My Husband’s Mistress Bought Our Wedding Night

The flight landed at LAX at 6:14 AM.

I had one carry-on. Everything else I'd left behind — the penthouse, the dress on the bathroom door, the life my parents had designed for me down to the centerpieces. I didn't need any of it. I had a bank account my parents couldn't touch, a wire transfer that had cleared at 4 AM somewhere over Kansas, and a number at the top of my notes app that I was already working on shrinking.

Myles was waiting at arrivals. No driver, no assistant, no one holding a sign. Just him, in a gray hoodie and jeans, leaning against a pillar with his hands in his pockets like he had nowhere better to be at six in the morning.

I walked up and he looked at my single bag and didn't say anything about it.

'How was the flight?' he asked.

'Productive,' I said.

He took the bag anyway — not in a way that made a thing of it, just reached out and took it — and we walked to the parking structure without making a production of the fact that my entire life had just collapsed and I had rebuilt the foundation somewhere over the Rockies.

His car was a black Jeep, nothing flashy. Silver Lake was forty minutes in early morning traffic. He told me about the apartment — ground floor, small, close to the training facility, nothing special. I told him that was fine. He told me the trainee program started Monday and that in front of the roster I was nobody special, just another new signing.

'Good,' I said.

'I mean it, Paisley. I can't—'

'Myles.' I looked at him. 'I don't want special treatment. I want to earn it.'

He nodded and kept driving. Outside, Los Angeles was waking up slow and golden, palm trees catching the early light, the freeway already filling with people who had no idea who I was. I liked that. I planned to use it.

---

The apartment had white walls and a window that faced a courtyard and a kitchen with exactly four things in it — a coffee maker, a box of filters, a mug, and a note from Myles that said *Monday, 8 AM. Don't be late.* I put the note on the counter and slept for eleven hours.

Monday came fast.

The training facility was a converted warehouse in Silver Lake — all exposed brick and sprung floors and mirrors that showed you everything you didn't want to see about yourself. There were twelve other trainees. They were younger than me, most of them, and hungrier in the visible way that people are when they haven't been hungry long enough to learn to hide it. I recognized the energy. I had felt it in a different form, standing in a Plaza Hotel ballroom with a smile I'd been wearing for four hours.

The vocal coach was a woman named Diane who had worked with three Grammy winners and had the patience of someone who had heard every excuse a human being could make for not breathing correctly. She listened to me run a scale, made a note on her clipboard, and said, 'Your breath control is underdeveloped. You're pushing from your throat. We'll fix it.'

The acting coach was a man named Paul who had the specific energy of someone who had seen too many talented people waste it. He ran me through a scene, stopped me twice, and said, 'You're telegraphing. I can see you deciding to feel something. Stop deciding. Just be in it.'

The media trainer was a woman named Gwen who put me in front of a camera and asked me three questions and then stopped the recording and said, 'You break eye contact when you're under pressure. The camera sees everything. We'll work on it.'

I wrote all of it down. Every note, every correction, every thing they said I was doing wrong. I wrote it in the same notebook where I tracked my money.

I stayed two hours after every session. The facility had a studio with a mirror and a speaker system and I used both. I ran scales until my throat ached. I ran scenes until the decisions stopped showing. I sat in front of a camera on a tripod and held eye contact with the lens until it stopped feeling like a confrontation and started feeling like a conversation.

By the end of week two, I was the last one in the building every night.

I didn't know what Diane said to Myles. I found out later — much later — that she had pulled him aside after a Thursday session and told him quietly: *She's going to be a problem. For everyone else on this roster.*

At the time, I just went home, made coffee, and subtracted another day from the number in my head.

---

In New York, I was told later, Kian woke up on a Tuesday.

Not the Tuesday after the wedding — that Tuesday he woke up in the penthouse with Leyla beside him and a headache that had nothing to do with the whiskey and everything to do with the particular silence of a room where someone used to be. He wasn't alarmed. That was the thing. He was annoyed. Annoyed the way you are when a meeting runs long or a flight is delayed — inconvenienced, not affected.

His assistant told him I had relocated to Los Angeles. Signed with Myles Thompson's company.

I heard the annoyance sharpened then. Became something with more edges to it. Something territorial, though I'm sure he didn't call it that. I'm sure he called it a strategic concern. I'm sure he told himself that Myles Thompson was a business rival and that anything involving Myles Thompson was therefore a matter of professional interest.

That same afternoon, he set up a Google alert for my name.

I didn't know that yet. I was in a Silver Lake studio at eleven PM, running the same eight bars until they stopped sounding like effort and started sounding like me.

But I would have found it funny, if I'd known.

Kian Wagner, the most powerful heir in New York City, setting up a Google alert for the wife he'd left alone on her wedding night.

I would have written it down in my notebook, right under the number.

$79,000,000 to go.