Chapter 1 - The Dom Pérignon Drop

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My husband kissed his mistress in front of three hundred people while I was thirty-one weeks pregnant.

The Halcyon Foundation gala was being held on the forty-second floor of the Langford Hotel in downtown Chicago. White orchids covered the tables, their heavy scent masking the bitter reality of the room. A jazz quartet played a smooth melody beneath a ceiling of hanging crystal, the notes floating over the heads of our company’s biggest lenders, half the executive board, and three state senators. So were two reporters from the Wall Street Journal, although neither of them had been invited as press.

Then he looked straight at me, his eyes dark and devoid of the warmth I had once loved, and said, “Don’t make this uglier than it needs to be, Avery.”

I didn’t scream.

I didn’t slap him.

I calmly reached for my left hand. I slid the six-carat diamond off my finger. The metal felt cold, heavy with a decade of carefully constructed lies. I placed it gently into Tessa Ward’s champagne glass.

“She can have you,” I said, my voice carrying clearly over the soft jazz.

The entire ballroom went silent. The clinking of silver forks stopped. The murmurs died in the throats of the elite.

Tessa stared down at the massive diamond sinking through the golden bubbles of her Dom Pérignon. She looked like a deer caught in the headlights, her polished corporate smile completely fracturing under the weight of the moment.

Graham’s face changed. Not because I had given away the ring. He expected me to cry. He expected a scene. He expected the emotional, pregnant wife he had been describing to everyone for months.

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But his face drained of color because I was smiling.

And after eleven years of marriage, my husband knew one terrifying thing about me. I only smiled like that when I already knew the answer. I only smiled like that when the trap had already snapped shut, and my prey just hadn't felt the steel teeth yet.