Marcus Sterling needed seventy-two hours.

I spent them pretending.

I went to work. I ran my meetings. I smiled at Flynn over dinner while he filmed himself plating salmon for two million strangers. *My wife works so hard. The least I can do is feed her soul.* He tilted the ring light. He checked his hair in the phone screen. Then he posted it and tapped the screen, waiting for the likes to load.

I ate the salmon. It tasted like nothing.

On Thursday night, Chelsea came over with her steel tumbler of cold brew and a flash drive. She didn't take her coat off. She sat in my car in the driveway with the engine running, like we were about to rob a bank.

"Sealed file," she said. "Password is your college dorm number. Don't open it in the house."

"How bad is it?"

She looked at the windshield. The rain had stopped. The street was black and shiny.

"Layne. Just read it."

So I read it. On my laptop, in the front seat, with Chelsea's hand on my arm.

A marriage certificate. King County. *Flynn Robert Cunningham and Elyse Marie Medina.* Dated twelve years ago.

A divorce filing, eighteen months before I met him. No lawyers on her side. No fight. No splitting of anything. Marcus had left a note in the margin: *Uncontested in eleven days. Nobody divorces that clean unless they're not really divorcing.*

Bank records. Transfers from our joint account to an account in Elyse's name. Every month. For ten years. Small at first. Then not small.

And location data. Little red dots on a map. Flynn's phone and Elyse's phone, sitting in the same spot. Tuesday afternoons. Saturday mornings. Twice a week, every week, for a decade.

Saturday mornings. He always said he was at the farmers market. He always came home with flowers for me.

"He married you for your salary," Chelsea said quietly. "You were a business plan."

I closed the laptop. My ring was turning on my finger again. Round and round.

"Don't go in there tonight," Chelsea said. "We need a lawyer first. We need a plan."

"I need to see his face."

"Layne—"

"I need to see his face, Chels."

---

Flynn was in his home office, editing a video. Soft jazz played from his speaker. The room smelled like his cologne and new leather.

"Got a minute?" I asked.

He smiled without looking up. "For you, babe? Always."

I shut the door behind me. The click was loud this time.

I didn't yell. I didn't cry. I did what I do in every board meeting. I laid the pages flat on his desk, one by one. The marriage certificate. The divorce filing. The bank transfers, with the dates highlighted in yellow. The map with its little red dots.

"I have some questions," I said. "Let's start with the marriage certificate."

He glanced down. Then he leaned back in his chair and laughed. Easy. Warm.

"Wow. Okay. You hired someone? That's kind of sweet, honestly. Babe, Elyse and I were young. It was nothing. I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to feel insecure."

"You sent her money every month for ten years."

"Charity." He spread his manicured hands. "You know I have a big heart."

"Saturday mornings," I said. "You brought me flowers."

His smile stayed. But his eyes went still.

"Tuesday the fourteenth. Two to five p.m. Her apartment in Renton." I tapped the yellow line. "Saturday the eighteenth. Nine to noon. Same place. Should I keep going? I have ten years of these."

I counted in my head. Old habit. I time every hard conversation.

He lasted about ninety seconds.

Then his arm swept across the desk. Paper flew everywhere. It slid across the floor and under the bookshelf. Before I could move, he grabbed my phone out of my hand and threw it at the wall. It hit hard. The screen cracked like ice on a puddle.

I didn't flinch. I wanted to. I didn't.

"You think a piece of paper means anything?" His voice was low and ugly. A voice I had never heard. "I own this situation."

"You own nothing," I said. "I paid for all of it."

He stood up. Then, slowly, he smiled again. That was worse.

"Sit down, Layne."

"No."

"Fine. Stand." He turned his laptop toward me. "But you're going to want to see this."

A folder. *L_Final.* He clicked it open.

It was full of pictures. Dozens of them. They were naked, explicit. And every single one had my face.

My face from our wedding. My face from my company headshot. My face from last Christmas, laughing at something Brodie said. Stitched onto bodies that weren't mine, doing things I'd never done. The lighting matched. The skin tones matched. It was perfect. It was horrible.

My stomach turned over. I tasted bile in the back of my throat.

"AI is incredible these days," Flynn said. "Took me one afternoon."

"What do you want?"

"Simple." He held up one finger. "You sign over everything. The house. The condo. The accounts. Your stock." A second finger. "You leave. I'll give you ten thousand dollars and the old Honda. That's generous." A third. "And you never, ever talk about this marriage. Not to a reporter. Not to a lawyer. Not to that loud friend of yours."

"And if I don't?"

He scrolled through the folder slowly, like he was showing me vacation photos.

"Then these go to your CEO. Your board. Every one of your LinkedIn contacts. Every platform you use for work." He closed the laptop gently. "By Monday morning, no one in this city will hire you."

The jazz kept playing. Soft. Sweet. Wrong.

I looked at my broken phone on the floor. I looked at the papers under the bookshelf. I looked at the man I had slept beside for ten years.

