After Rejection, Divorced Luna Becomes a Famous Doctor novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Clause Fourteen
On their third anniversary Luna signs the divorce, leaves her ring for the woman moving in tomorrow, warns Emerson off the steak plan in her kitchen, and reads in the cab that her contract gives any child of the marriage to the Kenleys.
I signed the divorce papers on our third anniversary.
Emerson Kenley didn't look up from his laptop.
"Leave the ring on the table," he said. "Trina moves in tomorrow."
Trina Galvin.
His college girlfriend.
Three million followers who called her Dr. Trina.
I had been his secret contract wife for three years, and now the woman replacing me had a name, a face and a moving date.
The pen shook in my hand.
I signed every page anyway.
What Emerson didn't know was that I had passed out on the bathroom floor that morning.
The test I'd hidden in my coat pocket had two pink lines.
I set my wedding ring on the white marble table.
It made a very small sound.
He typed through it.
Three years of running his house on Delancey Street.
Three years of his mother's lunches, his mother's charity boards, his mother's opinions about my shoes.
Three years of cooking every single thing he ate.
"Your assistant can take the papers," I said.
"Mm."
"Happy anniversary, Emerson."
That made him look up.
He frowned at me.
"Was that today?"
"It was."
"Well." He looked back down. "My mother had the completion payment wired this morning. Two hundred thousand. You did well out of this, Luna."
I went to the kitchen to get my things.
I had very few things.
The kitchen was the one room in the house that had ever felt like mine.
Someone had been in it.
Six cardboard cases were stacked against my pantry door.
KENLEY x DR. TRINA. THE CARNIVORE RESET.
A laminated sheet was taped to the fridge with gold tape.
DAY 1: Ribeye, 20 oz. Six eggs. No carbs. Fast until noon.
DAY 2: Ribeye, 20 oz. Bone broth. Four protein shakes.
All thirty days were steak, eggs and shakes.
My hands went cold.
I pulled the sheet off the fridge and carried it back to the dining room.
"You're doing this?"
"We're filming it for the launch," Emerson said. "Thirty days. I'm the face of it. It's a protein company, Luna, I eat protein."
"Not like this. You can't."
He finally closed the laptop.
"Excuse me?"
"Do you remember Maine?" I said. "Our honeymoon? The lobster and the steak, and you threw up in the car and didn't know what day it was?"
"I had a migraine."
"You had an ammonia level three times the limit. I drew it myself at that ER. I told you what I thought it was. I begged you to get one blood test."
He laughed.
It was the same laugh as in Maine.
"I sell protein powder. I'm not allergic to my own product."
"It isn't an allergy. Your body can't clear what's left over from protein. It builds up in your blood and goes to your brain."
"And my headaches stopped," he said. "Because they were migraines. Because I took the pills."
There had never been any pills.
There had been me, at five in the morning, with a kitchen scale and a pencil.
Forty grams of protein a day. Rice, bread, potatoes, fruit. Never a skipped breakfast.
Three years of meals measured to the gram, and he thought they just tasted nice.
"Emerson. Please. Don't eat what's on that sheet."
He stood up and buttoned his jacket.
"Trina is a physician," he said. "You were a cook in my house. Leave the medical opinions to her."
I looked at him for a long moment.
I had loved him for most of those three years.
I didn't say so.
I put the laminated sheet face down on the marble, next to my ring.
Then I went back to the kitchen and took one thing off the shelf.
A spiral notebook with a soft blue cover.
Three years of his meals, in grams, in pencil.
I put it in my bag with my mother's photograph and walked out.
Veronica Kenley was in the front hall.
She had let herself in, as she always did, pearls on, cane hooked over her wrist.
She looked at my suitcase.
She looked at my bare left hand.
"Good," she said. "You were always sensible."
"Goodbye, Veronica."
"Dr. Mayhew." She smiled. "That's what you'll go back to calling yourself, I suppose."
"It's what I am."
"Is it." She tapped her cane on the floor. "Read your copy of the contract on the way, dear. All of it."
I didn't answer her.
The door closed behind me on three years.
It was raining on Delancey Street.
I got into the first cab that stopped and gave the driver the name of a hotel I couldn't afford.
My hand went to my coat pocket.
The test was still there.
So was the contract, folded in thirds, the copy I'd never read past the first page.
I had been twenty-six and my mother had needed a night nurse.
I'd signed where Veronica's lawyer told me to sign.
The cab hit a light on Walnut Street.
I unfolded the pages under the window and read them, one line at a time.
Term. Compensation. Confidentiality.
Clause fourteen was two lines long.
Any child conceived during the term of this agreement shall be raised in the Kenley household.
The mother may visit at the family's discretion.
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