Julian Wilson was unlike any other titan in New York. When the paparazzi caught him in a fender-bender with his latest lover in the passenger seat, he didn’t get angry. Instead, he flashed a grin and gave the photographers a friendly tip. “Remember, for stuff like this, you call my wife. She handles the checks.” The tabloid reporters would share a knowing smile. “Mrs. Wilson has the patience of a saint. A hundred of them, and she doesn’t bat an eye.” But they also remembered the day Julian Wilson married me in a wedding that was the talk of the decade. They remembered how he’d spoken to them in a low, almost hushed tone, shielding me from the flashbulbs. “My wife… she’s a little shy. Please don’t frighten her.” That was only seven years ago. In that time, the shy Mrs. Wilson had learned to claw and fight with his mistresses, to sign one check after another. Scandal containment: a million. A discarded lover: five million. A life-ending secret, an abortion: ten million. And so, as the world held its breath, waiting for the check that would accompany mistress number one hundred, I pushed open the heavy oak door to the Wilson matriarch’s private study. “We had a deal,” I said. “When he reached number one hundred, I would walk.” 1 When the reporter slid the glossy photo of Julian kissing another woman across the table, I didn’t even flinch. I simply stood, went upstairs, and opened the door. Matilda Wilson turned in her chair as if she’d been expecting me. She watched me with the calm, assessing gaze of a woman who had won this war a generation ago. My feelings for her were… complicated. “Have you made up your mind?” she asked. “Yes.” I pushed the signed separation agreement across her desk, my eyes lowered. “Thank you, Mother, for taking care of me all these years.” She let out a long sigh and shook her head. “Leave whenever you’re ready.” I can still hear her words from seven years ago, the day I first stepped into the Wilson mansion as its new mistress. She had looked at me with an expression that was half-pity, half-knowing. “Loving him is easy, Vivian. Keeping him is the hard part.” I was too young, too in love to understand then. It was only after Julian’s scandals began piling up at my door, one after another, that I finally understood her warning. It wasn’t a prophecy; it was a history lesson. Leaving her study, I took a deep breath. The butler was directing staff to bring in a new delivery of gift boxes. The latest Parisian couture, the ‘Heart of Eternity’ diamond from a Christie’s auction, and a pair of crystal slippers Julian had spent six months commissioning for me. On the sole, etched in his own handwriting, were the words: J, for my only love, V. My only love? What a bitter joke. Every woman in Manhattan envied me the penthouse apartment I used just to store these tokens of his affection. To me, they were nothing but trophies of his infidelity. Each gift marked another betrayal. In the beginning, I believed him every time he apologized. I believed he would change, that he hadn’t inherited his father’s insatiable appetite for women. But the gifts kept coming, and I felt myself withering, petal by petal, until I was nothing but rot pressed into the mud. “Do you like them?” Julian’s arms wrapped around me from behind. I smelled an unfamiliar scent of orchid on his collar. It was the signature fragrance of mistress number one hundred, Isabella Rossi. She fancied herself a rare flower, a stark contrast to me, who, in her words, reeked of the vulgar smell of money and checks. I shifted away from his touch. He stumbled slightly, the smile on his face faltering for a second before he caught my hands, his fingers lacing through mine. “Still not used to it after all this time?” he murmured. “Alright, let me change. We’ll have dinner together.” He leaned in and kissed my cheek, completely missing the small object I held clenched in my palm. I was about to say something. But he had already turned. His polished leather shoe came down, stepping directly on the plastic pregnancy test I’d dropped. The two faint lines on its screen were a secret he would never know. He kicked it aside like a piece of trash. His brow furrowed in disgust. “What is this filth doing in the house? Someone, get in here!” In that moment, I couldn’t tell if he was talking about the test, or about me and the child in my womb. A heavy, crushing pain settled in my chest. I couldn’t even make a fist. Julian noticed nothing. When he sat down again, he brought up an old topic. “Let’s put Isabella on your team. If you’re managing her, I won’t have to worry.” Isabella was the daughter of one of their maids. He’d personally mentored her, brought her into the company, and had been pushing for weeks to place her on my project team. I’d refused every time, not wanting a daily reminder of his affair. But this time, I simply smiled. “Alright.” 