Chapter 1

My fiancée came home from work, and there was an extra used blister strip of blue pills in her bag.

I sank into thought: surely she hadn't mistaken these for candy.

I didn't question her, and I didn't shout.

I just quietly slipped a little nitric acid into the bottle.

Two in the morning.

One horrific photo blew up the internet.

Lucy was acting all wrong today.

Normally, the first thing she did when she got home was toss her white coat and dirty laundry at me and sweetly beg me to hand-wash them for her.

Today, though, she said nothing, her face flushed an unnatural red.

She walked in and went straight into the bathroom, without a single word of instruction.

When something is this far out of the ordinary, there's a reason.

When the water started running in the bathroom, I opened her bag.

And then I found something that set my heart hammering: there was an extra pill in her bag!

A blue pill.

My chest clenched hard.

The information I pulled up online froze me on the spot.

Viagra.

My vision went black in an instant, like I'd been dropped into an ice cellar.

As someone in the medical field myself, I knew better than anyone what that meant.

Two months ago, Lucy had suddenly told me she'd be getting a lot more chances to assist on surgeries and work night shifts.

I was routinely stacked with surgeries back to back, often working overtime late into the night, with pathetically little time to spend with her.

I just assumed she wanted to buckle down at work, get through her residency smoothly, and land a permanent staff position, and I felt nothing but guilt.

So whether she wanted the latest phone, a designer handbag, or skincare products, I swiped my card and paid without blinking.

Even the literature reviews she had to turn in for her residency and the general-journal papers she needed to publish—I stayed up night after night revising them and filling in the experimental data, just to barely get them past review.

But now those two things in her bag were like two slaps landing hard across my face.

The bathroom door opened, and Lucy came out wrapped in a towel to dry her hair.

I walked over and, out of habit, reached out to slide my arm around her waist. The moment my fingertips touched her skin, she shoved me away, hard.

"I assisted on three surgeries back to back today. I'm dead tired. Give it a rest. What kind of filthy things are running through your head all day? Doesn't it wear on a person?"

She slammed the bedroom door with a bang, and the coldness and distance in her voice stabbed into me like an icicle.

Getting close to my own girlfriend counts as wearing on her now?

Then what do you call going in to assist on surgery with Viagra and half a bottle of lubricant in your bag?

That night, I didn't sleep a wink.

Once she was fast asleep, I unlocked her phone. Her texts, work groups, call logs—I went through all of it, but it was as clean as a blank sheet of paper, not a single suspicious trace.

I took three days of annual leave, and every day I wore a mask and a hat, staking out the base of the inpatient ward to follow her movements.

But for two straight days, she made her rounds, went into surgery, and wrote up charts, all perfectly by the book, nothing out of the ordinary.

Then on the evening of the third day, a little past seven, Lucy came out of the inpatient building. Instead of heading for the subway station, she stood at the curb pacing back and forth, glancing down at her phone now and then and looking all around—clearly waiting for someone.

I pulled the brim of my hat down, clenched my fists, and had only one thought: the second that man showed up, I would make sure he learned exactly what it costs to cuckold another man.

But when I got a clear look at who it was, I was floored.

It wasn't a colleague from her department—it was her supervising mentor, Basil Chavez, the chief of general surgery.

Basil Chavez, fifty-eight, was a leading candidate for a hospital deputy director post. He controlled the permanent-position slots for surgical residents and held the power over board certification reviews, and he was a heavyweight surgical authority in the state.

Day to day he came across as upright and dignified. He and his wife, Polly Lawrence, the director of the Nursing Department, were the hospital's famously model couple; their son and daughter were both studying at top medical schools, and they lived the kind of life everyone respected.

After exchanging greetings, the two walked side by side toward the parking lot, looking no different from any ordinary mentor and student.

I had just breathed a sigh of relief.

The scene the next second shattered every last bit of the hope I'd been clinging to.

Before they even reached the car, Basil reached out and pulled her in, and Lucy, far from pulling away, leaned sweetly into his arms and wrapped her own arms around his neck.