Chapter 3

The same night I left the family group chat, I sent my resignation to Grant's company.

I had been one of its very first employees. In the early days, I was the one who went with him to every client meeting and stayed up with him rewriting proposals until the sun came up. The year we almost went under, we slept in that office for months.

The day the company turned its first profit, Grant stood up in front of everyone and pulled me to his side.

"Nina isn't just my wife," he said. "She's the partner who got me through the worst of it."

I cried that day, too. Those were the good kind of tears.

Now he was sure my resignation was just another move in the game.

His reply came back in under a minute.

[Approved. Come back when you're done throwing a fit.]

Day five of Mrs. Holloway for a Week was the company's anniversary party.

It was also my last day. I had a handover to finish.

I went in that afternoon to return my badge and pass off my projects. In the lobby, the anniversary video was playing on a loop across the big screens.

I stopped and watched it.

Every photo of me was gone. My name was gone from the credits.

There had been footage of me in the warehouse taping up boxes at two in the morning. There had been the night I kept drinking at a client dinner because Grant needed that account, until I ended up in the ER with a bleeding ulcer.

There had been the all-nighters, the dozens of versions of the same proposal, the empty takeout containers on my desk.

None of it was there anymore.

At the end of the video, where our photo used to be, there was a picture of Summer with her arm through Grant's.

The caption read: Thank you, Mrs. Holloway, for being with us every step of the way.

Grant knew the invitation to the party had been for me. He had Summer wear the dress that had been bought for me anyway.

She wore the Holloway bracelet, too. She stood beside him while he cut the cake. She raised a glass with him for every toast.

Every time someone called her Mrs. Holloway, she blushed and looked up at him.

He never corrected anyone. Not once.

When one of his friends asked if he was taking things too far, he only shrugged.

"The game's on day five. Stopping now would ruin it."

I didn't go into the ballroom.

I went up to my office and finished the handover. Then I packed up the last few things on my desk.

On my way out, I passed one of the guys who had been with us since the very beginning.

He stopped when he saw me.

"Mrs. Holloway," he said, loud enough for half the room to hear.

Then he looked past me at Summer, standing on the stage in my dress, and frowned.

"Wait. Then who's that?"

The whole room went quiet.

For the first time, the guests understood that the woman Grant was legally married to was somebody else.

The whispers started right away.

"If she's not his wife, why is she wearing the family bracelet?"

"She moved into someone else's house and showed up here calling herself Mrs. Holloway? Isn't that the other woman?"

But before it could go any further, someone nearby lowered her voice.

"Haven't you seen the new Mrs. Holloway's Instagram?"

"It's this one who won't let go."

"Grant's literally put the other woman up on stage, and she's still holding on because she helped start the company. It's embarrassing."

"Honestly, she just doesn't want to give up being Mrs. Holloway."

She held out her phone so the people around her could see.

It was a video. It was me, crying, grabbing my pajamas out of Summer's hands. It was me standing outside the master bedroom with tears running down my face, begging her to come out. It was me walking out of Sunday dinner at the Holloways' house.

Every clip showed me falling apart.

There was no clip of Grant laughing and saying it was just a game. There was no clip of him holding me afterward, telling me not to take it so seriously.

The caption said: Some people can't accept that their title has expired.

I stared at those words, and I thought about every one of those so-called games.

Each time I broke down, everyone would cheer, and I would have to stand there and say it out loud.

"I just love him too much. That's why I took it seriously."

I knew Grant still kept the betting records from every year on his phone.

They had bet on when I would cry.

They had bet on whether I would throw something.

They had even bet on how long it would take me to apologize to Summer.

Now I knew something else.

For three years, my tears had been saved. They had been recorded, replayed, and passed around for laughs.

Before I could say anything, Grant walked up to me and spoke low enough that only I could hear.

"If we're doing this, we're doing it all the way. Summer came to help me out. I'm not letting her reputation get wrecked in front of all these people."

I looked at him, and I laughed.

"So it's better if mine does?"

His face darkened.

"Nina, you've dragged this out way too long. If you didn't take everything so seriously, it never would've gotten this far."

I didn't answer him.

I walked over to the front desk and set down my badge and my resignation paperwork.

"The handover's done."

Then I stepped around him and walked into the elevator.

That was what finally made Grant angry. Not my tears. My silence.

In front of every guest in the room, he called over the company's lawyer.

"Draw up a divorce agreement. A real one."

"On day seven, I'm going to make her choose in front of all our friends."

"Let's see how long she can keep pretending."