2 He looked surprised, but his surprise was quickly replaced by delight. He lifted my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles. “Darling, I knew you’d be understanding.” The happy curve of his lips should have been familiar, but it felt like I was looking at a stranger. During my four years at Columbia, whenever people whispered that I was the bastard daughter of a showgirl, that I was dirty and cheap, he had always been the one to stand in front of me. He was the one who took me to see the stars from a Brooklyn rooftop, the one who carried me through the streets in the dead of night when my appendix burst, his shirt soaked with sweat and his feet bleeding by the time we reached the hospital. As I lay in the hospital bed, I had asked him, my eyes red, “How can I ever repay you?” He just smiled. “I don’t want repayment. Just be my partner. Just be understanding.” Later, when I was held up at knifepoint during a shopping trip, he’d talked the mugger into taking him as a hostage instead of me. I was unharmed. He took three stab wounds to the arm and chest, yet he was the one wiping away my tears. “Don’t cry. I don’t want your tears. Just marry me. Just be my understanding wife.” I never could have imagined what “understanding” truly meant to him. It wasn’t about being a good partner in business or a supportive wife at home. It was about accepting and cleaning up the endless messes from his affairs. Julian’s initial joy was followed by a flicker of suspicion. “You’ve always said no before. Why the sudden change of heart?” My gaze drifted to the corner where the broken pregnancy test lay in the dust. I gave a faint, empty laugh. “I’m tired,” I said. “I don’t want to fight anymore.” Not for him, not for this family. Whoever wanted the title of Mrs. Wilson could have it. “If only you’d realized that sooner! Which of my friends doesn’t have a girl in every borough? Your own father played the field back in the day, didn’t he? And your mother never said a word!” It was true. My mother never said a word. She and my father met on the mainland. After I was born, he came to New York to make his fortune. When he had enough, he brought us over. For a while, he was the perfect husband, the perfect father. Until my fifteenth birthday. That was the day my mother discovered his other family, his other son who was exactly my age. She had screamed, a raw, hysterical sound, and grabbed my father by his collar. “Why? How could you do this to us?” He shoved her away and pointed a finger in her face. “A cheap showgirl has no right to question me! If you hadn’t given me a useless girl, do you think I would have needed to find other women?” He turned and kicked me hard, spitting in my face. “Useless. What a waste of space.” Later that night, my mother stabbed my father twenty-three times. Then, she killed herself. She died at my feet. The blood was still warm. It has been my nightmare ever since. There was a time when Julian would have threatened to kill anyone who even dared to bring it up. Now, he could toss my trauma out like a casual joke to shut me up. I wondered how many times he’d shared this story with his lovers, with his friends, all of them laughing at my expense. Seeing the look on my face, he finally had the decency to back down, offering a weak apology. “Sorry. My mistake. Slipped out.” The pain came in waves, so intense it made me tremble. I said nothing. I didn’t even look at him. Just as he started to move toward me, his phone rang. He picked it up and walked out of the room. I heard him murmur the word “baby” with a tenderness that used to be reserved only for me. I once thought it was my special name. I later learned he called every one of them “baby.” The sound of their flirting, muffled through the wall, was like a thousand tiny needles in my ears. I remembered my first year at Wilson Industries. I couldn’t make sense of the financial reports. He’d pull me onto his lap and go through them with me, giving me a playful bite on the shoulder for every mistake I made. Back then, we were the golden couple of the New York elite. Then came the first mistress. I fought. I screamed. I threatened divorce. He would promise it would never happen again, but his nights were still filled with parties and other women. I cried until I was empty, and he would stand there, refusing to sign the papers, yelling, “My father was like this! My uncles are like this! Every man I know is like this! What did I do that’s so wrong?” I, a Columbia graduate, became a shrieking harpy, turning our home into a warzone. Finally, his mother summoned me to her study. “It’s useless,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion. “Infidelity