I Filmed My Husband Cheating, So I Married the Brother He Fears novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Video on the Wall
At Colby's CEO dinner Imogen plays the bedroom video of him and Bethany on the dining room screen; Colby says 'I want a divorce' first, Gerald throws her out, and Nathaniel waits at the curb with an offer.
At nine o'clock, in front of forty guests, I walked to the head of my in-laws' dining room and plugged my phone into the wall screen.
My husband was in the middle of a toast.
Colby had a champagne glass raised to his father, and every face at the table was turned up to him, the family's next chairman.
He had caught my eye when I stood and given me his small encouraging wink, the one he used when he thought I was nervous in front of his family.
"Imogen, sit down," his father said.
I pressed play.
The video was two minutes of my own bedroom.
My navy comforter. My reading lamp. My husband's left hand, with the pale scar down the forearm, sliding up the thigh of my bridesmaid.
My bridesmaid's laugh came out of the speakers loud enough to carry to the kitchen.
Nobody in the room moved.
That afternoon, I had been at my bench in the museum lab when my phone buzzed with a motion alert from the camera I'd put in the bedroom after last month's break-in.
I watched it on my lunch break with a conservation brush still in my hand.
Then I texted Bethany, the friend I trusted most: Is Colby still stuck in meetings?
She answered in under a minute.
Yes! I'm in the room with him all afternoon, he's miserable. Want me to bring you lunch? You work too hard, babe.
On my phone she was on top of my husband, and in the message she was bringing me lunch.
I said yes to the lunch.
I told her I'd see her at dinner.
Now she sat three seats down from Colby in a green dress, with her hand flat on the tablecloth, and she looked at the screen and shook her head slowly.
The video ended on Colby's face.
The silence lasted about as long as it took him to put his glass down.
"I want a divorce," he said.
He said it loudly, so that all forty people would hear it, and before I could say a word.
"This is fake," he went on. "It's been months. Imogen hasn't been well since the spring, and I've let it go on because I love her."
A woman near the door gasped.
Two phones were already pointed at me.
"Colby," I said, "that's our bedroom."
"That's a rented set," Colby said. "AI can do anything now. Somebody call her doctor."
His father stood.
Gerald Lathrop has a way of standing that makes a table feel small.
"Take her out," he said to the man by the door. "Her things will be sent to wherever she lands."
"Mine, you mean," I said. "Half of that house is mine."
Gerald checked his gold watch.
"Not tonight it isn't." I looked at Bethany.
She had finally found her face, and it was wet and wounded and perfectly arranged.
"Imogen, I think you need help," she said gently. "I'm so sorry. I'd never."
I had known her for six years.
She had held my bouquet at my wedding.
I looked at the hand in her lap and saw the same bracelet she'd had on in my bed.
"Where's the original?" Colby asked. He was smiling for the room, but he was looking at me. "You'd better hand it over, Em, before this gets ugly for you."
"It's somewhere you can't reach," I said.
His smile didn't change, but a muscle jumped in his jaw.
I knew that scar on his arm, the one he rubbed when he was lying.
He had gotten it four years ago in March, carrying a glass door out of the garage, and he'd never liked to talk about it.
It was the same month his half-brother's wife died in a car crash.
The family never talked about that either.
I took off my wedding ring and dropped it into Colby's champagne.
It sank with a small, clean sound.
So I turned my back on the head of the table and walked out, with two phones still filming me.
The man at the door held it open without looking at me.
It was raining on the gravel drive, and I had no coat, no keys and no ride, because Colby's driver had brought me.
I took out my phone to call Bridget.
"Forty people watched that," a man said behind me. "Not one of them followed you out."
I turned.
A black car was parked at the end of the drive with its lights off.
The man leaning against it wore a dark suit with no tie, and he was soaked through from standing in the rain.
Nathaniel Lathrop.
Colby's older half-brother.
The one the family called a drunk and a killer, and hadn't let through the front door in four years.
"The window was open," he said. "I heard all of it."
"Then you heard I'm busy," I said.
"I heard you tell my brother the original is somewhere he can't reach."
He took off his jacket and held it out to me.
I didn't take it.
He put it around my shoulders anyway, and it was warm and smelled of rain and cedar.
"My father votes my shares unless I'm a husband the board can see," he said. "In twenty-one days, he and Colby get the whole company."
"That sounds like your problem."
"You have a problem too. By morning, Colby will have your cards frozen, your house locked and my father's lawyers on your museum."
I said nothing, because he was right.
"I can give you my name," Nathaniel said. "My protection. And a front seat while my brother loses everything he built on you."
The rain ran off his hair and down his jaw.
He didn't smile.
"All it costs you," he said, "is being my wife."
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