The call came through at 2:07 in the morning, while I lay wide awake inside our quiet house in Larkspur. My husband, Adrian, had told me he’d be spending the night closing a major real estate deal out in Ridgeline. I feigned pure shock over the phone, slipped quickly into a robe, and asked which hospital they’d actually been taken to. The nurse at Saint Anthony Medical paused awkwardly before explaining that the couple had apparently mistaken a tube of industrial adhesive for a bottle of intimate lubricant, leaving doctors genuinely unable to separate them without direct medical intervention.
I knew perfectly well exactly how that had happened, because I was the one who’d arranged it myself.
Three days earlier, my flight to Cascade City had been canceled entirely, thanks to a sudden blizzard rolling over the mountains. I returned home unannounced to our estate in Ashcombe Hills, carrying a box of gourmet caramel chocolates Adrian genuinely adored. Stepping into the foyer, I heard muffled laughter drifting down from our second-floor master suite. Adrian was supposedly stuck in a late-night corporate meeting, while Yasmin, my own sister-in-law and my brother Gavin’s wife, was supposedly visiting her sick mother over in Fernwood.
I climbed the stairs quietly and found the two of them together, in my own bed.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t make a single scene. I simply covered my own mouth, slipped back out the front door entirely unnoticed, and sat for two full hours inside a small coffee shop downtown. I cried until my espresso went freezing cold, then finally remembered exactly who I’d been before marrying five years earlier. I was Katrina Kingsley, the youngest Chief Financial Officer Kingsley Global Enterprises had ever appointed — not the submissive, quiet housewife Adrian had spent half a decade carefully molding me into instead.
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