I wanted to impress my ex, who showed up at our son’s birthday party with his mistress, so I hired an actor to pretend to be my boyfriend — he laughed until my fake partner taught him a lesson.
Desmond and I had been together for twenty years, and for most of that time, I genuinely believed we had a happy marriage. We had four wonderful children together, and just six months ago, I’d given birth to our youngest, a baby girl.
⸻
Then, a few months ago, I saw a message from another woman on his phone, still open on the screen where he’d left it charging on the kitchen counter.
When I confronted him through tears, demanding an explanation, Desmond didn’t even have the decency to look uncomfortable about it.
“Vanessa and I have been together for over a year,” he said. “I don’t want to waste any more time with a woman I’m no longer attracted to.”
⸻
Vanessa was his secretary at work — beautiful, tall, about ten years younger than him, the kind of detail that somehow made the whole thing feel even more like a tired cliché.
It felt like the ground had genuinely disappeared beneath my feet, standing there in our kitchen with our sleeping newborn upstairs.
⸻
The divorce process that followed was one of the hardest stretches of my entire life, made considerably harder by the fact that I was navigating it while still recovering physically from childbirth and caring for a six-month-old at the same time.
⸻
As our son Theo’s fifteenth birthday approached, he told me he wanted to invite our entire extended family, along with all his friends, for a big pool party. So that’s exactly what I arranged, throwing myself into party planning as a welcome distraction from everything else falling apart around me.
⸻
Then Desmond texted me: Great. I’ll be there with Vanessa.
I stared at that message for a long time, something hot and humiliated rising in my chest at the thought of standing in my own backyard, watching him show up with her, while I stood there looking exactly as exhausted and overwhelmed as four kids and a fresh divorce actually made me feel.
⸻
I wanted so badly to show him I was doing perfectly fine without him. So, somewhat impulsively, I contacted a local acting agency and explained what I needed.
They sent over a man named Silas, who agreed to spend the afternoon pretending to be my boyfriend.
⸻
When I first saw him waiting outside the agency’s office, I could barely manage a coherent sentence. He was tall, easy-smiling, genuinely handsome in a way that made me immediately doubt the entire plan.
How could anyone believe a man like that would actually be with someone like me, three months postpartum, running on almost no sleep, still working through the particular exhaustion that comes with a marriage ending?
⸻
“I don’t think this is going to work,” I told him, standing in the agency parking lot. “This was a bad idea.”
Silas studied me for a moment, something steady and genuine in his expression that didn’t match the polished, performative energy I’d expected from a hired actor.
⸻
“Don’t you want him to see exactly how happy you are without him?” he asked. “You don’t need me to be believable as your soulmate, Renata. You just need him to see you standing next to someone who clearly respects you.”
⸻
Something about the way he said it settled my nerves enough that I agreed to go through with it after all.
We arrived at the party together that Saturday afternoon, Silas’s hand resting easily at the small of my back, greeting my sister and a few close friends with an ease that genuinely surprised me.
⸻
I was standing beside him near the drinks table when Desmond and Vanessa walked over to greet us, Desmond’s expression already sliding into something smug the moment he registered who I’d brought.
⸻
Desmond burst out laughing, loud enough that several nearby guests turned to look.
“That’s your boyfriend?” he said. “Have you even looked in a mirror lately, Renata? There’s no way a guy like that would actually be with you.”
⸻
I felt the ground threatening to swallow me whole, twenty years of marriage apparently reduced, in his mind, to this exact cruel sentence delivered in front of half my family at our son’s birthday party.
⸻
Silas didn’t react with anything close to embarrassment. He simply smiled, calm and easy, and reached into the bag he’d been carrying since we arrived.
“Actually,” he said, “I brought something for the birthday boy’s dad too.”
⸻
See more on the next page
