The About To Be Divorced Club

Chapter 1

The smell of $400-an-ounce ambergris and sterile marble was the first thing that hit Katherine when she walked into the kitchen that evening, the scent of a life she was being violently purged from. It clung to the back of her throat like expensive regret.

“I’m divorcing you, Katherine. And there is no going back on that.”

The words didn’t just fall; they struck. George’s voice was steely, vibrating with a cold finality that seemed to fracture the very air molecules floating above the pristine, designer island. To emphasize his point, he swept his arm across the marble in one deliberate arc.

The set of hand-forged sterling silver utensils, ones she had chosen in Milan two summers ago clattered to the floor in a bright, metallic cascade. The sound rang against the stone like a single tolling bell at a funeral no one else was invited to attend.

He snatched his slim leather briefcase from the counter, already turning toward the doorway as though he hadn’t just detonated five years of marriage in under thirty seconds.

Katherine stood frozen in the archway, chest heaving, each breath scraping against ribs that suddenly felt too small. “You can’t do this to me, George,” she whispered. The words came out thin, trembling, barely audible over the blood roaring in her ears. “Not after everything. Not after five years.”

“Five years of what? Playing house?” George scoffed. He began pacing the length of the kitchen, ten deliberate steps one way, ten back like a man finally released from restraints he had worn too long. His polished oxfords clicked against the heated travertine with metronomic indifference.

“I gave up everything for you!” Katherine’s voice cracked higher, desperation spilling out like water from a broken dam. Tears blurred the edges of the room into soft watercolor smears. She took one step toward him, then another, hands reaching instinctively as though she could physically gather the fragments of their life and press them back together.

“When your father passed and the company was hemorrhaging cash, I was the one who stayed up until four a.m. with you, running projections, making coffee, massaging your shoulders while you stared at spreadsheets. I managed this house. I managed your image. I smiled at your mother’s horrible friends and pretended I didn’t hear them whisper that I was new money trash trying to climb. I loved you, George. I begged for whatever scraps of your time you could spare, and I ate them gladly. Gladly.”

She was pleading openly now, dignity sliding off her like wet silk and pooling on the polished floorboards. “Please. We can fix this. We can go to counseling, we can take that trip to Santorini you always promised, we can…”

“Stop.” George spun to face her. His expression was a twisted cocktail of pity and revulsion, the look one might give a wounded animal that refuses to die quietly. “It’s over, Katherine. I’ve met someone. Someone I actually love.”

The sentence landed like a physical blow. Katherine recoiled, one hand flying to her sternum as though checking for an entry wound.

“Who?” Her voice was barely a breath. “Who could possibly be worth throwing away five years?”

George straightened the knot of his charcoal silk tie with the calm precision of a man already mentally elsewhere. A cruel, triumphant light flickered behind his eyes. “He is everything you aren’t. He understands the world I actually live in. He understands me.”

The silence that swallowed the room afterward was absolute, thick enough to choke on.

He.

The pronoun hung between them, slowly stripping away years of Katherine’s private confusion: the cold nights, the locked study door, the endless headaches,the way George’s body had always stiffened when she reached for him in the dark. The pieces she had refused to name reassembled themselves in brutal clarity.

“You’re… you’re gay?” The words left her lips like glass shards. For one surreal heartbeat the shock actually numbed the deeper pain. “George, your mother…she’s sick. You know what she expects. The grandchildren. The legacy. The continuation of the West name…”

“I’ll have children,” he snapped, snatching a slim leather folder from the counter. The motion was so casual it felt rehearsed.

“But not with you. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing, Katherine. Surrogates, egg donors, lawyers who make inconvenient questions disappear. You, however, are an outdated relic of a mistake I made when I was too afraid to be myself.”

He crossed into the living room without waiting for her response. The very room where, three Christmases ago, they had once made desperate, half-clothed love on the rug after a rare night of tenderness.

He stopped beside the mahogany coffee table and dropped the thick stack of divorce papers onto the wood. The thud echoed like a judge’s gavel.

“Sign them. Or don’t. It won’t change tomorrow morning.” He checked his Patek Philippe, the face catching the recessed light. “I’ll see you at the courthouse at 9:00 a.m. sharp. Don’t be late. I’d hate for my new life to wait even a second longer because of your attitude. Please spare me the dramatics, Katherine. I have places to be that do not involve you.”

He walked out. No hesitation. No final glance. The heavy front door closed with a soft, expensive click that felt louder than any slam.

Katherine remained rooted to the spot for several long seconds after he left, ears ringing, lungs burning. Then her knees gave way.

She collapsed onto the nearest sofa, the dam inside her finally rupturing. Sobs tore up her throat until it felt raw and scraped. She cried until the room spun and the silence of the cavernous house mocked her with its perfection, every surface gleaming, every cushion plumped, every flower fresh. All of it belonged to a life that had just ejected her.

Eventually she lifted her head and stared at the divorce papers. The top sheet bore George’s elegant, looping signature already in place beside the blank line reserved for hers.

She had no job. No career. No recent work history. George had never wanted her stressed by employment; he had promised, sworn on his father’s grave that he would always provide. And she, twenty-two and starry-eyed, had believed every syllable.

She had abandoned her parents, who had begged her not to marry into the West family, who had warned her that George was polished ice over a bottomless freeze. She had cut ties, deleted numbers, burned every bridge behind her to become the flawless Mrs. West.

Now the bridges were ash, and she stood alone on a rapidly sinking island.

