The Billion Dollar Bet

GRACE'S POV

I wasn't snooping. Let me be clear about that from the start, because when this all comes out and it will come out… I need to remember I wasn't looking for anything. Carter left his laptop open on the kitchen island when he went to shower, and I just wanted to order Thai food because he'd promised us dinner at home for once and I knew he'd forget to actually arrange it. That's the kind of wife I was. The kind who smoothed over the gaps, who anticipated needs, who made our life look effortless from the outside.

The screen was already awake when I sat down. His email was open, which wasn't unusual. Carter never logged out of anything, never worried about privacy because why would he? He owned three homes, a hedge fund worth nine figures, and apparently my complete trust. The preview pane showed his inbox and I wasn't reading it, not really, just scrolling to find his Seamless app when I saw the subject line: "Saturday night… you're an animal."

My hand stopped. The sender was Marcus Webb, Carter's best friend and business partner. The kind of guy who called women "females" and thought it was a compliment. I should've closed the laptop right then. Should've ordered the pad thai and pretended I'd seen nothing, but my fingers clicked the email before my brain caught up.

The message was short. Just a video attachment and three words: "Encore performance, brother."

I knew before I opened it. Some part of me that had been holding its breath for three years suddenly understood why. The video loaded and there was Carter, my husband, in what looked like Marcus's penthouse, with a woman whose face I couldn't see yet. She was bent over the back of a leather couch and he was behind her, one hand fisted in her hair, and I watched for five seconds before I closed it because I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but stare at the frozen frame on the screen.

The woman had a tattoo on her shoulder blade. A small bird in flight.

I opened my email on my phone with shaking hands and searched for the last message from Stella Chen. My former best friend. The woman who'd been in my wedding, who knew how I took my coffee, who'd held my hand through my mother's cancer scare last year. I found her I*******m, scrolled to a beach photo from two months ago. She was turned away from the camera, showing off her new bikini, and there on her left shoulder blade was that same little bird.

Something cold and sharp lodged itself in my chest, made it hard to pull in air. I went back to Carter's inbox. Searched "Saturday" in his email. Found six more messages from Marcus, spanning the last year and a half. Each one had videos attached. I opened them methodically, one after another, like I was reviewing quarterly reports instead of watching my marriage dissolve frame by frame.

There was Stella three more times. Twice someone I didn't recognize—a redhead with a professional blowout and what looked like a hotel room behind her. Once a brunette in what I was pretty sure was Carter's office, the one with the view of Central Park that I'd helped him decorate. I'd chosen the couch she was on. West Elm, because he'd said the designer options were too expensive even though his watch cost more than a car.

I counted. Six videos. Seven women total, because two of them featured multiple partners and Carter's face was visible in all of them, smiling, confident, completely at ease. There were time stamps. The most recent was four days ago. We'd had brunch with my mother that Sunday. He'd held my hand across the table and told her how lucky he was to have me.

The shower shut off in the master bathroom. I could hear Carter humming something, probably whatever jazz standard had been playing at the restaurant last night. He always did that, absorbed ambient music and replayed it unconsciously. It used to charm me, that little quirk. I'd thought it meant he was present, paying attention to his surroundings. Now I wondered what else he'd absorbed. What other women's sounds he was unconsciously replaying.

I didn't move from the barstool. Didn't close the laptop or try to compose myself. Some distant part of my brain understood I was in shock, that I should feel something more than this spreading numbness, but I couldn't access it. Instead I just sat there staring at the paused video on the screen, at Carter's hand wrapped around someone else's throat, and waited.

He walked out in a towel, rubbing another one through his wet hair. Even now, even after what I'd just seen, some treacherous part of me registered how good he looked. Tall and lean with that sharp jawline and those blue eyes that had made me stupid three years ago when he'd approached me at that charity gala. He'd told me I was the most beautiful woman in the room. That he'd been watching me all night. That he couldn't leave without knowing my name.

I'd believed him. God, I'd believed every word.

He saw me at the laptop and his expression flickered—just for a second—before smoothing into a smile. "Hey, babe. I thought you were in the bedroom. Did you order food? I'm starving."

My voice came out steady, which surprised me. "How long?"

Carter stopped moving. The towel in his hands went still and I watched his eyes track from my face to the laptop screen, saw the exact moment he understood what I was looking at. His jaw tightened. Then, and this was the part I'd remember forever, the part that would replay in my head during the worst nights to come—he sighed. Like I'd caught him leaving dishes in the sink instead of watching him fuck my best friend.

"Grace. This isn't—it's not what you think."

"How long?" I said again, and this time my voice cracked on the second word.

He set down the towel, ran a hand through his wet hair. Stalling. "Can we talk about this rationally? You're upset and I get that, but—"

"There are six videos here. Six that Marcus sent you, which means there are probably more. So I'm asking you one more time." I looked directly at him, forced myself to hold his gaze. "How long have you been cheating on me?"

