Chapter 1 - The Bracelet on the Floor
For six months, my husband had barely touched me.
Then on a Friday night when his brother Ethan was working an overnight shift at Greenwich Hospital, I found a packet of performance pills inside Julian’s dinner jacket.
I held it up when he came downstairs.
“Six months you wouldn’t touch your wife—but suddenly you need these when your brother works nights?”
Julian’s face changed.
Not guilt.
Panic.
He snatched my wrist, twisted the packet from my fingers, and shoved past me toward the east hallway.
Toward Sienna’s room.
My sister-in-law opened the door before he knocked.
I knew then.
I followed ten minutes later after hearing something crash.
Julian was on the floor beside the bed, pale and barely responsive. Sienna stood wrapped in a white sheet, shouting that he had suddenly collapsed.
His phone flashed on the bedside table beside an expensive silver bracelet.
I reached for it.
Sienna lunged.
“Don’t touch that phone,” she snapped. “Your marriage isn’t the only thing Julian paid me to destroy.”
I shoulder-blocked her away and grabbed it.
Eleanor, my mother-in-law, rushed in just as I unlocked the screen with the code Julian had used for years.
The banking app was open.
Repeated transfers to Sienna.
$7,500.
$12,000.
$9,500.
Some dating back eleven months—months before the affair appeared to have started.
I looked at Eleanor.
She recognized the transactions.
“You knew?”
She reached for the phone.
I jerked away.
Sienna dropped beside me and grabbed my wrist.
“The affair was never the secret, Clara,” she said. “Julian was paying me to keep his mother out of prison.”
Her bracelet slipped loose and fell onto the rug.
A dark-blue enamel crest was engraved inside it.
The same crest appeared in a photograph open behind the banking app.
A much younger Eleanor stood beside a tall dark-haired man wearing the identical crest.
He looked so much like Ethan that, for one sickening second, I thought the photograph had been taken yesterday.
Except the date stamped in the corner was 1987.
Ethan had not been born until 1990.
Eleanor saw what I was looking at.
May you like
Her face drained.
And suddenly the affair looked like the smallest betrayal in the room.
