A Stranger Told Me My Husband Cheated, So We Cheated Back novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Thursday at Noon
Over lunch a stranger tells Jo her husband is sleeping with his wife; she follows him to a hotel door and watches it happen, and the other woman smiles at her in the mirror.
Nolan Draper had asked for twenty minutes about "the lease," so I came to lunch with an apology ready.
I had rehearsed it in the car, still in my purple scrubs, with a parking ticket flapping under my wiper.
Corley's gave us a window table, and he had already ordered me a water with lemon.
He owned the building that held my husband's second gym.
I had shaken his hand at two ribbon cuttings, and both times he had looked at me a beat longer than a landlord needed to.
"Mr. Draper, before you say anything," I began. "I know Trevor is two months behind on rent. I'll make sure it's paid this week."
"Nolan." He squared his knife with the edge of the table. "And that isn't why you're here."
"Then why am I here?"
He waited until I had taken a sip of water.
"Your husband is sleeping with my wife."
I breathed the water in and it went everywhere, across the tablecloth and over my bread plate.
The couple at the next table stopped talking and stared.
Nolan passed me his napkin and waited, patient, until I finished coughing.
"You've made a mistake," I said, when I could talk. "Trevor is in Towson doing inventory. He's counting kettlebells."
"He left Towson at eleven," Nolan said. "On Thursdays he goes to the Alder Harbor Hotel."
He turned his phone around and set it beside my plate.
The photo showed a hotel mirror ringed with round light bulbs.
A woman in a red satin dress leaned on the vanity, and a shirtless man stood behind her with one hand on her hip.
"That's Bianca," Nolan said. "My wife of six years."
He did not point out the man, because he didn't have to.
There was a bird across his chest that I had paid for on our fifth anniversary.
And on his ribs was my name, in my own handwriting, with the loop I always put on the J.
I had written it with an orange pen on a napkin, and Trevor had carried that napkin to the tattoo shop.
"Anyone can edit a photo," I said, and my voice came out thin.
"Then ask him where he is."
I picked up my phone with a hand that wasn't steady and typed, "Where are you?"
Trevor answered before I had set the phone down.
"Towson, counting kettlebells. Love you. Making carbonara tonight. Also I'll pick up your clinic results Monday so you can skip the waiting room. Don't worry about it."
I read it twice.
For four years he had collected my fertility results himself and read them to me at the kitchen table, so I would never have to open the envelope.
My friends called him the best husband in Baltimore.
Trevor had also never answered a text on time in his life, and he had answered this one at once.
"It's twelve forty," Nolan said. "They keep room 614 until one thirty."
"How long have you known?"
"Long enough to be sure." He didn't look away. "I need a witness who isn't on my payroll."
A waiter came to ask if we were ready to order, saw my face, and went away again.
I looked at the red dress and the round bulbs, and at my name on a stranger's phone, on my husband's ribs.
I put a twenty under my water glass and stood up.
"Take me there," I said.
The Alder Harbor Hotel was six minutes away.
Nolan walked beside me through the lobby and did not touch me once.
In the elevator I watched the numbers climb and saw my face in the brass doors, pale above the purple scrubs.
On six, the hallway smelled of carpet shampoo.
Room 614 sat at the far end, past a cart of folded towels.
Nolan took a key card from his jacket.
"Bianca's spare," he said. "I took it out of her purse this morning."
He held it out to me, and he did not say a word to talk me into it.
I took it.
I could hear them before the door opened.
First a woman's low laugh, then a man's voice I had heard every morning for eight years.
"Relax, babe. She never checks anything."
The lock clicked green under my thumb.
I pushed the door open without a sound.
It was the room from the photo, with the same vanity and the same ring of bulbs around the mirror.
Bianca leaned over the table in her red dress with her palms flat and her hair swept over one shoulder.
Trevor stood behind her with no shirt on, his hand sliding up her thigh and his chin on her bare shoulder.
"Four years," he said into her neck. "Jo hasn't asked me one question in four years."
Bianca laughed again.
Nolan stopped just behind me in the doorway, close enough that I felt him breathe.
Neither of them turned around.
They were watching themselves in the mirror, and the mirror was showing them us.
Bianca's eyes slid past her own reflection and landed on mine.
She smiled at me.
And she didn't stop.
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