is in the Wilson blood.” “But I will give you a choice. Wait until he’s had his one-hundredth affair. After that, whatever you decide to do, I will support you.” She thought I would become like her: numb, resigned, and eventually, accepting. But I became Mrs. Wilson because I loved Julian. I didn’t love Julian because I wanted to be Mrs. Wilson. Without love, I didn’t want the man. I should have been numb by now. But as my eyes fell on the two-meter-long portrait of me in my wedding dress hanging over our bed—a mosaic he’d spent three months piecing together, his eyes red with exhaustion—and I heard him on the phone, patiently coaching his new lover on how to handle tomorrow’s investors’ briefing, the absurdity of it all was overwhelming. I wiped a tear from my eye, pulled a suitcase from the closet, and began to pack. Julian walked back in, a smile on his face. The smile vanished. “Where are you going?” 3 “I was thinking of a trip. Europe, maybe.” He looked me over and nodded to himself. “Good idea. Let Isabella handle things here. You go and relax.” The next day, the annual investors' briefing was packed. Every partner of Wilson Industries was there. Isabella, dressed in a sharp power suit, commanded the stage, all traces of the timid girl who used to call me “ma’am” gone. Julian sat beside me, beaming with pride. Suddenly, the massive screen behind Isabella went black. A moment later, it flickered back to life, not with charts and figures, but with the unmistakable sounds of a couple in the throes of passion. An image appeared—Isabella, entangled in bed with a man. Although their faces were blurred, everyone in the room knew exactly who that man was. Isabella covered her face and ran from the stage, pushing through the stunned crowd to throw herself into Julian’s arms. She looked at me, her face streaked with tears. “Mrs. Wilson… Vivian… I know you’re angry, I know you look down on me, but how could you risk the Wilson legacy for your own petty jealousy?” With one sentence, she made me the villain. I looked directly at Julian. “Do you also believe I did this?” He didn’t answer me. He just held Isabella, murmuring words of comfort. After a long moment, he finally looked up, his eyes filled with a mixture of disgust and disappointment. “So that’s why you agreed so easily yesterday! You had this planned all along!” he hissed. “You came from nothing, Vivian. How can you be so cruel to her? We’re all selling something in this world. What makes you so much better than her?” He let out a cold, humorless laugh. “Don’t you forget, I made one Vivian Thorne. I can just as easily make another Isabella Rossi!” The air was thick with whispers and mocking laughter. I thought after seven years, I was immune. I thought I had cried all my tears and felt all the pain there was to feel. But his words… they churned something toxic inside me. I opened my hand, wanting to show him I didn’t have the remote, that it wasn’t me. The moment my hand moved, Isabella shrieked and recoiled. “Vivian, no! Don’t hit me! I’m sorry! I’ll never see Julian again, I promise, just please don’t hit me!” Julian’s face darkened. He grabbed her arm and yanked up her sleeve. The crowd gasped. Isabella’s arm was a canvas of ugly bruises and what looked like whip marks. In an instant, Julian’s eyes went red. He pulled the trembling woman into a fierce embrace and barked an order at his bodyguards. “Make her kneel.” I struggled, screaming, “Julian, calm down! It wasn’t me!” He sneered. “I’ve been too calm. I’ve given you too much respect, and it’s turned you into a monster. Today, I’m going to teach you how to be a proper Wilson wife.” As he finished speaking, a bodyguard stepped forward with a riding crop. The whip cracked through the air. The people around us just watched, some of them even starting to count. “One… two… three…” My face and limbs were pinned to the floor. Blood, mixed with tiny flecks of skin, splattered in front of my eyes. The pain on my back was a fire, burning its way straight into my soul. The man who once rode a bicycle with me through Central Park at dawn, the man who once whispered “don’t be afraid” as he shielded me with his own body, the man who knelt outside the library at Columbia and swore he would love me for a lifetime… that man was finally, irrevocably shattered. Tears streamed down my face. When Julian saw my tears, he flinched as if he’d been burned and took a step back. “Mr. Wilson, that’s one hundred,” a guard said quietly. “Any more and you might kill her.” He waved a dismissive hand, his brow furrowed. “Enough! Get her to a hospital.” As they loaded me onto a stretcher, I saw Isabella, still nestled in Julian’s arms, flash me a triumphant smile.
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