I had forwarded her emails to Rhett and asked him to book her.
I pulled up my inbox and searched her name.
There were the messages—the friendly ones, the ones I’d answered with my usual enthusiasm.
But then I noticed something I hadn’t paid attention to before.
The booking confirmation hadn’t come from my assistant.
It had come from Rhett’s account.
Just one line: Schedule confirmed.
Thursday, 2 p.m.
I sat there looking at it for a long time.
Maya came in from school around four.
She’s fifteen and has my mother’s sharp eyes.
She took one look at me and dropped her backpack on the floor.
“Mom?
What happened?”
I told her the truth, as simply as I could.
I told her that her father had made a terrible mistake and that I was handling it.
She didn’t cry.
She just stood there and said, “Is she still in the house?”
“No.
She’s gone.”
“Good.”
My mother, Vera, called that night.
She’s seventy-three and lives two towns over.
She’d seen my name in the studio calendar and wanted to know if I was bringing dessert to Sunday dinner.
I said yes, because I didn’t know what else to say.
Rhett came home around eight.
He stood in the kitchen doorway like a man who didn’t know if he still lived there.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Then talk.”
He took a breath.
“It just happened.
It was a one-time thing.”
“A one-time thing in the middle of my show,” I said.
“With a guest I invited.”
“It wasn’t planned.”
“Neither was my walking in.”
He rubbed his face.
“It was a mistake.
She’s just a friend.”
I looked at him and said, “A friend you never mentioned.”
He opened his mouth and then closed it.
I didn’t need to reveal what I’d found.
He did it himself.
“She’s an old friend,” he said.
“Someone I knew before we met.”
“Before we met,” I repeated.
“And in all these years, she never came up.”
He didn’t answer.
I realized I was holding the edge of the counter so hard my fingers had gone white.
I let go.
“You should know something,” I said.
“The file from today is already backed up.
I have it.”
He looked at me with something new in his eyes—something careful, like he was recalculating what I might do next.
And in that moment, I understood that the kiss was not the worst part.
The worst part was going to be figuring out what else he had been hiding.
Chapter 3 – The Guest List
After Rhett and Aubrey left the studio that day, I sat alone in the dark with my phone in my hand and the raw audio file still open.
I told myself I was only going to listen once.
But once was enough to hear something I hadn’t noticed while it was happening.
Aubrey’s voice, low and close to the microphone, said, “You promised you’d handle things after the anniversary.”
I stopped the playback and stared at the screen.
Anniversary.
Our anniversary wasn’t for another three weeks.
So which anniversary was she talking about, and why did it sound like a deadline?
I called Simone, my producer friend who had been with the show since the beginning.
Chồng xuống phong độ, hôn nhân lạc lối! Lấy lại bản lĩnh ngay
Sức Khỏe Nam Giới
Nam giới yếu, vợ chán yêu! Thử mẹo sinh lý từ thảo dược thiên nhiên
Sức Khoẻ Nam Giới
Thói quen trước giờ ngủ giúp quý ông phong độ bền vững, khỏe mạnh đến già
Sức Khỏe Nam Giới
She picked up on the second ring.
“Celina, it’s almost midnight.
Are you okay?”
“I need you to tell me I’m not crazy,” I said.
“Can you come to the studio tomorrow morning?
I don’t want to be alone with the equipment.”
She didn’t ask questions.
She just said she’d be there at seven.
The next morning, I started going through the archive.
I had thousands of hours of audio stored on the shared drive, most of it raw tape from years of interviews, filler, and warm-ups.
But I wasn’t looking for my own voice.
I was looking for Rhett’s.
It took me two hours to find the first one.
A recording dated three months back, when Rhett was supposed to be testing a new microphone.
The file was forty-two minutes long.
For the first five minutes, I heard him humming and tapping the mic.
Then his phone rang, and he answered it.
“Hey, it’s me,” he said.
“No, she’s not here.
She’s at her mother’s.”
I sat back in my chair.
He kept talking.
“I told you, Aubrey, we have to be careful.
She’s not stupid.
If she finds out before the launch, everything falls apart.”
Launch.
