That rule certainly didn’t work out too well for her.
I wake up again at around three in the morning. The first sensation I become aware of is my bladder—full and slightly uncomfortable. I’ve got to hit the bathroom. Usually, I go right before bed, but Andrew wore me out and I fell asleep before I could muster up the energy.
And that’s the other sensation I become aware of. A sense of emptiness. Andrew isn’t in the cot anymore.
I suspect after I fell asleep, he decided to relocate to his own bed. I can’t blame him. This cot is hardly comfortable for one person, much less two, and the room is so claustrophobic. Maybe he tried to tough it out, but after tossing and turning, he migrated downstairs. Andrew is more than ten years older than me, and my back can barely make it through the night with this mattress, so I can hardly blame him.
I’m so glad this is the last night I’ll be sleeping here. Maybe after I use the bathroom, I’ll go join Andrew downstairs.
I rise to my feet, the floorboards groaning under my weight. I make my way to the door and turn the doorknob. As usual, it sticks. So I turn it more firmly.
It still doesn’t turn.
Panic mounts in my chest. I press myself against the door, the scratch marks in the wood splintering into my shoulder, and place my right hand squarely on the knob. I try once again to turn it clockwise. But it doesn’t budge. Not even a millimeter. And that’s when I realize what’s going on.
The door isn’t stuck.
It’s locked.
PART II
THIRTY-EIGHT
NINA
If a few months ago, someone had told me I would be spending tonight in a hotel room while Andy was at my house with another woman—the maid!—I wouldn’t have believed it.
But here I am. Dressed in a terry cloth bathrobe I found in the closet, stretched out in the queen-size hotel bed. The television is on, but I’m barely aware of it. I’ve got my phone out and I click on the app I have been using for the last several months. Find my friends. I wait for it to tell me the location of Wilhelmina “Millie” Calloway.
But under her name, it says: location not found. The same as it has since the afternoon.
She must’ve figured out I was tracking her and disabled the app. Smart girl.
But not smart enough.
I pick up my purse from where I put it down on the nightstand. I dig around inside until I find the one paper photograph I have of Andy. It’s a few years old—a copy of the photographs he had professionally taken for the company website, and he gave me one of them. I stare into his deep brown eyes on the shiny piece of paper, his perfect mahogany hair, the hint of a cleft in his strong chin. Andy is the most handsome man I’ve ever known in real life. I fell half in love with him the first moment I saw him.
And then I find one other object inside my purse and drop it into the pocket of my robe.
I get up off the queen-size bed, my feet sinking into the plush carpet of the hotel room. This room is costing Andy’s credit card a fortune, but that’s okay. I won’t be here long.
I go into the bathroom and I hold up the photograph of Andy’s smiling face. Then I pull out the contents of my pocket.
It’s a lighter.
I flick the starter until a yellow flame shoots out of it. I hold the flickering light to the edge of the photograph until it catches. I watch my husband’s handsome face turn brown and disintegrate, until the sink is full of ashes.
And I smile. My first real smile in almost eight years.
I can’t believe I finally got rid of that asshole.
How to Get Rid of Your Sadistic, Evil Husband—A Guide by Nina Winchester
Step One: Get Knocked Up by a Drunken One-Night Stand, Drop Out of School, and Take a Crappy Job to Pay the Bills
My boss, Andrew Winchester, is ever so dreamy.
He’s not actually my boss. He’s more like, my boss’s boss’s boss. There may be a few other layers in there of people in the chain between him—the CEO of this company since his father’s retirement—and me—a receptionist.
So when I’m sitting at my desk, outside my actual boss’s office, and I admire him from afar, it’s not like I’m crushing on an actual man. It’s more like admiring a famous actor at a movie premiere or possibly even a painting at the fine arts museum. Especially since I have zero room in my life for a date, much less a boyfriend.
He is just so good-looking though. All that money and also so handsome. It would say something about life just being unfair, if the guy wasn’t so nice.
Like for example, when he went in to talk to my own boss, a guy at least twenty years his senior named Stewart Lynch, who clearly resents being bossed around by a guy who he calls “the kid,” Andrew Winchester stopped at my desk and smiled at me and called me by name. He said, “Hello, Nina. How are you today?”