I Filmed My Husband Cheating, So I Married the Brother He Fears novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Locked Out

Colby freezes her accounts, changes the locks and has his father's lawyers threaten her museum job; Imogen takes Nathaniel's terms and he signs a second page she may not read.

"No," I said, and I kept his jacket on.

Nathaniel nodded once and let it go.

"Where do you want to go tonight?" he asked.

"Bridget's. Take me there and drive away."

He opened the car door for me, and I got in because the rain was coming down harder.

He didn't say a word the whole way across the river.

At her building he handed me a card with a phone number and nothing else on it.

"Colby moves fast," he said. "Check your accounts in the morning."

I took the card to make him stop holding it out.

Bridget opened her door in scrubs and a sleep mask pushed up into her red hair.

She looked at my wet dress, at the man's jacket, and at the black car pulling away from the curb.

"Whose jacket is that?" she asked.

"Colby's brother's."

"The murderer?"

"That's what they say."

"Okay," Bridget said, and pulled me inside by the sleeve.

"I'm putting the kettle on and you're telling me everything."

"And I'm not allowed to scream until you're done."

I told her everything.

She screamed anyway, quietly, into a couch cushion.

Then she took my phone, found the video's backup in my cloud, and watched thirty seconds of it with her mouth open.

"Bethany," she said. "She cried at your wedding. I watched her do it."

"I know."

"I'm going to key her car."

"You are not going to key her car."

"I'm going to think about keying her car very seriously," Bridget said, and put a blanket over me.

I fell asleep on her couch with the card from Nathaniel in my fist.

My phone woke me at seven.

The first alert was from the bank.

Your joint account has been closed at the request of the primary holder.

The second said my credit card had been cancelled.

The third was from the museum's director, long and polite.

It said that, after events at a private dinner now online, I was on leave until further notice.

Events online.

I opened my feed with my thumb shaking.

Bethany had posted a photo of herself in tears, holding a candle.

The caption said: Sending love to Colby and his family. Some people need help more than they need the truth.

It already had nine thousand likes.

Under the photo was a clip of me at the head of the dining table, with my hand out.

They had cut out the video I played, so all you could see was a woman in a wet dress shouting at a family.

"They cut it," Bridget said, reading over my shoulder. "They cut out the part where he's the problem."

"Colby's lawyers."

"Colby's lawyers or his father's, same thing."

I called a locksmith friend of Bridget's and asked him to meet me at the townhouse so I could get my things.

At ten, I stood on my own front step with a duffel bag and a key that wouldn't turn.

The lock had been changed overnight.

Through the front window, I could see my grandmother's lamp on the hall table.

A security guard stepped out of the neighboring doorway.

He told me, politely, that Mr. Lathrop's instructions were to send my belongings to my lawyer.

"I don't have a lawyer," I said.

"Then I'd get one, ma'am," said the guard.

I sat down on the front step.

An hour later, a courier handed me a thin envelope from a law firm with four names in its header.

Inside was a letter that barred me from the museum's donor rooms and from contacting the Lathrop family.

It also barred me from publishing the video, on pain of a defamation suit.

I read it twice, and then I took out Nathaniel's card.

His penthouse was on the top floor of a glass building on the river, and the elevator opened straight into his living room.

He was standing at the window with a folder.

He didn't turn when I came in.

"Colby has frozen your accounts, locked you out and threatened your museum," he said. "Is that the list?"

"You knew."

"I know my family."

"What are your terms?" I asked.

He turned, and there were shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there at the curb.

"One year," he said. "You live here as my wife. We are married in public, before witnesses, and my father sees it."

"And in private?"

"In private, you have a room and a door that locks. I don't touch you."

"I'd like that in writing."

"You can have it in writing." He slid the folder across a long table. "Read every page."

I read every page.

It was a short contract, and it said one year.

It said I kept my name, my work and my savings.

It said his lawyers would answer every letter Colby sent me.

It said I could end it any time before the dinner if I walked out.

"One more," Nathaniel said. "You don't ask me about my first wife. Not once."

"Why not?"

"That's the price."

I looked at him for a long moment.

He signed the last page with a black pen.

Then he turned over a second sheet that I hadn't seen and signed that one too.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Mine," he said. "Not yours."

I could have pushed.

Instead I thought of Colby's face while Gerald told a guard to throw me out.

I thought of the lock that wouldn't turn.

It was almost midnight.

I took the pen.

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