Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 74467 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 372(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74467 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 372(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
I’m not in love with William Crawford, but this breaks my heart all the same.
We were never romantic. Our relationship is much more complicated than that, but some part of me hoped that maybe, one day, we could get there. He’s tall and charming and handsome, the former captain of the University of Pennsylvania rowing team and a graduate of the Wharton Business School. He’s on the fast-track to a comfortable position at a dozen different Wall Street banks and hedge funds, and his family is deeply wealthy, deeply powerful, and stupidly connected. I’ve known him since we were little, and he proposed to me two months ago in my father’s back yard at our house in Mt. Airy.
Marrying William isn’t my dream, but our parents wanted it, and he seemed willing, and I thought, why not?
I’ve been so unlucky in love for so long.
I figured, how could it get any worse?
This is how.
My phone buzzes. Another email alert.
I don’t want to look. I want to scream. I’m terrified and angry, my hands are trembling, and I just want to close my eyes and pretend like this isn’t happening. But some sick compulsion makes me turn the screen on, swipe into my mail, and stare at the subject line.
Still not sure?
I click the Dropbox link.
It’s another image of William. Another shot from street level. This time, it’s outside of his apartment, and he’s got both hands on the girl’s tits, and they’re kissing right there in plain view of the street.
Another email comes through. There’s more but you get the idea.
My hands are shaking as I type a reply.
Send everything you have. I want to throw up when I hit send.
I get a response five seconds later. Whoever’s sending me this is waiting on the other end.
The subject reads, Go wild.
Inside is a link, and in the link is enough material to make me want to drown myself in the toilet.
Chapter 2
Marie
A dozen congratulatory emails flit through my work inbox and even Emma stops by my desk before I leave for the day. “Good job in there. He doesn’t go to shows often.” She nods and heads off, leaving me with conflicted emotions.
Joy, sure, happiness, fine, but all of that is overshadowed by the shared Dropbox folder from some random, anonymous account filled with pictures of William cheating on me with not one girl, not two, but four different women since we’ve been engaged.
Four women. Two months. It’s mind-boggling and horrible, and I’m numb for the rest of the day.
I spend that night alone in my apartment sifting through it all. I’m happy as hell I decided not to live with him until we got married, otherwise I’d be freaking out right now and he’d be in the other room or something. I sit on my couch curled up with a glass of wine and start looking through evidence of my fiancé’s infidelity, slowly letting it sink in.
This is humiliating. It’s so much worse than I realized. There he is, grinding with a woman in a club, his hands moving up her legs toward her crotch. That’s her with her hand on his dick in a dark hallway near the bathrooms. Another of him going into his apartment with that same dick-grabbing chick from the club. Another of her leaving, disheveled. He couldn’t even walk her out to the cab waiting at the curb.
On and on. Picture after picture. The more I look, the worse it gets, but a different question starts to form—
Who’s following William around and why did they send me this?
William’s family is wealthy. I’m talking elite country club wealthy. I’m talking generational money sort of wealth. One of their ancestors invested in railroads, and another ancestor opened one of the earliest drug manufacturing plants on the East Coast, and another gobbled up real estate all over the Philly area. William has a trust fund the size of a small island nation’s entire GDP. He grew up in a series of mansions, summer houses, private schools, elite sleepaway camps, and all that stuff. He’s as privileged as it gets, but still, I thought he was a decent guy at heart.
We were friends when we were kids. Not super close, but friendly.
I thought we could make a life together.
Apparently, I’m embarrassingly naive.
There’s nothing I can do about it yet. William is in New York for work all day tonight and tomorrow and he’ll be back in the evening, which means I have a day to think and plan. I spend my night sifting through the evidence, marking the most egregious and horrible images, and mentally trying to figure out who did this and why.
I go to work the next day. I’m exhausted and barely slept, but I deal with the accolades, try to focus on my job, and mostly I spend the afternoon thinking about what I’m going to do about my asshole fiancé.