Chapter 2

My aunt arrived at the hospital late the next morning and insisted on staying with Mom while I went home to shower and collect her insurance documents.

Maxwell did not return until noon.

He walked through the door smelling of whiskey and the sweet perfume Arabella always wore. Exhaustion from the previous night's celebration was written across his face.

He loosened his tie and glanced at me.

"You stayed at the hospital all night?"

I said nothing.

He frowned. "The doctors said your mother was stable, didn't they? I know you were scared, but you can't act like the world is ending every time something happens."

He rubbed his forehead impatiently.

"The company's cash flow has been tight. You need to be realistic about how much treatment we can afford."

He did not ask how I had raised the surgery money.

He did not apologize for breaking his promise.

Ten minutes later, he was asleep in our bedroom.

I stood beside the bed and looked at the man I had loved for five years. There was no guilt on his face.

I quietly walked into his study.

If the company was really struggling, I wanted to know how he had found $30,000 for Arabella's birthday.

His laptop was still connected to the cloud account he used for work. I knew the password; it was the same one he used for every device in the house.

A folder hidden among his project files caught my attention.

Arabella Birthday Album.

My breath stopped.

Inside were ninety-nine photographs arranged for a photo book Maxwell had designed as her birthday gift.

The first showed them together on a private hotel balcony.

Then came island sunsets, ski resorts, business-class flights, and candlelit hotel rooms. In almost every picture, they were kissing or holding each other.

Each page included a date and a message from Maxwell.

The oldest photograph had been taken four days before our wedding.

They had never broken up.

For five years, while I believed we were building a life together, my husband had been traveling around the world with another woman.

Then I noticed one photograph dated October 14.

I remembered that night clearly. My mother had suffered her first stroke, and I had sat alone with her in the emergency room. Maxwell had told me his flight home from Chicago had been canceled.

But in the photograph, he was standing with Arabella in a Napa vineyard, his arms wrapped around her waist.

Beneath it, he had written:

"No matter who I marry, you will always be the woman I love."

I stared at those words until the screen blurred.

Then I opened our joint credit-card statements.

Luxury hotels. Designer handbags. Jewelry. Airline tickets. Transfers to Arabella.

In five years, he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from our marital accounts on her.

Yet when my mother needed surgery, he had told me the company was short on cash.

I photographed every page, preserving the dates and account details. Then I downloaded the statements and sent copies of everything to Claire.

I did not delete a single file.

I did not want Maxwell to know what I had found.

A few minutes later, Claire replied:

"Do not confront him yet. If these payments came from marital assets, he has a much bigger problem than divorce."

I closed the laptop and returned it to exactly where I had found it.

Maxwell was still snoring in our bedroom.

He had no idea that while he slept, I had collected everything I needed to destroy the lie he called our marriage.