Chapter 1 — Just One Last Time
“Just one last time,” Joshua whispered, slipping into her bed the night before their divorce was final.
Gretchen went still as the mattress sank under her husband’s weight.
For nearly six months they’d slept in separate rooms and barely touched.
When his cold hand grazed hers over the sheet, she felt no tenderness — only a sudden, rising unease.
“What are you doing?” she asked quietly.
Joshua looked at her in the dark, his face tired.
“I don’t want us to end up hating each other after everything,” he said.
Then he set his phone on the nightstand beside the lamp.
A few seconds later the screen lit white with an incoming text, and Gretchen read it before he could snatch the phone away.
Has she signed everything yet? — from a contact named Cheyenne.
Her whole body went cold.
Joshua hadn’t come back to her bed because he still loved her.
He’d come back because she was supposed to sign the agreement ending fourteen years of marriage the next morning — and someone else was waiting for her signature.
She took a screenshot before she’d even decided to.
Chapter 2 — The Empty House
Gretchen was thirty-eight, a surgical nurse at a busy hospital in downtown Minneapolis.
For months she’d used the exhaustion of long shifts as a place to hide from what was happening in her quiet home in Plymouth.