in heels with her jaw set and her eyes locked on the man who just called her a liar.
She reaches the microphone. The recording is still playing underneath her, Reid’s moans filling the arena like an indictment.
“It’s not a lie.” Her voice breaks through the speakers and fills the building like a gunshot. “The woman you just heard on that recording was me. We had an affair. While I was his patient.”
The arena erupts—not applause, something rawer. A roar of shock and fury and twenty-five thousand people’s reality splitting open at the seams. Phones are up everywhere, the darkness blooming with screens.
Forty-five seconds. Caleb cuts the feed. Clean.
The silence that follows is worse than the noise. A sucking, airless void where Reid’s career used to be.
Footsteps behind me. Fast. Heavy. Reid storms onto the stage from the wings where he’d retreated, face crimson, the mask incinerated—every trace of the warm, practiced man gone.
His hand closes around my upper arm, bruising, wrenching me toward him.
Jenna steps back. The microphone catches everything.
“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?”
His breath is hot on my face. His eyes are wild—not the blank nothing from the kitchen, not the motion-sensor smile. Something feral and panicked and cornered, the animal realizing the cage has been locked from the outside.
Twenty-five thousand phones are pointed at us. The livestream is running.
I look at my husband. I smile—the last smile I will ever give him, and unlike every smile I’ve performed in recent years, this one is real.
“Oh, honey. I’m just practicing radical transparency. Isn’t that what you wanted?”