Never fake a divorce with your hidden billionaire wife

I balanced two grocery bags on my hip and pushed the front door open with my shoulder.

"Kevin? I'm home early."

The marble entryway swallowed my voice. No answer. I set the bags on the console table. A sprig of thyme had escaped through the paper and laid itself across my knuckles, green and bright.

Five years married. Three of those, I'd cooked on Saturdays. Kevin had been sleeping at the office for weeks now — red eyes, wrinkled shirts, two text messages a day if I was lucky. Tonight I was fixing that. Filet mignon. The Bordeaux he liked. Two candles in the silver holders his mother had given us before she drove off the bridge.

Then I heard it.

A woman's laugh. Upstairs.

Soft, then sharper, then a moan that came down through the ceiling and landed somewhere under my ribs.

I froze with my hand on the banister.

"Kevin, slow down. Oh, God."

That voice wasn't mine.

A man's grunt answered. Low. Familiar. The exact pitch he used to make against my throat at three in the morning, back when he still came home.

I climbed two stairs before my body caught up with my brain. Three more. Our bedroom door — *our* bedroom door — sat cracked open, and pale lamplight cut a yellow line across the hallway carpet.

I didn't push the door.

I didn't have to.

"What about her?" the woman asked, breathless and lazy, like she was asking what to order for dinner. "She'll be home soon, won't she?"

"Don't worry about that stupid woman." Kevin laughed. Actually laughed. "She already signed the divorce papers. I'll marry you in a few days."

I put my palm flat against the wall.

The wallpaper was textured, thin vertical ribs, and I felt every single one of them under my hand. *I am going to be sick on this carpet*, I thought, very clearly, like reading a sentence off a page.

"A few days?" The woman giggled. "Promise me, baby."

"Sweetheart, I've been waiting two years to say it out loud."

Two years.

The number slid into me like a key into a lock I hadn't known was on my chest. Two years. We'd spent our third anniversary in Capri. I'd been pregnant six weeks and lost it on the flight back, and he had held my hand in the airplane bathroom, and he had *cried*.

My knees went first.

I slid down the wall an inch at a time until the carpet pressed against the back of my thighs. I couldn't hear the bed anymore. I couldn't hear anything except a high thin sound that I finally understood was my own breath whistling through my teeth. There was a smell rising from the grocery bag downstairs — thyme, lemon, butcher paper — and somehow it had become the smell of a stupid woman who didn't know.

I bit down on the side of my hand to stay quiet.

If they came out and saw me,