CHAPTER TWO
Martina checked into a beachfront hotel under her maiden name, which she hadn't used in so long the desk clerk had to ask her to spell it again.
She spent the night doing an efficient rotation of crying, shaking, and staring at the ceiling replaying the same four seconds on a loop—Cassidy's blouse, the jersey, the number nineteen—like her brain had decided this was the film it wanted to screen indefinitely, no intermission, questionable concessions.
By morning, her phone told her Paul had already gotten to work.
A text arrived first from Deb, a teammate's wife Martina had spent a decade making small talk with at fundraisers. It was a screenshot, forwarded with a string of horrified emojis, of a message circulating among team staff.
Paul's agent was telling anyone who'd listen that Martina had suffered an "emotional episode" at the arena and damaged team property.
Then a second text, this one from a board member at the foundation, gently relaying that Cassidy had a slightly different version going around—something about an innocent late-night meeting that Martina had misunderstood before turning violent.
Violent.
That was rich, coming from the man who had nearly ripped her car door open.
Paul himself showed up an hour later, freshly showered and dressed for the cameras that weren't there yet. He didn’t beg forgiveness. He didn't so much as flinch.
"It was never supposed to touch our real life," he said, like the affair was a work trip that had simply run long.
"How long," Martina said. But it wasn’t really a question, more of a demand.
"Almost a year."
She waited for something in her chest to break further, but there was apparently a floor to how much a person could shatter in twelve hours, and she'd hit it sometime around the overpass.
Paul laid it out like a business proposal, because to him, it was one: the contract, the endorsements, the front-office role waiting for him after retirement.
All of it depended on the stable, devoted-husband image Martina had spent a decade and a half building brick by photogenic brick.
He proposed she stay publicly married until he retired.
In exchange, he'd end things with Cassidy quietly and give Martina her freedom, eventually, on his schedule.
"Do you love her?" Martina asked.
"Doesn't matter," Paul said, which was somehow worse than yes.
When she said no—flatly, immediately, no negotiation—he was far from impressed. He told her he'd let the team know she'd become unstable, that she might need to get some help. He reminded her, almost gently, that nearly everyone in her life these days belonged to his world first.
He left without raising his voice, but the anger was there all the same, seething under the surface. That was the most frightening part.
Martina sat on the edge of the hotel bed for a long time after the door clicked shut, running an inventory of her own life the way she might check a foundation budget line by line.
Her closest friends, it turned out, were mostly wives and staff who answered to Paul's schedule before their own. Her calendar belonged to galas he headlined. Even her hairdresser had been Paul's PR team's recommendation, back when they'd decided her look needed "softening" for a magazine spread.
Seventeen years, and she couldn't think of a single person in her contacts who didn't owe their invitation to something with Paul's name on it.
Well, except one.
Martina called Martin Lewis, the divorce lawyer three of her foundation friends had quietly recommended over the years, back when quietly recommending a divorce lawyer was just something married women did for each other, like a good dermatologist.
She found his number and called his office, surprised when he personally answered the line.
Martin listened. He didn’t interrupt, which was refreshing. He told her not to go home alone, or release anything publicly—not yet. Paul had a head start on the narrative. She needed proof, and she needed witnesses who weren't paid by the Breakers.
That was when she remembered the arena's security system, upgraded two years ago after a rash of players' wives got followed home by overzealous fans. Gabe Mercer had walked them all through it personally, standing at the front of the room in his understated way, answering every anxious question.
She called him before she could talk herself out of it.
He picked up on the second ring, and something in her voice must have told him everything, because his first words weren't hello.
"Martina. What's wrong."
"Do the cameras cover the captain's corridor?"
A pause. Careful. "Every entrance and exit in that section. Why?"
She didn't answer right away. She looked at the thin cut across her palm, already scabbing, already proof of something.
"I need to see what got recorded last night," she said. "Before Paul finds out it exists."