He didn't know it yet. But I had a copy of every page.

And I was already counting again.

I opened my mouth to answer. Flynn held up one hand.

"Wait. I'm not done." He sat back down and crossed his legs. He looked almost bored. "You should know what you're really fighting for."

"I know what I'm fighting for."

"Do you?" He tilted his head. "Brodie's not yours."

The jazz kept playing. A saxophone climbed up high, then slid back down.

"Don't," I said.

"Remember the C-section? You lost a lot of blood. You were out for almost a day." He said it like he was reading a recipe. Smooth. Practiced. "Elyse delivered the same week. Mom knew a nurse. When you woke up, there was a baby boy in your arms. You cried. It was honestly kind of cute."

My hands were flat on the desk. I kept them there.

"Where is she?"

He blinked. "Who?"

"You said Brodie isn't mine. So I had a baby. Where is she?"

Something flickered in his face. He'd expected me to scream about Brodie first. He'd planned for that.

"A girl. Six pounds something." He shrugged. "I owed some people a lot of money, Layne. She was gone before you woke up. Debt cleared."

"Who has her?"

"That's not part of the deal."

"Who has her, Flynn?"

"Her name's Brynleigh, if that helps." He smiled. "The buyer picked it. Not me."

Then he leaned forward. Just a little. The same way he leans toward his ring light. Waiting for the perfect shot. Waiting for me to break so he could watch.

I gave him nothing.

I bent down and picked my cracked phone off the floor. I slid it into my pocket.

"I need the bathroom," I said.

"Take your time." He turned back to his video. "You've got until Monday."

---

I locked the guest bathroom door. I turned the faucet all the way up. The water roared into the sink.

Then I came apart.

I pressed a towel over my mouth and slid down the cabinet until I hit the cold tile. My whole body shook. No sound came out. Not one.

I saw it all at once. *You Are My Sunshine*, sung a thousand times in the dark. Sandwiches cut into stars. The thermometer at 3 a.m., 103 and climbing, his hot little hand in mine. The red-eye from Austin. Every single one of those nights, I gave to a boy who wasn't mine.

And somewhere out there was a girl. Ten years old now. Ten birthdays I didn't know about.

Did anyone sing to her?

Did anyone hold her when she was sick?

I bit the towel until my jaw ached.

The water kept running. I let it.

Forty minutes later, I stood up. I splashed cold water on my face. I looked in the mirror. My skin was dry. My eyes were clear and still, like a lake in the dead of winter.

I turned off the faucet.

I walked down the hall. Past Brodie's room. I heard the beeps of his game through the door. I didn't stop.

Outside, the air was wet and sharp. At the curb, there was a storm drain with a rusty iron grate. I twisted my ring one last time. It came off easier than I thought it would.

I dropped it. I heard a tiny clink, then nothing.

I kept walking.

Chelsea's car was still idling in the driveway. The headlights cut through the mist. I got in and shut the door.

"Layne. What did he—"

"Drive," I said. "I'll tell you at your place."

She looked at my bare finger. Then she drove.

---

Chelsea's apartment was small and smelled like coffee. She tossed a blanket at me. I didn't use it. We sat at her kitchen table with two laptops open, and I told her everything.

When I said the word *sold*, she set her tumbler down. Very slowly. Very carefully. Like it might explode.

"Okay," she said. "He's going to prison."

"First he's going to try to empty everything."

"Then we move faster." She cracked her knuckles. "Give me your logins. All of them."

We worked until the sky outside went from black to gray.

The transfers to Elyse came first. Ten years. Every month. Chelsea added them up and turned the screen toward me.

Eight hundred and forty thousand dollars.

Then Virginia's card. Cashmere. Gold bracelets. A spa week in Scottsdale I'd never heard of. A "medical consultation" that turned out to be a jewelry store.

"She told me she needed help with her heart medication," I said.

"Her heart's fine," Chelsea said. "It's made of gold. Eighteen karat."

Then she found the last piece. A company called Hearth & Home Media LLC. Registered to a P.O. box in Tacoma. Every sponsorship payment Flynn ever got went there. Kitchen brands. Meal kits. A mattress company.

Not one dollar ever touched our accounts.

"He told me the sponsorships barely paid for the ring light," I said.

"He lied." Chelsea didn't look up. "Shocking."

At four in the morning, she called a partner at her firm. She talked fast and low, all legal words. *Ex parte. Dissipation of assets. Irreparable harm.* Then she hung up.

"Emergency motion to freeze everything," she said. "It gets filed at seven. A judge sees it by noon. After that, if he moves a single dime, it's contempt of court."

"And the pictures?"

"Let me worry about the pictures." She didn't look worried. She looked hungry.

My cracked phone buzzed on the table. One message. From Flynn.

*Monday, babe. Don't make me wait.*

I didn't answer.

I pulled a sticky note off Chelsea's pad. I wrote one word on it and pressed it to the edge of my screen.

*Brynleigh.*

Then I started counting again.