Chapter 1 — Thirty Thousand Dollars

The sharp click of stilettos on the hardwood stairs echoed through the living room as Bristol descended in a scarlet dress, trailing a cloud of synthetic jasmine.

My husband’s twenty-five-year-old sister tossed her handbag onto my coffee table and snapped her manicured fingers at me.

“Odette, wire me thirty thousand dollars by noon,” she said, with the practiced arrogance of a woman who had never once been told no.

“I’m putting together a last-minute trip to Miami with my influencer friends.”

I looked up slowly.

“Thirty thousand?”

She rolled her eyes.

“My friends date pro athletes and tech founders.

If I show up in South Beach on a budget airline and stay in a cheap motel, I’ll be the laughingstock of the internet.

I need to charter a yacht to show my status, then book the VIP section at the best club in the city for the good champagne.

You have money to burn.

Don’t be cheap.” I set down the cloth I’d been holding, and I felt something settle in my chest that had been a long time coming — not anger, exactly, but a kind of cold, final clarity.

This was a woman who refused to work, who spent her days lounging by my pool expecting me to serve her dinner after my twelve-hour days, and who now stood in my living room demanding thirty thousand dollars to fake a billionaire’s life online.

I did not yet know that the next ten minutes would end my marriage and empty my house.

But I knew, looking up at her, that something had reached its end.

What had reached its end, I understand now, was a process so slow I had never been able to see it happening, the way you cannot watch a coastline erode though you can return after years and find the cliff gone.

When Trevor and I married, I had been a specific person: a woman who ran a firm, who negotiated with boards, who was respected and decisive and entirely in command of her own life.