The Ex-Change novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Kiss on Camera
On the first night of a divorce show, a pop superstar fixes Callie's earpiece and kisses her hair on live camera, and her ex tells the world she clung to him. She sets the record straight in front of everyone and stays. Her ex raises a glass and mouths one word.
In front of two thousand people in a Roman piazza, with three cameras on us, Jude Hartley fixed my earpiece and kissed my hair.
He didn't mean to.
His fingers were already at my ear when it happened.
His mouth touched the top of my head for one second.
Then we both stopped breathing.
This was the opening night of a show about divorce, and he belonged to the other couple.
"Do not move," said Lowen Quinn in my ear. "Do not blink. That's the best frame we've ever shot."
Jude's hand was still at the side of my face.
"Sorry," he said, so quietly the microphones couldn't have caught it. "Twelve years of stage techs. Somebody always fixes my gear, so I fix everybody else's."
"It's fine."
"It was a kiss."
"It was a very small kiss."
His green eyes crinkled.
Across the fountain a crowd of fans started screaming his name.
The host called a break, and the lights over us dropped from white to gold.
A woman in a cream blazer hurried over from the far side of the stage.
Vanessa Lowe, Jude's ex-wife, the other half of the other couple.
I had been braced for her to be icy, and she was holding out a roll of tape.
"Hold still, hon, your mic pack is peeling off your back," she said. "Nobody tells you how sweaty these things get."
She tore a strip with her teeth and pressed it flat under my jacket, humming while she worked.
It was a pretty little tune with a lift in the middle, the kind you hear in a cab and carry around all week.
"There," she said. "Now you won't broadcast your own heartbeat."
"Thank you," I said, and meant it.
She squeezed my elbow and went back to her mark.
Jude was watching her go. His face gave nothing away.
Then the host came back on the big screen above the piazza, grinning, and said we would start with a clip.
"Four people. Two marriages. One question," he said. "Why does love end? We asked the exes to tell us."
The picture cut to my husband.
My ex-husband, I corrected, the way I had been practicing for eight months.
Colton Bevan sat in a leather chair with his best dimple on, a gold award on the shelf behind him.
He had announced our wedding at the height of his boy-band fame, and every year since, strangers had asked how I got so lucky.
"Callie is a wonderful woman," Colton told the camera. "But she just couldn't let go. I tried for a year. In the end I had to be the one to end it."
The piazza made a soft sad noise, the kind a crowd makes for a man who has been hurt.
Somebody behind the barrier shouted, "She doesn't deserve him!"
A few people laughed.
I stood very still on the cobblestones in my only good coat.
I had filed those papers myself.
I had signed them at my kitchen table in Ohio on a Tuesday in March, with a pen from the bank.
He had signed back in six days, and then he'd gone to a premiere.
"Callie," said Lowen in my ear, low and fast. "Smile. Smile and look at Jude. You're the clinging ex, that's the part, just give me the look."
Jude had gone still beside me.
"Say the word," he murmured, "and I'll walk you off this stage."
I thought of the $60,000 that had already paid my mother's hospital bill.
I thought of two thousand people, laughing.
Then I reached up and took the earpiece out of my ear.
I held it in my fist where the cameras could see it.
The host noticed first. He made a small cut-it gesture, and nobody cut it.
"My name is Callie Radcliff," I said, loud enough that the front rows went quiet. "I asked for the divorce. I filed it myself, in March. He signed it in six days."
Nobody moved.
"If I clung to anything, it was a pen."
That got a laugh, and not the cruel kind.
I walked to the edge of the stage and looked straight up at the screen.
"So he can say whatever he likes about me tonight," I said. "I'm staying. All eight weeks."
The cameras swung around to Colton.
He was sitting at a table at the far end of the piazza next to Vanessa, with a glass of wine, and the big screen showed him in close-up.
A man who had just been called a liar in front of two thousand people should have looked furious.
Colton looked at the screen and raised his glass a few inches, toward me.
His lips moved around a single word.
"Good."
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