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Chapter1
“What wouldyou do if you ever caught your wife cheating?”
It was the game of hypotheticals Victor and his partners always played between long, boring meetings. They usually started off ridiculous, like, what would you do if the pizza delivery guy handed you your pizza and you realized he was wearing no pants.
They always came around to cheating.
Maybe it was because between the three of them, it was the worst thing any of them could come up with.
It was Victor’s worst nightmare. But not because he thought Alice was some great, destined love of his life or anything like that.
He’d met her like most of everyone in his social circle met their partners: at some charity gala, looking suitably bored and willing to crack jokes at the speaker’s expense. She invited herself up to his room, and they called room service up to the suite to eat and fuck until they couldn’t stay awake any longer.
Most of the time, those liaisons didn’t go past noon. And for him, most of those liaisons never started. He was unsteady on his feet at the best of times, though his net worth tended to be very appealing to plenty of women at those functions who were willing to look past his odd gait.
But the ones who did make it up to his hotel room usually stopped the moment he took his trousers down and they saw the braces on his legs. They never did ask, and in all honesty, he probably would have never explained himself. It was all a bunch of medical jargon he couldn’t pronounce himself, and none of them would actually care.
But his little tryst with Alice had been different. She hadn’t looked down at his feet when he walked over. Their conversation carried past lunch at the wharf and into dinner at Mood 52 after he called in a favor from the chef. She wasn’t particularly impressed by that move, considering her father was in politics and was one of those generational political Americans with money that could be traced back to the Revolution. But she had smiled at him and ordered the cheapest appetizer on the menu like that was meant to be funny.
She laughed at his sorry attempt to make jokes—something he had to actively work on because his real humor wasn’t something most people found amusing. He was dry and sarcastic but hadn’t mastered the tone enough to let people in on the fact that he wasn’t serious.
Mostly.
That night, he did take her back up to his suite. She saw his orthotics strapped to his calves, asked if his legs hurt when he took them off, then proceeded to mount and ride him with short, perfunctory rolls of her hips, both hands pressed to his pecs.
There was no kissing—at least, not while they were fucking. She let him taste her lips when he walked her to the door, and she was the one who called first, three days later, to invite him to a polo match.
She didn’t reallygethim, but she let him live his life and work his job and didn’t make too many demands on his time. And when he told her the only thing that he wanted from her—his only real hard line—was for her to be faithful, she just kissed him and smiled.
He took that her telling him not to worry, or at least something like it.
He most definitelydidn’ttake it as the equivalent of her patting him on the head and saying, “Oh, sweetie, that’s cute. I’m going to fuck your best friend.”
“What would you do if you ever caught your wife cheating?”
During the game, he used to say he’d stand there quietly until she noticed him, and then he’d verbally devastate them both until she was sobbing and begging for forgiveness. And he really believed that at the time.
When he was faced with the reality of it, he threw up on his shoes.
To be fair, she wasn’t his wife yet, but their wedding was planned. It was two weeks away. The honeymoon was booked. All the deposits were made. Guests were invited. They’d tasted food and had chosen their cake. They’d picked ice sculptures with swans on them carved by some guy who said they would stand without melting for seven hours.
Now he stood, watching her and Charlie, wondering if he should light the match and burn it to the ground.
Or, he could save the future marriage and pretend like his so-called best friend wasn’t balls-deep inside the one person Victor actually thought he was going to spend the rest of his life with.
The solution was simple. It just felt like shit.
He ignored them as Alice stuttered and Charlie tried to scramble from the sheets. The pain was something he didn’t really understand, so he didn’t know how to process it. He just turned in his soiled, three-thousand-dollar custom Gucci loafers she’d convinced him to buy and left the building.
Neither one of them followed him that far.
Victor didn’t remember hailing a cab. He didn’t remember giving directions to anywhere. But suddenly, he was standing in front of the lobby of the Belle Azure with a confused-looking bellhop who had been looking for bags that didn’t exist.
His ears were ringing—at least, he thought that’s what the buzzing was until he realized it was his phone in his pocket. He felt sick again and stared down at the smudges on his loafers. Was he going to vomit in front of all these people too?
He finally checked his phone and saw it was Emil—his second oldest friend, if he could call anyone in his life a friend after this because surely—surely—they all knew.
He answered without really thinking.
