My Husband Pretended to Love Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At her tenth anniversary party Tamara hears her husband tell Lydia over a live microphone that the ten years of loving his wife were a shield for Lydia, then takes off her ring in front of 120 guests and hears a voice say her contract has failed.
Stanley tapped his fork against his glass, and a hundred and twenty people on our back lawn went quiet.
It was our tenth anniversary.
White lights hung from the oak trees, and a photographer knelt beside the dance floor with his camera raised.
Three guests were filming on their phones.
I stood next to my husband in the blue dress my best friend had picked out for me, smiling until my face hurt.
She had zipped me into it that afternoon.
"Breathe," Lydia said. "He's been working on this toast for a month."
Then she checked her watch twice and went to find a seat in the front row.
Before the guests arrived, Stanley had walked into the kitchen and spoken to the caterer without looking at any card.
"No pine nuts anywhere near my wife. She's allergic. And her coffee takes one sugar, never two."
Two of his cousins laughed and said he knew me better than I knew myself.
Stanley didn't laugh with them.
He went outside to check the lights.
Now he lifted the microphone and gave the lawn his easy smile.
"Ten years ago tonight, a waitress spilled coffee in my lap, and I never recovered."
The guests laughed.
"Tamara Lowell, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. I would do all ten years again."
He raised his glass.
"To my wife."
Everyone drank.
Then he lowered the microphone, but not far enough, and turned his back to me.
Lydia was standing in the front row with both hands over her mouth and her eyes full.
"That's the last time I have to say it," Stanley told her quietly.
The speakers carried every word across the lawn.
"Ten years, Lyd. Darryl watched me love her, and he never once looked at you. You're safe now."
"You were perfect," Lydia whispered, and the speakers carried that too. "I don't know how I'll ever thank you."
Nobody on the lawn made a sound.
Somewhere behind me, a woman lowered her glass.
Darryl was Lydia's ex-husband.
She had told me once that he'd put her in the hospital twice before I ever met her.
I looked for the joke in what I had just heard, and there wasn't one.
Ten years of Sunday pancakes.
Ten years of his hand finding mine under restaurant tables.
Stanley turned around and saw my face.
"Tamara," he said. "It isn't what it sounds like."
Lydia was beside me before I could answer, pulling a cream cashmere wrap from her arm.
"Honey, it's the champagne," she said. "He's had four glasses and he's exhausted. You know he adores you."
She put the wrap around my shoulders.
Her hands were warm, the way they had been when she held my hair back at my mother's funeral.
I looked at her for a long moment.
I looked at the phones, still lit and still pointing at me.
Then I did the only thing I could think of that was mine to do.
I took the microphone out of Stanley's hand.
"Thank you all for coming," I said. "Please finish the cake. The marriage is over."
Nobody laughed at that.
I slid my wedding band off my finger.
It left a pale line where it had sat for ten years.
I dropped it into his empty champagne glass, and it rang once against the bottom.
So I walked off the lawn.
"Tamara!" Stanley shouted behind me. "Tamara, wait!"
The clock over the bar said 11:38 as I went past it.
The first drops of rain hit the gravel as I reached my car.
I got in and locked the doors, and my hands shook so hard I couldn't fit the key in.
That was when a voice spoke inside my head.
I had heard it only once before, on the morning I married him, and I had told myself it was nerves.
"Condition not met," it said. "Ten years complete. At midnight, you will be erased."
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