The Right Way for a Spoiled Heiress to Get Divorced

I found the video at one in the morning.

It was shot in some dim corner of a party, the lighting low and suggestive. A woman with honey-blonde curls stood on her tiptoes, both hands draped around my husband Julian's neck. Julian tilted his head slightly, and the cufflink on his wrist caught the light.

White gold, set with black diamonds. One of a kind—only two in the world. I'd picked them out myself.

He leaned down and kissed her. A deep, lingering kiss that lasted a full minute.

The comment section was a feeding frenzy. Hundreds of messages piling on top of each other. Someone had tagged me: "Hey, Ashford heiress—your husband's having the time of his life out here."

I tossed the phone aside, got up, and walked barefoot into the closet.

Three custom suits had just arrived, still hanging in their garment bags.

I'd hired the designer myself—spent a fortune on him. These were supposed to be Julian's birthday present.

Not anymore.

I picked up the scissors and cut them to ribbons.

Not enough.

That wasn't nearly enough to put out the fire inside me.

I dropped the scissors, walked to the bed, and pulled our wedding photo off the wall.

In the picture, Julian wore a black tuxedo. His eyes were soft, the faintest smile on his lips, his head tilted toward me with a tenderness that hardly seemed real.

I raised the frame over my head and smashed it against the floor.

Not enough.

I grabbed the antique lamp on the nightstand—the one he'd brought back from Florence—and hurled it across the room. Then the ceramic cat, the one he said had a temper just like mine. Smashed.

The entire bedroom was in ruins. Broken glass and shredded fabric covered every inch of the floor.

Crazy.

The ladies of the Upper East Side had always said I was out of my mind.

Turns out they were right.

I sat down in the middle of the wreckage, opened a bottle of red, and drank while I waited for him to come home.

Julian walked in half an hour later.

He paused in the doorway when he saw the carnage, his gaze sweeping over the debris. His brow furrowed. "What happened?"

I handed him my phone. The video was still frozen on the frame of him leaning in to kiss that woman.

"How dare you cheat on me?" My voice came out cold and flat.

Julian glanced at the footage, and the corner of his mouth actually twitched upward. "Not a bad angle, is it?"

Not a bad angle? I could have combusted on the spot.

He set the phone back on the nightstand, undid the buttons on his overcoat, and lowered himself into the armchair across from me.

"I'll be honest with you," he said, his tone perfectly even. "I'm tired of your temper."

"Instead of tearing each other apart like this, why don't we try an open marriage? You're free to meet new people too. Make some new friends. It'll be better for both of us."

What? Are you joking, Julian?

"An open marriage?" I let out a sharp, derisive laugh. "So cheating comes with a rebrand now?"

His brow creased. He didn't care for that reaction.

But he did have one thing right: my temper was, in fact, terrible.

On our wedding day, every socialite on the Upper East Side had been waiting for the punchline.

"Vivian Ashford? That wild child?"

"She superglued her cheating father to his mistress when she was ten and sent them both to the ER. You didn't hear about that?"

"Julian's marrying her? I give it three days before he files for divorce."

The ladies' luncheon bets had come in round after round. The most generous wager gave us three months.

Three months, they said, and Julian would be done with me.

But four years went by, and every last one of them lost.

Julian was nothing short of devoted.

No tabloid scandals. No flirtations. He'd even call to check in when a business dinner ran late and he'd had too much to drink.

I thought I'd won.

I remember it vividly—not long after the wedding, I woke in the dead of night from a nightmare, soaked in cold sweat. In the dream it was that day again, the day ten-year-old me walked in on my father and his secretary.

Julian woke up too. He sat up and pulled me into his arms, his chin resting on the top of my head, his hand patting my back in a slow, steady rhythm.

Curled up against his chest, I told another person about the thing that haunted me for the first time in my life. By the time I finished I was sobbing so hard I could barely get the words out.

He kissed my forehead and made me a promise, his voice low and solemn:

"I will be faithful to you and only you for the rest of my life. Whatever hurt you before—I will never let it happen to you again."

Four years.

It only took four years, Julian Castellano.

The vow you made with your own mouth had a shelf life of just four years.

"Are you even listening?" Julian's voice yanked me back to the present. He was on his feet now, looking down at me, the last traces of patience scraped clean from his face.

"We've been married four years, and you haven't been able to produce a single heir." His tone turned to ice. "Have you ever stopped to consider how much of the problem in this marriage is yours?"

The breath caught in my throat.

He snatched his car keys off the table and slammed the door on his way out. The frame rattled; the one photo on the wall that had survived my rampage tilted sideways.

The bedroom was finally quiet.

I looked down at my hands. Two fingernails were snapped off, and thin lines of blood traced across my palms where the broken glass had cut me.

For four years, he'd dumped every ounce of pressure about our childlessness squarely on my shoulders. Every year his mother found some fresh new way to humiliate me—mocking my "defective body" in front of guests—and he sat right there beside her without saying a single word in my defense.

Did he have any idea how many tests I'd been through?

Julian, the problem was you. It was always you.