My Billionaire Brother Destroyed My Cheating Ex Husband novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: A Joke at the Table
At Chad's anniversary dinner Rochelle teases Poppy, Chad turns on her in front of forty guests, and a text on Poppy's phone shows the truth. She leaves, her cards decline, and the one number she knows by heart answers on the first ring.
Forty people sat at the long table in our backyard when my mother-in-law tapped her glass with a fork.
Lights hung over us, and I had cooked the whole dinner myself because my husband wanted it to feel like home.
It was the tenth anniversary of his company, and every person he needed to impress was there.
"To my son," she said. "And to Rochelle, who has fed him for five years and never once complained."
Everyone clapped, and I took a bow with the gravy ladle.
That morning in the kitchen my husband had told me his assistant was like a kid sister to him.
I hadn't asked. He had said it anyway.
The assistant sat on my right in a pale blue dress I had helped her pick out.
Her name was Poppy, she was twenty-four, and she had lived in our guest room since March, when her landlord threw her out.
I was the one who offered. She had hugged me twice that afternoon while we folded napkins.
She also called herself baby, in the third person, all day long.
"Baby can't reach the salt."
"Baby is so cold."
Chad thought it was sweet, so I had stopped noticing.
Now Poppy stood and lifted her glass.
"Baby wants to say thank you to Chad," she said in the little voice. "Baby would be homeless without him. Can somebody help baby back into her chair?"
I had worked since six that morning, and I'd had two glasses of wine.
"Poppy, you're twenty-four," I said, smiling. "Does baby have a driver's license?"
A few people laughed, and none of it was cruel.
Poppy's face folded.
She sat down hard and put both hands over her mouth, and her shoulders started to shake.
The laughing stopped.
My husband's chair scraped back.
"Apologize to her," he said. "Right now."
"Chad, it was a joke."
"You've been picking at her since March." He said it loud enough for the whole table. "I've watched you do it."
I hadn't, and he knew I hadn't.
"Rochelle, honestly," my mother-in-law said. "The girl has no family."
At the far end of the table, one of Chad's project managers held up his phone and started filming.
I looked at Poppy's shaking shoulders.
Her phone lay face up on the tablecloth beside my plate, and it lit.
I wasn't trying to read it. It was right there.
Chad's name was at the top.
"Keep crying. She's folding. Two more months and I'm rid of her."
I looked up the table.
Chad was standing, and his phone was in his hand with his thumb still over the screen.
I read the message out loud, word for word.
Nobody moved.
Poppy's hand shot out and covered the phone, but the whole table had heard it.
Chad smiled at me. It was the same smile he used on clients.
"Mar, that's from a joke thread about my mother," he said. "You're exhausted. Let's go inside and talk."
His mother laughed, a little too high.
"Honey, you've had wine," she said.
The project manager kept filming.
I looked at the man I had married at twenty-four.
I took off my wedding ring and set it next to his plate.
So I stepped out.
I walked through the side gate with my purse and my keys and nothing else.
Behind me I heard Chad say, calmly, "Let her go. She'll be back by morning."
I drove until the fuel light came on and stopped at a gas station on Skokie Road.
My card declined.
I tried the second one, and that declined too.
Chad kept our money in his name. He liked handling it, and I had always let him.
He took the mail out of the box every day before I got home from school. He said I'd lose the important things.
My phone buzzed.
It was a text from Chad: "Your cards are off until you apologize to Poppy on camera. Don't bother calling Alasdair. He never picks up for you."
I stood under the pump lights with eleven dollars in my coat pocket.
I had not said my brother's name to anyone in six years.
I knew his number by heart anyway.
It rang once.
"Rochelle," Alasdair said.
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