The Contract Wife Chapter 01
When A-list actress Ruby Calloway’s private account was hacked, hundreds of love letters she’d written spilled onto the internet and went viral overnight.
She wrote: The man I once loved with everything I had ended up as somebody else’s husband.
The comments were a flood of heartbreak and sympathy:
“God, is this what a tragic love story actually looks like?”
“She’s so devoted. My heart breaks for her.”
Without thinking, I typed:
“How does someone manage to make falling for another woman’s husband sound so innocent?”
I forgot to switch to my burner account.
A minute later, my husband Nathan’s name lit up my phone.
“Evelyn, delete that comment. Ruby’s in a bad place right now. Your words are going to cause her problems she doesn’t need.”
I sat frozen for a moment. Then I laughed.
So it turned out that in this three-person arrangement, the odd one out had been me all along—the wife.
…
The phone was still pressed to my ear.
Only then did it hit me: the tragic male lead of Ruby’s private posts, the man she’d loved and lost
was my husband. The man I’d been married to for nearly three years.
I opened my mouth to explain that I’d just commented in passing.
But what came out instead was, “How did you even see it?”
Silence on the other end. A few seconds.
Just those few seconds.
And suddenly I understood.
The trending post had tens of thousands of comments. For Nathan—on a business trip, no less—to spot mine at a glance, out of all of them, meant something.
Not that I mattered so much. It was that the very busy CEO had been keeping tabs on every scrap of news about Ruby. Scrolling through every comment, one by one.
“Evelyn, just delete it. I’ll handle the rest. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“All right.”
I kept my voice level.
“I didn’t know those letters were about you. I’ll delete it.”
Silence again. He seemed to want to say something more, but in the end there was only a low, muted:
“Mm.”
The call ended.
I set the phone face-down on the arm of the sofa and went back to my face mask.
Fifteen minutes later, I got up and went to the bathroom to wash my face.
The woman in the mirror looked ordinary enough. Only the skin around her eyes was slightly red.
Probably the serum from the mask had gotten in.
When I came back out, I reopened Twitter, found the post that had blown up the internet, and deleted my comment.
By the time I closed the app, the trending list had already shifted.
“Who is the man behind the hundred love letters?” Under that hashtag, thousands of amateur detectives were combing through Ruby’s posts, hunting for clues.
I turned off my phone.
The living room fell quiet again.
Suddenly I thought back to three years ago, to a lawyer’s office, and the look of pure relief on Nathan’s face the moment we signed that prenup.
There was a sunset clause tucked into the agreement:
After three years, if either party requested a divorce, the other party was obligated to consent unconditionally, and the divorce would proceed uncontested.
Only two months remained until that date.