My Husband Cheated With My Best Friend, So I Took Them Both novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Key in the Door
Juliet comes home early and hears her husband and her best friend admit fourteen months of an affair; they ask her to stay with them both, and she gives them seven days.
The bookstore was still clapping when the airline texted that my flight home was cancelled.
Ice had shut the airport. Two hundred readers had waited in the cold to watch me sign.
I smiled through the last forty books anyway.
Then I texted my husband from the signing table.
Declan wrote back: "Don't try to get home, Jules. Roads are glass. I'm at the office till late anyway. Love you."
Roz wrote: "I'm on shift until Monday. Eat something real. Pancakes Sunday as always."
I read both twice and felt better.
My publisher closed her laptop and picked up her keys.
"I have winter tires and a bad attitude," she said. "Get in the car."
"It's four hours."
"It's three and a half if I'm angry."
She drove the whole way through the ice with both hands on the wheel.
I held my key ring in my lap.
It had the house key, the car key and a small brass one for the bottom drawer of my desk.
Nobody had ever read what was in that drawer. Not Declan, and not Roz, who got every other draft I wrote.
I turned the brass key over and over until we reached the lake.
It was almost midnight when Imogen, my publisher, stopped at the foot of my drive.
The kitchen windows were lit.
Declan's truck sat by the barn. Behind it was a red hatchback with a nurse's parking tag hanging from the mirror.
"That's Roz's car," I said.
"Is it," said Imogen.
"She's on shift. He's at the office."
Imogen turned off the engine and didn't say anything.
I got out. The snow squeaked under my boots all the way to the porch.
I put my key in the door and turned it slowly, because it always stuck in the cold.
It opened without a sound.
They were in the kitchen. I could hear them from the hall.
"She lands Sunday," Roz said. "That gives us two days to work out how to say it."
"We say it together," said Declan. "We say we're sorry. Then we say the other part."
"The other part is what gets us thrown out."
"Fourteen months, Roz. She gets all of it."
"She deserves better than both of us," Roz said, and her voice cracked in the middle.
I stood very still with my hand on the wall.
Behind me Imogen had come up the steps. She put her palm flat between my shoulder blades.
"Do you want me in here or in the car?" she whispered.
"In here," I said. "I want a witness."
I walked into my kitchen.
Declan sat at the table with both hands flat on the wood. Roz stood at the counter in my old grey cardigan, the one she had borrowed in October and never returned.
Neither of them moved.
"Jules," Roz said.
"You're on shift."
"I swapped."
"Declan, you're at the office."
He looked down at his hands. "I'm not."
Imogen stayed in the doorway with her coat still buttoned. "Don't mind me," she said. "I'm furniture."
I didn't scream, and I didn't throw anything.
I took off my coat and hung it on its hook by the door.
Then I pulled out the chair at the head of my table and sat down in it.
"I heard all of it," I said. "Say it again. Slowly."
Declan swallowed. "Roz and I have been together for fourteen months."
"Together."
"Sleeping together," Roz said. "And more than that. I'm not going to dress it up for you."
She was crying already. She wiped her face with the cardigan sleeve and kept her eyes on mine.
"Whose idea was it to tell me on Sunday?"
"Both of ours," said Declan. "We've been trying for months. We keep losing our nerve."
I looked at the man I had married in this room six years ago.
Then I looked at the woman who had held my hair back through every bad night since we were eighteen.
My own kitchen smelled of coffee and of both of them.
"I'm going to ask you one thing," Declan said. "Please hear the whole of it before you decide."
"Go on."
"We don't want you to leave," he said. "We want you to stay. With both of us."
Roz pulled out the chair across from me and sat. "I'm not asking you to forgive us," she said. "I'm asking you to stay. We love you, Jules. Both of us. That's the part we couldn't say."
Imogen made a small noise in the doorway.
"Say that again," I said, "in front of my publisher."
"We love you," said Declan, quietly. "Both of us."
I did not stand up.
I did not leave, though every part of me that had ever written a heroine leaving a room wanted to.
So I stayed.
"Seven days," I said. "I sleep in this house. You answer every question I ask, and none of the answers are pretty. On the eighth day, I tell you what I've decided."
"Yes," they said together.
That hurt more than anything else they had said.
"Start with when," I said.
Roz's mouth shook. She looked at Declan, and he nodded.
"The night of your launch," she said. "Last November."
I remembered it. I had stood up at the party with a glass in my hand and thanked them both for holding up my life.
They had clapped for me the loudest.
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