The word hung between us. Cheating. So small and ordinary for what it meant, for what it was doing to my lungs, to my ability to think straight. Carter's face did something complicated—annoyance and resignation and something that might've been guilt if I was being generous.

"I haven't been cheating," he said finally. "We're married, Grace. It's not the same thing."

I actually laughed. It came out harsh and broken but it was a laugh. "Explain that logic to me. Please. I'd love to understand how you being inside other women doesn't count as cheating just because we signed some papers."

"Because you knew." He said it quietly, like he was the reasonable one. Like I was overreacting. "Come on. You're not stupid. Did you really think I was going to stop living my life just because we got married?"

The numbness cracked then, let something hot and vicious through. "Your life? This is your life? Fucking my friends and recording it for your boys' club to jack off to?"

"Don't be crass." He moved toward the bedroom, toward his clothes, and I realized with dawning horror that he was planning to just get dressed and leave. That this conversation was over as far as he was concerned. "And Stella wasn't your friend, Grace. She was barely an acquaintance. You hung out twice."

"She was in our wedding." My voice went high and thin. "She gave a toast about how perfect we were together."

Carter pulled on boxer briefs, reached for his pants. "Yeah, well. That was good for the optics. My mom liked her."

I stood up so fast the barstool scraped against the marble floor. "Optics. Our wedding was about optics."

"Our wedding was about a lot of things." He buttoned his pants, grabbed a shirt from the closet. Still wouldn't look at me directly. "And it was a nice day. You got what you wanted—the dress, the venue, all those flowers you insisted on. I didn't complain."

"You didn't complain," I repeated, and something in my chest felt like it was tearing. "Carter. We've been married for three years. I thought—" I couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't articulate what I'd thought because it sounded so stupid now. That he loved me. That we were building something. That the life we had, the quiet dinners and the weekend trips and the way he kissed my forehead in the morning, meant something.

He turned to face me finally, and his expression was so calm it terrified me. "You thought what? That I was going to completely change who I am? Grace, you met me at a party where I had a different woman on each arm. I was always upfront about who I was."

"You asked me to marry you." I heard the tears in my voice, hated myself for them. "You said you wanted forever. You said—"

"I do want forever. I want you." He crossed to where I stood, put his hands on my shoulders. His touch felt alien now, contaminated. "You're my wife. That matters to me. But marriage doesn't mean I'm going to pretend I'm someone I'm not."

I shook him off, stepped back. My hip hit the kitchen island and I grabbed it for balance. "So what am I, then? What have I been for three years?"

Carter's jaw worked. He looked at me for a long moment and I saw him calculating, deciding how much truth to give me. "You're the woman I married. The one I come home to. The one who looks perfect on my arm at benefits and knows how to talk to investors' wives. That's important, Grace. That has value."

Value. The word sat between us like a stone. I thought about the last three years. How I'd closed my design studio because he'd said it was too much stress while we were building our life together. How I'd smiled through dinners with his friends even when they told jokes that made me feel small. How I'd learned to anticipate his moods, to smooth his temper, to be whatever he needed me to be in any given moment.

"Did you ever love me?" I asked, and hated how small my voice sounded.

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. "I married you, didn't I?"

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer you're going to get." He grabbed his keys from the counter, his wallet. "I have a meeting in an hour. We can talk about this later when you've calmed down."

He moved toward the door and panic seized me. "You're leaving? Right now? After I just found—" I gestured at the laptop, couldn't even name what I'd found. "You're just walking out?"

Carter paused with his hand on the doorknob. When he looked back at me his face was already distant, like he'd filed this conversation away and moved on to the next item on his agenda. "What do you want me to say, Grace? I'm sorry you went through my private emails? I'm sorry you're upset? Fine. I'm sorry. But this isn't going to change anything, so we might as well both accept that now."

The door closed behind him with a soft click. So quiet. So unremarkable. I stood in our kitchen—his kitchen, really, because he'd bought this place before we met and I'd just moved my clothes into his closet—and stared at the laptop screen. At the frozen image of my husband with his hand in another woman's hair.

My phone buzzed. A text from Carter: "Order whatever you want for dinner. I'll probably be late."

I looked at the message. At the casual assumption that I'd still be here when he got home, that we'd still eat dinner together like this was just another Thursday, just another minor disagreement smoothed over with takeout and silence. I looked at the laptop, at the evidence of three years of lies. At my reflection in the dark window behind the kitchen island—a woman I barely recognized anymore, all careful highlights and expensive skin care and clothes chosen to complement her husband's aesthetic.

Then I opened the laptop again and started forwarding emails to myself. Every video. Every message from Marcus with its casual cruelty, its locker room camaraderie. I sent them to my personal email, to a cloud drive Carter didn't have access to. I worked methodically, numbly, until I'd documented everything.

Only then did I let myself cry.