Chapter 1

I built my husband' s career from nothing. I was the architect of his rise, the woman who would make him mayor. But the one thing I didn't plan for was the cheap perfume on his collar-the scent of our new intern.

When I confronted him, he didn't apologize. He called me a burden.

"She's simple," he said. "She's not... complicated like you."

He claimed the affair was a necessary escape so he could tolerate coming home to me.

Then, when his campaign fraud was exposed, he tried to pin it on his mistress and used the deepest wound of my life-my brother's death, which he caused-to demand I clean up his mess.

He looked at me, the man I had sacrificed everything for, and warned me not to "fall apart on him now."

He wanted me to bury the scandal. I looked him in the eye and agreed.

"Fine," I said. "I'll bury it."

He didn't realize I meant I would bury him.

Chapter 1

April Acevedo POV:

I had built my husband' s career from nothing, crafting every speech, every handshake, every lie. The one thing I didn' t plan for was the cheap perfume clinging to the collar of his custom-tailored suit.

It wasn't just any perfume. It was 'Summer Fling,' the kind of saccharine, fruity scent you could buy at any drugstore for ten dollars. The kind our new intern, Kennedy Williamson, bathed herself in.

The realization didn' t crash over me like a wave. It was more like a slow, seeping cold that started in my chest and spread to the tips of my fingers.

Our wedding photo sat on the mantelpiece, a testament to a decade of calculated partnership and, once upon a time, love. Harman, smiling his perfect, camera-ready smile. Me, looking at him as if he were the sun.

I picked up the heavy silver frame. My fingers traced the smooth glass over his face.

Then, with a force that surprised even me, I hurled it against the opposite wall.

The sound of shattering glass was sharp and final, a gunshot in the tomb-like silence of our home. Shards rained down onto the polished hardwood floor, glittering like fallen stars.

My campaign manager' s voice, sharp and panicked, crackled through my phone' s speaker. "April? What was that? Is everything okay?"

I had been on a conference call, finalizing the strategy for Harman' s biggest campaign rally-the one that would launch his mayoral bid. The one I had orchestrated down to the last detail.

"April, talk to me."

I couldn't. The breath was trapped in my lungs, a painful, heavy weight. My gaze was fixed on the wreckage of the photo. Harman' s smiling face was now bisected by a jagged crack. It was strangely fitting.

I sank onto the plush white sofa, the phone slipping from my numb fingers and clattering to the floor. I felt nothing and everything all at once. A hollowed-out cavern where my heart used to be.

An hour later, Harman came home. He looked exhausted, the way a man does after a sixteen-hour day of pressing the flesh and selling a version of himself that I had invented. His tie was loosened, his hair slightly disheveled in a way that was calculated to look boyishly charming.

He stopped short in the living room, his eyes landing on the shattered frame on the floor.

"What the hell happened, April?" His voice wasn't laced with concern. It was laced with annoyance, the tone he used when a carefully planned event went off-script.

I didn't answer. My eyes drifted to the collar of his white shirt. Even from across the room, I could see it. A faint, almost invisible smudge of pale pink lipstick, right next to a navy-blue thread.

"I asked you a question." He walked closer, his irritation growing. "Are you going to sit there and give me the silent treatment?"

My gaze locked on the thread. It was a cheap, synthetic fiber, the kind that frayed easily. I knew that thread. I had seen it just last week, dangling from the cuff of a navy-blue scarf Kennedy wore.

I remember thinking it looked tacky.

"Kennedy is a good kid, April. She' s just... eager." That' s what Harman had said a month ago when I' d pointed out the intern' s constant, almost worshipful presence at his side. He' d had this look of paternal patience, a look he never gave me anymore.

He had defended her when she' d messed up the press schedule, claiming she was just "learning the ropes." He had praised her "fresh perspective" when she' d suggested a painfully naive slogan that I' d had to quietly kill.

He said it with a smile, dismissing my concerns as the over-cautiousness of a seasoned pro. "You're too hard on them, April. She just looks up to me."

And I, the master strategist who could read a room of a thousand voters, had believed him. I had bought the lie because wanting it to be true was easier than confronting the alternative.

Then he started mentioning her more often. Little complaints that weren' t really complaints.

"Kennedy spilled coffee all over the polling data this morning. I had to spend an hour calming her down." He' d say it with a sigh, but there was a flicker of something else in his eyes. A hint of pride. He wasn' t annoyed; he was flattered by her helplessness, by the way she needed him.

The arguments started a week ago. I had told him her constant presence was unprofessional.

"For God's sake, April, she's an intern! What do you want me to do, fire her because she admires me?" His voice was cold, dismissive. He looked at me as if I were a jealous, paranoid shrew.

"I want you to set a boundary, Harman. That' s all."

He had thrown his hands up in exasperation. "Fine. Whatever you want. I'll have her reassigned." A small, hollow victory that I had clung to like a fool.

It was a lie, of course. Deception doesn' t stop just because you ask it to. It just gets better at hiding. And he hadn't even bothered to hide it well.

"Are you going to answer me?" he demanded, his voice sharp, pulling me from the memory.

I lifted my eyes to his. The numbness was receding, replaced by a glacial calm.

"That perfume," I said, my own voice sounding distant, foreign. "It's called 'Summer Fling.' Did you know that?"

His face went blank for a fraction of a second. A flicker of panic in his charismatic eyes. He was a good liar, but I was the one who had taught him how to read a room. I knew his tells better than he did.

"What are you talking about?" The anger in his voice was a shield. But it wasn't anger. It was fear.

I slowly stood up and walked toward him, my phone in my hand. "You smell like her, Harman. You smell cheap."

I held up the phone. On the screen was a photo. It had been sent to me from an anonymous number not twenty minutes before he walked in. It was a picture of the two of them, in the back of his car. Harman, with his eyes closed, and Kennedy, her face buried in his neck, her tacky navy-blue scarf wrapped around her shoulders. Her lipstick was the same pale pink now smeared on his collar.

His face turned to stone. The carefully constructed mask of the rising politician shattered, revealing the weak, selfish man underneath.

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