My Husband Bought His Mistress Our Downstairs Apartment novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: A Thousand Roses for 14B
On her thirtieth birthday Linnea signs for a thousand roses, reads the card, and finds the woman downstairs wearing her husband's shirt.
I turned thirty today, and Dexter's side of the bed was already made.
There was no note on the nightstand.
There was no text on my phone.
I lay there and watched the morning light stretch across the hardwood of our penthouse.
Everyone called it a beautiful apartment.
Everyone called it a beautiful life.
I got up and went to the kitchen to bake my own birthday cake.
I had done it every year since we met.
The first year, Dexter forgot.
The second year, I told myself he was busy.
By the fourth year, I just bought the flour myself.
His older brother, Quinton, always left family dinners before the cake came out.
Dexter said that was just Quinton.
Today I made lemon chiffon.
It was also seven years to the day since the gallery opening where I met Dexter, and I hadn't mentioned that to anyone.
He had called the next morning, and he had never told me how he got my number.
I was twenty-three and flattered, so I never asked.
I was halfway through the frosting when the intercom buzzed.
I almost let it ring.
Then it buzzed again, longer.
"Delivery for 15A," a man said. "Ma'am, I need you to come down. It's a big one."
The lobby was full of roses.
They were red, wrapped in black ribbon, and stacked in arrangements that touched the ceiling.
The doorman stood beside them with his hands in his pockets.
The delivery man held out a clipboard and grinned.
"One thousand, exactly," he said. "The shop said it took three days to put together."
My chest went tight and warm.
Dexter had remembered.
After seven years, he had actually remembered.
I signed for them and pulled a small white envelope from the nearest arrangement.
My fingers were shaking.
The card inside said: For Paloma Serrano, Apt. 14B. You are my everything. D.
I read it twice.
I stood very still while the delivery man kept talking, and I couldn't hear him.
Paloma Serrano. Apartment 14B.
That was the unit directly below ours.
I handed back the clipboard and rode the elevator up.
At the kitchen table I opened my laptop.
My hands had stopped shaking, and that frightened me more than the shaking had.
I pulled up the building's property records first.
Apartment 14B had been bought eight months ago, and the owner was Dexter Barrow.
Then I opened the staff directory at Barrow Holdings, where Paloma Serrano was listed as a junior associate, hired seven months ago.
Then I found her Instagram.
It was public, of course it was.
The posts went back months.
A man's watch lay on a nightstand, and I knew that watch, because I had given it to Dexter two years ago.
A La Perla box sat on rumpled sheets.
A champagne glass was held up to a window, and I knew that city view, because I had the same one a floor higher.
The caption said: He always knows what I need.
She wasn't hiding.
Every post was meant for one reader, and that reader was me.
She had only been waiting for me to find the account.
I closed the laptop.
I took the elevator down one floor and knocked on 14B.
The door opened on the first knock.
Paloma Serrano stood there in Dexter's blue oxford shirt, the one missing a button I had been meaning to sew on for a year.
She was young and pretty, with glossy black hair and red lipstick.
She looked at me as if she had been expecting me for a long time.
Dexter was on the couch with his phone at his ear.
He looked up, and his face went from surprise to something soft and sorry.
It was the face he wore when he was about to be kind to me.
He ended the call and stood. "Lin. Hey. Happy birthday. Let me explain."
"The roses went to the wrong apartment," I said.
"It was a gift for a coworker. The address got mixed up."
"You bought this apartment eight months ago."
Something shifted behind his eyes.
Then he turned on me so fast it almost looked natural.
"You went through my records? You've been spying on me, Lin."
"Dexter."
"You've been suffocating me for years," he said. "You don't work, you don't have a life, and you've let yourself go."
"You sit up there waiting to catch me at something."
Paloma leaned against the doorframe and smiled, just barely, just enough.
I looked at her.
I looked at him.
I pulled off my engagement ring.
It was three carats, and he had proposed with it on a rooftop, with a string quartet and two hundred people filming.
I set it on the floor between us.
I didn't throw it, and I didn't say a word.
I turned around and walked back to the elevator.
Upstairs, my half-frosted cake was still on the counter.
I picked up my phone and opened the family group chat.
It held his mother, his brother, his cousins, and the couples we had eaten dinner with for years.
I photographed the card with Paloma's name on it and posted it.
Under it I typed one line: Seven years today. Happy anniversary to me.
I hit send.
Then I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet.
I listened to everything I had built go quiet.
Then my phone started lighting up on the tile beside me.
Message after message came in.
The first one was from Quinton, who had never once written me a word in that chat.
It said: Linnea. Stay where you are. I'm coming.
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