My Husband Cheated With The Nanny (She Gets Revenge #19)

Chapter 1

PEEKABOO!

My knee pops as I squat in the Target baby aisle, reaching for the last two packages of diapers on the bottom shelf. My phone buzzes in my back pocket. Mitch. He’s been fussy all morning so I pull up the nursery cam to make sure he’s okay.

I watch as our nanny, Ana, enters the nursery and leans over the crib, adjusting Mitch’s blanket. My shoulders loosen. She’s checking on him. She’s good at taking care of him.

Then Preston walks in behind her.

He puts his hand on the small of her back.

My breath stops as I try to figure out what the hell is going on and if Preston is inviting a lawsuit of some kind.

But my mouth drops open as Ana leans into it, turns around, and her arms go around his neck.

Through the speaker, her voice, tinny and clear: “Finally. I thought she’d never leave. ”

My knees almost give out. I grab the shelf.

Ana glances up at the camera. “What about—”

Preston shrugs. “She doesn’t check the notifications when I’m home.” He reaches up and taps the camera housing. “I’ll move it so it won’t get us. Relax.”

I watch as he moves the camera so that it faces the wall, but he doesn’t realize the camera now faces a mirror. I have to fight the urge to sob in the middle of Target.

Preston’s mouth is on hers and his hands are in her hair and hers are pulling his shirt out of his pants. They’re frantic, grabbing at each other like horny teenagers.

Her top comes off. His shirt comes off. He walks her backward toward the nursing glider—the one I picked out when I was seven months pregnant, the one where I nursed Mitch every night for four months—and she drops into it and pulls him down on top of her.

Then I watch my husband fuck the nanny in my baby’s nursery.

Through the speaker I can hear Mitch crying—that high, shaking wail he does when nobody comes.

“God, I missed you,” Ana says. “I’ve been thinking about this since breakfast.”

Preston laughs. Low, easy. The laugh he used to save for me. “Yeah?”

“Mm-hmm. Every time she asked me to do one more thing—unload the dishwasher, fold the laundry—I kept thinking, just leave already.”

Mitch’s crying gets louder.

“Should we—” Ana starts.

“He’s fine. He’ll tire himself out.”

My son is screaming in his crib and neither of them even looks at him.

The fluorescent lights above me are buzzing so loud I can feel them behind my eyes and my stomach lurches and I shove the cart into the shelf and walk as fast as I can through the store without running.

Past the checkout lanes, past the Starbucks, through the automatic doors.

The parking lot air hits my face and I make it to my car and barely get the door open before everything in my stomach hits the asphalt.

A woman walking past stops. “Oh honey—are you okay?”

I wave her off without lifting my head.

I drop into the driver’s seat and wipe my mouth with a napkin from the console.

My hands won’t stop shaking. The acid taste coats my tongue and the back of my throat and every time I close my eyes I hear it—Finally.

I thought she’d never leave—and the glider rocking, and Mitch wailing while neither of them stopped.

I sit there for I don’t know how long. My brain keeps looping back to the same image—Ana’s arms around his neck, Preston kicking the door shut, the glider moving. And Mitch. My baby screaming while his father told the nanny he’d tire himself out.

What the fuck do I do now?

The garage door grinds open and I sit there gripping the steering wheel until my fingers ache. My chest feels packed with wet concrete. Every breath takes effort, like my lungs forgot how to do this on their own.

I hear Preston’s voice through the mudroom door before I open it—muffled, that smooth cadence he uses on work calls. Behind a closed door. I can’t make out the words, but the tone is easy, relaxed. Like nothing happened today.

I step into the kitchen. Ana is at the table with Abby and Mitch.

Abby is eating goldfish crackers one at a time, lining them up on the table and biting their heads off with great ceremony.

Mitch is in his high chair. His face is still blotchy—that raw, mottled pink he gets after he’s been crying hard.

His eyes are swollen and red-rimmed. He sees me and his lower lip pushes out and his arms go straight up.

I cross the kitchen so fast Ana startles in her chair. I pull Mitch against my chest and his fingers grab a fistful of my shirt and I bury my face in his hair—milk, sweat, that fading baby-skin smell—and my throat squeezes shut so hard I can’t swallow.

I’m holding him too tight. He squirms against me and I force my arms to loosen. My eyes are burning and I blink hard because if I cry right now, in this kitchen, in front of this woman, it’s over.

“How was he today?”

My voice sounds normal. I don’t know how that’s possible.

Ana smiles. “Perfect. He’s such a good boy.”

“Was he fussy at all? His face looks like he’s been crying.”

“Oh, just a little. You know how he gets when he’s teething. But he calmed right down.”

She’s lying. She’s looking right at me and lying. I watched her stand three feet from his crib while he screamed and she didn’t touch him, didn’t pick him up, didn’t even look at him, and now she’s telling me he calmed right down.

“Great.” My jaw aches from how hard I’m clenching it. “Thanks, Ana. Same time tomorrow?”

“Of course!” She gathers her bag, waves at Abby. “Bye-bye, sweet girl!”

Abby waves a goldfish at her. “Bye, Ana! You didn’t finish our picture.”

“We’ll finish tomorrow, okay?”

“You always say that.”

Ana laughs and heads for the front door.

It opens and closes and then she’s gone, and I’m standing in my kitchen holding my son, staring at the spot where she was sitting.

The rage comes up so hot and fast it scares me.

My arms tighten around Mitch and he fusses and I kiss his forehead. “Sorry, buddy. Mama’s here.”

Preston’s office door opens down the hall. His shoes on the hardwood—that unhurried, confident walk. He comes into the kitchen scrolling his phone, glances up like I’m part of the furniture.

“Hey. You get the diapers?”

“Still in the car. I’ll grab them in a minute.”

“Cool.” Back to his phone. He opens the fridge and grabs a sparkling water without looking at me, without touching Mitch, without even glancing at our son’s blotchy, tear-swollen face. He already knows why Mitch looks like that. He was there. He was in the room.

“Did you check on Mitch at all today?”

He looks up from his phone. “Hmm? No, I was on calls all afternoon. That’s what we have Ana for.” He takes a drink and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why?”

“No reason. He just looks like he had a rough day.”

“He’s teething. Ana said he was fine.”

Ana said he was fine. Preston says Ana said he was fine. Everybody in this house is telling me my son was fine while I watched him scream on my phone screen in the Target baby aisle.

“Abby, you finish your snack?”

“Almost, Daddy.” She holds up a goldfish. “This one’s the queen. She doesn’t get eaten.”

“Lucky queen.” He’s already walking back to his office.

I put Mitch in his playpen and set up Abby with her coloring books and tell her I’ll start dinner in a few minutes. Then I walk down the hall to the nursery.

The door is open. The nursing glider has been pushed back to its usual spot, the cushion pressed flat. Like nothing happened in it.

I look up at the camera. The lens is aimed at the far wall, just like it was on the feed.

She doesn’t check the notifications when I’m home.

He was almost right. If Mitch hadn’t been fussy today, if I hadn’t pulled up the app, I might not have noticed for weeks.

The dresser mirror is directly across the room, and in the reflection I can see the whole nursery—including the glider.

He moved the camera and didn’t even think to check where he pointed it.

Abby’s voice floats down the hall. “Mommy? Can I have juice?”

“One minute, baby.”

I close the nursery door. I press my hand flat against it, then harder, like I can seal shut everything that happened behind it.

My other hand goes over my mouth because the sound building in my chest is not a sound my children can hear.

It’s not a sound Preston gets to hear. It pushes up through my ribs and fills my throat and I press my hand tighter and breathe through my nose until the pressure backs off enough that I can unclench my jaw.