He was caught on the stadium’s big screen in front of sixty-seven thousand people. She has to go back to work on Monday and face six hundred children and every one of their parents.

Jo Reeve runs an elementary school. Every morning she stands in the hall in a lanyard and a calm voice, and she has built her whole life on being the one in the room who does not lose her head. Then the stadium kiss cam finds her husband in the owner’s suite. Dalton Reeve, the Northmen’s quarterback, is in a sling and a suit, and the woman beside him is the team’s vice president of partnerships. For four seconds he does not stop it. The next shot on the giant screen is Jo’s face, three sections away, sitting next to his mother.

By Monday morning the clip has forty million views, and Dalton is standing at the corner outside her school in an orange safety vest, holding a stop sign for the crossing guard. He does not speak. He does not call. He does not explain. Jo does not ask him to leave, because she will not make a scene in front of the children. Instead she writes him a letter: sixty school mornings, in the vest, in silence, with no cameras and no statements. She will tell him her answer on the sixty-first.

The count is cold, dark and public. A parent shoves him at the curb. A reporter ambushes the corner. A seven-year-old asks if he is the quarterback who messed up. The other woman, who knew he was married and is being destroyed by the internet far more than he is, writes a letter of her own. And Dalton learns what it costs to stand still while the one person you hurt decides whether to look at you.

Inside this book: A heroine who is a principal, a daughter and a sister, whose whole job is managing everyone else’s feelings. A hero who is never excused, and a grovel made of cold mornings, silence and showing up where everyone can see. An other woman with her own chapter, her own shame and her own spine. Dual and triple point of view, a crosswalk, a stop sign, a library with tiny chairs, and a second chance the wife decides herself. No cliffhanger.

CHEATED ON BY MY QUARTERBACK HUSBAND is a complete standalone pro football marriage-in-crisis cheating romance with a committed ending. The betrayal is public, the grovel is relentless, and the second chance has to be earned.

Leah M. Stratton

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