Chapter 2

In the locked bathroom, I opened the Calculator app on Dante's secret phone and found a password screen hiding behind its decimal button. I entered our wedding date, because even his betrayal was concealed beneath a memory he knew I treasured.

The first messages were eleven months old. Tessa had written that I suspected nothing, and Dante had instructed her to keep it that way while I was upstairs injecting hormones into my stomach.

Photographs showed them in Paris, Miami, Aspen, Sicily, and on the yacht where Dante once told me he was working. In one picture Tessa wore his shirt, while in another she slept in the hotel bed where he had claimed to be negotiating a deal.

The bank records hurt more than the photographs. Dante had sent her fifty thousand dollars for shopping, another hundred and twenty thousand for an apartment, and five hundred thousand dollars marked FOR OUR BABY.

The corporate payment authorization bore the signature I had watched Dante use on documents he never let me read. He had not only bought Tessa's comfort; he had made other people's business accounts carry its cost, and those people might listen when a wife named the exact sum.

I enlarged the company name and recognized a harbor project Dante had once described as the family pension's safest investment. If its directors had been made to finance his private promises, the date and signature would matter to people who had never cared whom he kissed.

I remembered begging him to attend my second egg retrieval because I did not want to wake alone from anesthesia. He had called my fear childish and left for a meeting, and I had apologized to him.

Then I found an audio recording. Tessa mocked the injections and the crying, while Dante described me as useful because the wives and politicians' families trusted me.

"Sienna makes me look legitimate," Dante said on the recording, his voice casual enough to chill me.

"The perfect-husband routine is public relations," Dante added.

Tessa asked whether I would leave when their child arrived. Dante replied that I had stayed after the miscarriage, and that I would tolerate almost anything if he made leaving feel like losing him.

I stopped the recording before either of them could say another word. My hands shook for five seconds against the marble counter, and then I began collecting evidence.

I copied the messages, photographs, transfers, and audio into an encrypted archive. Payments from Moretti companies appeared among the records, proving Dante had spent family money on a private affair.

The betrayal was no longer only a reason to leave my husband. If the family's accountants and trustees saw what he had diverted, the money could threaten the authority he guarded more carefully than our marriage.

I sent a message to Rebecca Shaw, the attorney I had trusted before becoming Mrs. Moretti. I asked for a divorce lawyer, a forensic accountant, and discretion, then warned her that Dante did not know I intended to leave.

The bathroom door shook beneath Dante's fist while the evidence of his affair sat only inches from the man who had hidden it.

"Open the door, Sienna," Dante said, and Tessa's sweet voice followed him, telling me everyone was waiting.

I hid the phone inside my purse and checked my face in the mirror. My lipstick was perfect, my child was still a secret, and the evidence of eleven months of lies was already beyond Dante's reach.

When I unlocked the door, Tessa smiled as though she had come to rescue me. I smiled back, because they could celebrate for one more night while I learned where Dante's power really came from.