Perfect Husband Act: Now My Wife's Sorry novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Pretend to Sign

Susie flipped a pizza box over on the kitchen table and uncapped a marker with her teeth.

"Three problems," she said.

She wrote them on the lid as she talked.

"One. The recording is a drunk man at a Christmas party. A cop hears it and thinks he's bragging."

"Two. The book is in a safe."

"Three. Nobody in this town believes anything bad about Travis Bannon."

Audrey sat with her chin on her fist.

"The mayor eats at his table," she said. "He's on the board of the Chamber of Commerce."

"So we skip the cops and the town hears it all at once," Susie said.

I looked at the lid.

"The dinner."

"The Hilliard Club, the twentieth, two hundred people in rented tuxedos." Susie tapped the box. "Every client he has will be sitting at a round table with a free steak. He gets a plaque and a microphone."

"And we take the microphone," Audrey said slowly.

"The man who runs the club's sound board had his appendix out on my floor in March. He cried when I took out his IV. He likes me."

I almost laughed.

"We play it through the room speakers," Susie went on. "His own voice, in front of everyone he's ever lied to."

"He'll say it was faked," I said.

"Then we need him to say something worse live." Susie turned to her sister. "He wants you to sign. So you show up and sign."

"No," I said.

Audrey put her hand flat on the table.

"Yes," she said. "I can't beat him by refusing. He just wants me to be scared in a better room."

"He'll see through you."

"He's known me since I was eight. He'll see exactly what he's looking for."

Her mouth went crooked.

"You kept a face on for a week, Ethan. I can manage one night."

I did not say it was never a face.

Susie capped the marker and stood.

"Nobody say anything private," she said, and she went out, and her car started in the driveway.

The house went quiet.

I rinsed the three glasses at the sink and stood there with my hands in the water.

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