And she knew exactly why they were both stuck in that absurd, agonizing predicament.
Three days earlier, Isolde’s flight to Chicago had been canceled by a severe storm. She’d come home unannounced, carrying a box of dark chocolate truffles Weston loved, hoping to surprise him.
She was the one who got surprised.
From the hallway she heard quiet laughter coming from inside her own master bedroom. Weston was supposed to be at a late business dinner. Priscilla — his younger brother Roland’s wife — was supposed to be upstate visiting her mother.
Isolde cracked the door open a few inches.
She saw them. In her bed.
She didn’t scream. Didn’t drop the truffles. Didn’t let them know she was there. She covered her mouth, backed away, and walked out of the house feeling like her legs no longer belonged to her.
She spent nearly two hours in an all-night diner, staring at a cup of coffee that went stone cold.
She cried.
Then she remembered something Weston had spent five years trying to make her forget.
Before becoming “Weston Ashworth’s wife,” Isolde had been the Chief Financial Officer of Ashworth & Kane Enterprises — the commercial real estate conglomerate her grandfather founded. She knew how to read balance sheets, trace hidden capital, unearth lies buried under polished numbers.
Months ago she’d already noticed suspicious offshore transfers. That’s why she’d quietly hired a private investigator.
The affair just confirmed it was time to stop protecting her husband.
That night, packing his bags, she went through Weston’s luggage and found hotel reservations, jewelry receipts, and a small tube of intimate lubricant he always packed for his “business trips.”
Hurt and furious, she made a dangerous choice — one she knew she’d eventually have to answer for.
She swapped its contents with industrial-strength adhesive.
She hadn’t meant to cause real physical harm. She just wanted his lies exposed in a way that couldn’t be explained away.
Now, at 2:40 a.m., Isolde walked into the ER at St. Cordelia’s Hospital in a tailored black suit, flawless makeup, a thick leather folder tucked under her arm.
Inside: six months of photographic evidence, bank statements, text logs, recorded calls.
When the ER physician pulled the curtain back, every drop of color drained from Weston’s face.
Priscilla buried her face in a pillow. Both covered by a single white sheet, doctors and nurses maintaining a stiff, professional silence.
“Isolde… sweetheart, this isn’t what it looks like,” Weston stammered, voice shaking.
She looked at him without blinking.
“Really, Weston? Then explain what you’re doing at two in the morning in an ER, stuck to your brother’s wife.”
Silence.
Isolde unclasped the folder. Laid out the photographs. The hotel receipts. The wire transfers.
Then played a recorded call where Weston explicitly said he was staying married to her solely to keep voting control over her family’s corporate shares.
Priscilla burst into tears.
Cornered, Weston flipped strategies. “She set us up! She did something to us!”
Isolde didn’t deny it. “I’ll answer for what I did, Weston. But marrying me just to steal what belongs to my family — that trap, you set years ago.”
She called Roland. He arrived twenty minutes later, drenched from the rain. When he saw his wife on the gurney beside Weston, he lunged forward in a rage — hospital security pulled him back fast.
Within sixty seconds, the two lovers turned on each other. Priscilla sobbed that Weston had manipulated her into it. Weston shouted that Priscilla had pursued him first.
The perfect lovers dismantled each other in real time.
Before the medical team prepped them for a minor procedure to separate them, an attending asked Isolde to sign consent forms as Weston’s primary guarantor.
She uncapped her pen. Before signing, she looked straight into his eyes.
“Give me the combination to the safe in your office.”
His expression shifted instantly.
Weston didn’t look afraid of the divorce. Didn’t look afraid of the scandal. Didn’t even look afraid of losing his title.
