All Chapters of I Slept With My Best Friend's Son: Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

I am a sinner.I want to say that first, before you hear the rest and draw your own conclusions. I know what I am doing. I know what it looks like. I know that if any of my former colleagues — the ones I used to face down in courtrooms from the Southern District to the Second Circuit — could see me now, they would have a great deal to say about it. Let them say it. I am sleeping with my best friend's son. I started it deliberately, with full knowledge, without apology. Because the woman I used to call my best friend has been sleeping with my husband since before he became my husband. And the man I call my husband has spent six years using my money, my career, my reputation, and my silence as raw material for a life I was never supposed to survive with anything left. So yes. I am a sinner. But I did not arrive here by accident. Let me go back. Back to where it actually started — not the version Rhett would tell you, not the version Ashley rehearsed in the mirror every morning for

That evening I wore what I always wore at home when Rhett was away — comfortable, unhurried, the version of myself that had existed before I started editing my appearance to suit someone else's preferences. Silk robe over a camisole, hair loose, bare feet on the kitchen tile while I put dinner together. It was my home. I had said so.Evan came downstairs at six forty-five, showered and changed, and stopped in the kitchen doorway. He did not say anything about what I was wearing. He did not look at anything he should not have. I registered this and filed it without examining why I was keeping track."Can I help?" he said."I have it."He sat at the counter anyway.He was quiet in the way of someone who is genuinely comfortable with silence rather than accidentally producing it. Most people, in a new place with someone they barely know, fill space. They ask questions they don't care about the answers to. They perform ease. Evan did none of this. He sat with the particular stillness of a

Rhett came home at six that evening. I heard him before I saw him. I always had — six years in the same apartment teaches you the particular sound of a person. His key in the lock. The specific pause before he pushed the door open, the beat he took to compose himself on the other side of it. Then his footsteps on the tile, heavier than usual. There was a register to Rhett's anger that I had catalogued thoroughly over the years, the way you catalogue things you cannot afford to be surprised by. I was at the kitchen table. Evan was upstairs. I had suggested, at around four o'clock, that he might want to get settled with his reading before dinner, and he had looked at me for a long moment with the expression of someone calculating what was not being said, and then gone upstairs without comment. I had been right about him from the beginning. He was smarter than he looked, and he already looked intelligent. Rhett walked into the kitchen and we looked at each other across the room. "R