One hundred and fifty guests at the Met Gala preview saw my husband, Cyrus Nightingale, hand a microphone to his ex-wife, Liesel, so she could read my private letter to him on stage.
The letter was from the first year of his company, when he was just a tech prodigy from a double-wide trailer in West Virginia and I was the ER nurse paying our rent. I’d written it after he’d worked a ninety-hour week, telling him I believed in him more than he hated where he came from. He’d framed it. Liesel, the socialite he’d left for me, called it ‘a touching artifact from his real origin story’. The audience laughed. Cyrus stood beside her, smiling.
He said it was for the brand. That AscendX needed a human narrative for the IPO. That Liesel, with her old-money name and her PR firm, was just helping. He stopped telling me about board meetings. He started taking her calls during our dinners at Le Bernardin. When I asked him why he gave her the key to his private study, he said, “She understands the optics, Temperance. You never cared about any of this.”
The final email from his lawyer arrived at 3:02 PM, just as I was intubating a seven-year-old asthmatic. It outlined the terms for the publication of ‘The Nightingale Letters: A Billionaire’s Rise’. My words, our life, his property. I came home to our Fifth Avenue penthouse and found the box where I’d kept every birthday card he’d ever given me. It was empty.
He never touched her. He just handed her the scalpel and told her I was being dramatic. How do you divorce a man for being ashamed of the woman who loved him before he was somebody? And when he finally sees the price of that IPO, will there be anything of us left to save?
There is no cheating in this book.
