Chapter 1 - The Proposal
My husband ran away with my best friend on a Thursday afternoon, and less than twenty-four hours later, her husband stood outside my apartment and asked me to date him. I laughed because I honestly thought grief had broken Michael Morgan’s mind. Then he looked me straight in the eye and said, “It doesn’t have to be real. Let’s just give them something to regret.” At that moment, revenge sounded ridiculous—but after what Daniel and Rachel had done to us, ridiculous was starting to feel strangely tempting.
My name is Claire Bennett, and until 3:17 the previous afternoon, I still believed my six-year marriage was basically solid. I was giving an important presentation at work when my phone vibrated three times on the conference table. Daniel knew exactly how important that meeting was, so I glanced down expecting an emergency. Instead, I saw the message that split my life cleanly into before and after.
“Claire, I’m sorry,” the first message said. The second was worse: “Rachel and I are leaving together. Please don’t try to find us.” Rachel wasn’t some woman from Daniel’s office or a stranger I could hate without complication. She had been my best friend for ten years, my maid of honor, and the person who knew almost every vulnerable thing I had ever said about my marriage.
Then Daniel sent a photograph from O’Hare Airport. His arm was around Rachel’s waist, and they were smiling like two people starting a vacation instead of destroying two marriages. But what made my stomach turn wasn’t only Daniel’s hand on her body. Rachel was wearing my cream coat and the pearls Daniel’s mother had given me on our wedding day—the same things Rachel had borrowed from me three nights earlier for a “charity dinner.”
I barely made it out of the conference room before I broke down. When I reached our apartment, Daniel’s suitcase, passport, clothes, laptop, and toothbrush were gone, while his wedding ring sat on the kitchen counter beside a letter. He wrote that he and Rachel had “fallen in love,” that she understood him in ways I apparently never had, and that part of me must have known our marriage was already unhappy. I tore the letter apart before I could finish reading it.
Then my mother called, and suddenly my ruined marriage became the second-worst thing happening that day. My father had suffered a heart attack while carrying groceries into the house, and I raced to Northwestern Memorial Hospital without even changing out of my work clothes. Doctors stabilized him, but when I saw him beneath those bright hospital lights, he looked smaller than I had ever seen him. He still smiled when I walked in and whispered, “There’s my girl.”
Dad asked where Daniel was, and I lied. I told him Daniel had been called away for work because I could not tell a man recovering from a heart attack that his son-in-law had just escaped to Europe with my best friend. Then Dad smiled and said he still needed to live long enough to meet his grandchildren someday. Daniel and I had been planning to try for a baby again that winter, and I had to look away before my father saw my face collapse.
I returned home after midnight and stared at Daniel’s empty side of the bed until sunrise. By morning, I had stopped crying, not because I felt better but because I had gone strangely numb. That was when I saw Michael Morgan standing beside a black SUV outside my building. Rachel’s husband looked just as wrecked as I felt—unshaven, exhausted, and carrying the same kind of message on his phone that Daniel had sent me.
We went to a coffee shop because neither of us knew what else to do. Michael showed me Rachel’s goodbye message, and it was almost identical to Daniel’s: apology, confession, departure, and a request not to follow. Then Michael told me something that changed my grief into anger. Two weeks earlier, he had turned down a major promotion because Rachel complained that he worked too much and claimed their marriage would not survive if he accepted it.
I knew exactly how he felt because Daniel had done something similar to me. Months earlier, he said my work travel was damaging our marriage, so I gave up an important account that might have helped me earn a promotion. Michael and I sat there realizing the same awful truth at almost the same time. Our spouses had allowed us to sacrifice our careers for relationships they were already quietly abandoning.
That was when Michael asked, “Can I ask you something insane?” I expected him to suggest lawyers, private investigators, maybe even flying after them. Instead, he leaned forward and asked, “What if you and I got together?” When I stared at him, he quickly added that it could be fake—just enough to show Daniel and Rachel that the two people they discarded had not collapsed.
I told him he had lost his mind. Michael didn’t argue, but before leaving he slid his business card across the table and said I could throw it away. I put it in my purse anyway, then spent that entire night staring at it while Daniel’s empty pillow sat beside me. At 2:42 in the morning, I called Michael and said, “If we do this, there are rules.”
No sleeping together. No jealousy. No using each other as therapists, no lying to my parents, and no physical affection unless someone else could see us. Most importantly, the moment Daniel or Rachel came back, the arrangement would end. Then I added the rule that sounded safest of all: “We do not fall in love.” Michael gave a tired laugh and replied, “I think we’re both safe on that one.”
Our first fake date happened the next evening at Rachel’s favorite restaurant in River North. I wore the black dress Daniel always called “too dramatic,” while Michael booked the table Rachel used to request whenever they went there. We didn’t post a single photograph because that would have looked desperate. We simply waited for someone we knew to notice us.
It took nineteen minutes. Rachel’s former coworker spotted us, lifted her phone when she thought we weren’t looking, and started taking pictures. Michael leaned closer and whispered, “Smile,” so I did. By dessert, my phone was exploding with messages asking whether I was really having dinner with Rachel’s husband.
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Then Daniel texted me three words: “That was fast.” Two minutes later, Michael’s phone buzzed with a message from Rachel that said only, “Seriously?” For the first time since they left, Michael and I laughed so hard we could barely breathe. Our ridiculous plan was working.
But before the week was over, one of them would call, another would come home unexpectedly, and the rules Michael and I had made to protect ourselves would begin collapsing one by one.
