The Price of His Nineteen-Year-Old Mistress

My husband, Christopher Kramer, was Manhattan's most notorious playboy, famous for his seasonal affairs with nineteen-year-old girls. For five years, I believed I was the exception who had finally tamed him.

That illusion shattered when my father needed a bone marrow transplant. The perfect donor was a nineteen-year-old named Iris. On the day of the surgery, my father died because Christopher chose to stay in bed with her instead of taking her to the hospital.

His betrayal didn't stop there. When an elevator plunged, he pulled her out first and left me to fall. When a chandelier crashed, he shielded her body with his and stepped over me as I lay bleeding. He even stole my dead father's last gift to me and gave it to her.

Through it all, he called me selfish and ungrateful, completely oblivious to the fact that my father was already gone.

So I quietly signed the divorce papers and vanished. The day I left, he texted me.

"Good news, I found another donor for your dad. Let's go schedule the surgery."

Chapter 1

Emily Porter's POV:

My father died because my husband, Christopher Kramer, chose to comfort his new favorite, a nineteen-year-old girl, instead of ensuring she made it to the hospital to donate the bone marrow that would have saved his life.

In Manhattan, Christopher Kramer was a name that glittered like the city's skyline. He was the golden-boy heir to the Kramer real estate dynasty, a man whose life was chronicled in gossip columns and business journals with equal fervor.

His reputation preceded him. He had a specific, almost clinical preference: young, innocent college girls, usually around nineteen.

They were a seasonal bloom in his life, arriving with the fall semester and withering by spring break. These girls, often scholarship students dazzled by his charisma and wealth, would be lavished with gifts, paraded at parties, and then, just as quickly, discarded. Their tenures were as predictable as the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace-a brief, glittering spectacle, followed by an abrupt and final exit.

The city buzzed with stories of his conquests. The NYU art student who was given a gallery show and then ghosted. The Columbia literature major who received a first-edition collection of classics before finding her apartment keys no longer worked. It was a cruel, well-oiled machine, and Manhattan watched with a detached sort of fascination.

Then, there was me.

I was Emily Porter, a gig-economy worker juggling three jobs to put myself through a community college program. I wasn't from their world of penthouses and pedigrees. I was from a world of late-night shifts, instant noodles, and the quiet, fierce love of my father, a retired high school English teacher.

And I, too, was nineteen when Christopher Kramer' s world collided with mine.

The force of his attention was terrifying and intoxicating. It was a whirlwind romance that scandalized Manhattan's elite and left my own small world breathless.

The playboy, the prodigal son, was suddenly, impossibly, reformed.