With shaking fingers she pulled out her phone and opened the banking app.

Available Balance: $112.40

That was it. Five years of devotion reduced to a number smaller than most people’s weekly grocery bill. George had already drained the joint accounts.

He had canceled the credit cards before he even stepped out the door. She was twenty-seven, a college dropout whose resume could be summed up in one cruel line: Socialite (2019–2025).

Her phone buzzed violently against the glass coffee table. Serena. Her best, and increasingly only friend.

Katherine let it ring once, twice, three times. She wanted silence. But when the fourth call came through, insistent and furious, she surrendered.

She answered, voice cracked and hollow. “He’s leaving me, Serena. It’s over. He’s… he’s gay. He has someone else. A man.”

“He’s what?” Serena’s voice detonated through the speaker, sharp and gloriously unfiltered. “Oh my God. Is that why he never hired any female staff? While you thought he was protecting your delicate feelings from temptation, he was just curating his own personal buffet, the selfish bastard! Honey, listen to me very carefully. That sickly, closeted, performative heterosexual is doing you the biggest favor of your life. You are not spending tonight crying in that sterile mausoleum over a man who never wanted what you were offering in the first place.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” Katherine rasped. “I have a hundred and twelve dollars to my name. I’m ruined.”

“You have a hundred dollars? Perfect.” Serena’s tone shifted to something almost gleeful. “That’s just enough for a gloriously bad decision. Put on that red dress I bought you last birthday, the one that shows enough skin to start a small insurrection. I’m sending a car in forty-five minutes. We’re going to The Gilded Lily. It’s time to bury George’s ghost and remind you that you’re still breathing. Still young. Still dangerous.”

Two hours later Katherine barely recognized the woman staring back from the full-length mirror.

Her eyes were rimmed in smoky charcoal that made the green of her irises look almost feral. Her lips were painted a vicious crimson that felt like war paint.

The silk dress, deep scarlet, scandalously low-cut, clinging to every curve like liquid sin had been chosen to be noticed, or perhaps to let her disappear inside someone else’s hungry gaze for a few hours.

When she stepped into the VIP section of The Gilded Lily, the sheer decadence of the place hit like a fever dream. The bass throbbed inside her ribcage. The air was thick with expensive cologne, spilled champagne, and inescapably, that same ambergris note that had haunted George’s house. Here, though, it felt predatory instead of domestic.

“There she is!” Serena shrieked over the music, sliding a chilled crystal flute of something golden toward her. “Drink up, baby. Tonight we toast the death of Katherine the Housewife and the resurrection of Katherine the fucking Goddess.”

Katherine took a cautious sip. The champagne burned pleasantly down her throat. Even through the fog of grief, the part of her brain that had once orchestrated flawless dinner parties for thirty couldn’t help cataloguing the flaws.

The VIP area was cramped. The lighting was harsh and unflattering, cheap recessed cans instead of layered ambiance. The flow of traffic was choked by pointless decorative partitions.

“It’s too much,” she murmured, almost to herself.

“What? The fun?” Serena laughed, already swaying to the beat.

“The noise. The decor.” Katherine’s voice sharpened with sudden, surprising clarity. “The lighting is amateur. If they wanted a true luxury experience, they should have shifted the bar to the north wall, installed warm recessed LED strips to create depth instead of these flat spots, and removed half those ridiculous screens. It’s… it’s a beautiful space being strangled by bad decisions.”

Serena grinned. “Well, maybe you can pitch the owner after you get properly laid.” She jerked her chin toward the far end of the bar. “Look.”

Katherine followed her gaze.

He stood half-shrouded in the shadows of a velvet-draped alcove, radiating a gravitational force that made the rest of the room feel peripheral. The charcoal suit cut so sharply it looked dangerous.

Dark hair swept back from a face of rugged, almost brutal symmetry. He wasn’t dancing. He wasn’t drinking. He simply surveyed the crowd with the cool, detached interest of royalty watching lesser creatures at play.

Then his eyes, sharp, intelligent, unmistakably predatory found hers across the pulsing sea of bodies.

Electricity snapped through Katherine’s bloodstream, bypassing thought entirely and landing hot and urgent between her thighs. For five years she had been ornamental: a beautiful thing to be displayed, never used. This man looked like he knew exactly how to handle something beautiful until it shattered in his hands.

She glanced down at her tiny clutch. Inside: one crumpled hundred-dollar bill, a tube of lipstick, and three quarters.

She thought of George’s parting sneer. An outdated relic.

She thought of the echoing silence waiting at home.

She thought of five years of cold sheets and polite excuses.

Katherine rose. Her movements felt liquid, desperate, inevitable.

“Where are you going?” Serena asked, startled.

“To buy a miracle,” Katherine whispered.

She crossed the room toward the man in the charcoal suit. With every step the roar of the club receded until there was only the crisp click of her heels, the thunder of her pulse, and the magnetic draw of his gaze.

He didn’t move as she approached. He simply watched her come, the faintest, most dangerous curve touching the corner of his mouth. Up close he smelled like rain-soaked cedar, tobacco, and something darker, something that promised trouble and delivered.

Her voice trembled, but the words were steady. “I have a hundred dollars and approximately six years’ worth of rage. Is that enough for a night of your time?”

The man glanced down at the bill, then slowly back up at her face. A slow, dark amusement kindled in his eyes.

“For you, sweetheart?” He leaned in until the heat of his body brushed hers, until she could feel the faint brush of his breath against her temple. “It’s a down payment.”