Chapter 1The Mistress He Mourned Helped Me Destroy Him

For five years, my marriage to Garrett Crawford was an exercise in curated tolerance.

He kept a revolving carousel of women—hotel heiresses in Manhattan penthouses, aspiring gallery directors in Tribeca, PR girls he picked up at charity galas. Whenever the tabloids ran blurry photographs of him stepping out of an uptown town car at three in the morning, Garrett would slip behind me in our dressing room, rest his chin on my bare shoulder, and whisper into my collarbone: “They’re just appetizers, Natalie. None of them could ever touch your seat at the table.”

I swallowed it because that was what women of our pedigree were bred to do. Until he hired Linnea.

Linnea Brooks wasn’t an appetizer. From the moment she took the desk outside his executive suite at Crawford Capital, Garrett became a man possessed. He had eyes for no one else. They moved through our social sphere like a closed circuit, practically glued together at the hip, flaunting their intimacy in the very rooms where my family’s name hung in bronze plaques. Garrett stopped bothering with discretion. He was so brazen that once, during a black-tie gala at the Metropolitan Museum, he pulled a five-hundred-dollar bill from his tuxedo pocket and handed it to me across the champagne table, murmuring, “Run down to the twenty-four-hour pharmacy on Lexington, would you? Pick up the ultra-thins. Linnea hates the texture of the ones they keep in the penthouse suite.”

Then, without warning, the girl was dead.

Killed in a catastrophic crash on the winding cliffs of Bear Mountain—her sports car engulfed in flames, incinerated so thoroughly that the coroner could barely piece together enough dental fragments to fill an evidence bag.

When the call came in, Garrett was sitting across from me in a glass-walled conference room on the fiftieth floor, staring down the third iteration of our divorce settlement.

He didn’t sign. Instead, he flipped the solid walnut table, sent two crystal carafes shattering against the floor-to-ceiling glass, and bolted into the private elevator like a rabid animal smelling smoke.

For the next seven days, he barricaded himself in the subterranean wine cellar of the upstate estate he had bought as Linnea’s private gilded cage. He refused food. He refused water.

On the eighth day, the cellar door finally groaned open.

When Garrett crawled up the stone stairs into the daylight, he looked like a corpse dredged from the Hudson River. His signature Tom Ford suit hung limp and stained over his sunken frame. His hair, usually sculpted with razor-sharp precision, was matted and grease-streaked. Dark, hollow bruises shadowed his eye sockets, which were shot through with crimson capillaries, and his jaw was covered in a filthy, bristling scruff. He reeked of stale gin, unwashed skin, and raw, rotting decay.

I sat motionless on the Belgian linen sofa in the great room, holding a glass of warm water.

He froze, locking his wild, blood-rimmed eyes on me. Then, with a guttural roar, he launched himself across the Turkish rug and clamped his fingers around my throat.

“It was you… wasn’t it?!”

His voice was a gravelly scrape, shreds of torn vocal cords scraping together. His grip tightened, driving the back of my head hard against the sofa cushions.

“You couldn’t stand her, Natalie. You were sick with jealousy. You orchestrated the crash! You murdered my girl, you vicious bitch!”

The air vanished from my lungs. Blood roared in my ears, hot and suffocating, and my vision tunneled into pinpricks of black and silver. Tears welled in my eyes—purely biological, the body’s involuntary panic at being snuffed out. But I didn’t flail. I didn’t claw at his wrists. I simply looked up into his face, watching it twist under the weight of his own monstrous grief.

“Answer me! Say something!” he screamed, his spittle flecking my cheek.

Suddenly, his gaze dropped to my flat abdomen. A look of visceral disgust contorted his features, followed by a sickening flash of mania.

“You think killing her keeps you safe? You think you get to sit pretty as Mrs. Crawford forever? You think that because you’re carrying this filthy little mistake, I’m going to fall on my knees and come back to you?”

He leaned down until his cracked, dried lips hovered an inch from my ear, every syllable dipped in acid:

“Let me make one thing clear, Natalie. That unwanted parasite in your gut makes me want to vomit. I’m going to drag the entire Hayes family into the gutter—every company, every foundation, every trust fund your father ever built will burn to ash as a memorial for Linnea. And once they’re dead, I’m coming for you and that little bastard.”

My windpipe felt like it was collapsing. Yet, staring into those manic, dilated pupils, a bizarre impulse took hold of me: I wanted to laugh.

This was the golden boy of Manhattan finance. The prodigy who had terrified Wall Street at twenty-eight. The boy I had once loved when we were teenagers on the polo fields of Greenwich. Now, he was nothing more than an unhinged, feral dog foaming at the mouth.

Summoning the last fraction of strength in my arm, I raised the glass of warm water and threw it directly into his face.

The water splashed across his eyes, dripping off his crooked nose and soaking into his collar.

Stunned by the shock of it, his grip slackened for half a second.

I shoved him back with everything I had. I rolled off the couch onto my knees, coughing violently, gasping for air that felt like broken glass tearing down my throat. The skin around my neck burned; even without a mirror, I knew five mottled purple bruises were already blooming in the shape of his fingers.

“You have a remarkably high opinion of yourself, Garrett,” I rasped, climbing to my feet and smoothing the lapels of my cashmere coat. I looked down at him where he sat collapsed on the floor, dazed and dripping wet.

“If I wanted to kill your secretary, do you really think I’d be foolish enough to get blood on my own hands?”