From the bestselling author of Dead Certain and The Perfect Marriage comes a smart and twisty legal thriller about love, life, and truth, that careens to a shocking conclusion you won’t soon forget …
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Adam Mitzner’s Love Betrayal Murder, which is out May 16th.
Love: Matthew Brooks and Vanessa Lyons are a perfect match, both attorneys at a powerful New York City law firm. But there’s a small hitch: Matt just made partner, and Vanessa is coming up for partner next year. Two hitches, actually, because Vanessa is married.
Betrayal: Vanessa is assigned to the biggest case at the firm, the one that will determine her own partnership chances. Unfortunately, Matt has been working on the case for years, leaving him no choice but to supervise his lover in violation of firm policies. After the case is over, Vanessa’s ascendance is assured. But when Vanessa is denied her partnership, she can only assume that her affair with Matt was the reason.
Murder: in broad daylight, on a crowded Manhattan street corner. But with so many having been betrayed, will the true murderer be brought to justice? A gripping criminal trial will leave readers unsure of who, if anyone, is telling the truth. All culminating in the shocking final reveal.
CHAPTER 2
Bradley kissed Vanessa full on the lips. It was undoubtedly the way many wives wished their husbands greeted them upon returning from work.
For Vanessa, however, it only drove home how unworthy she was of his love. Almost as if he were adding insult to injury, Bradley had their three-year-old cradled against his chest.
Zoe cried out, “Mama!”
Bradley placed Zoe on the ground. She waddled over and Vanessa scooped her up, inhaling her daughter’s scent. It was mainly baby shampoo, but to a mother it was the smell of pure joy.
“You’re home earlier than I expected,” Bradley said. “I figured a New Year’s Day work emergency wouldn’t end before midnight.”
That had been today’s lie. It was Vanessa’s usual go-to. She had enough legitimate work emergencies that throwing in another every so often was hardly suspicious. Besides, even before her affair with Matt, she had warned Bradley that the year she came up for partner would be nonstop work, and that year had officially begun at the stroke of midnight.
She didn’t respond to her husband’s comment, having long ago learned that when it came to lying, the less said, the better. Both for her credibility and her soul. Not that she had much of either anymore.
“There’s some leftover pizza. Or I’d be happy to whip something up for you,” Bradley said.
“Thanks, I ate at the office.”
What she meant was that she had indulged in room service at the Four Seasons. Chateaubriand for two and foie gras, not to mention the bottle of Dom. Vanessa feared that Bradley would be able to smell the champagne on her breath, although she had done everything she could think to hide it—brushed her teeth, mouthwash, mints. That Bradley was still smiling after they kissed suggested that her efforts had succeeded.
“So, did they make the announcement?” Bradley asked.
Vanessa’s defenses went on high alert. It had been weeks since she’d last mentioned it, but Bradley had apparently not forgotten that the Rawls Ryan partnership vote was held on New Year’s Day.
“Yes. Matthew Brooks made it from litigation. The other guy, James Underwood, from the corporate group, was named Of Counsel. The woman, Natalie Denmark, didn’t even get that. She was outright rejected.”
Bradley considered this for a moment. “That’s actually good for you, right? They won’t want to ding a woman two years in a row.”
“That’s a glass-half-full way of looking at it, I suppose. The other way is that they’re misogynists.”
“You worked with Matt Brooks on that thing last year, didn’t you?”
Her lover’s name coming out of her husband’s mouth sent a chill down Vanessa’s spine. She had been careful not to mention Matt since their relationship had begun, even as she worried her silence about him might be a greater tell. Before they were lovers, Matt was a recurring character in Vanessa’s work stories, as he was the senior associate on Vanessa’s most important case.
“Yeah. I’m happy for him.” Hearing her words, Vanessa felt the need to be less enthused about Matt’s good fortune. “Although the glass-half-empty part of me thinks that the litigation department might not make a partner two years in a row.”
“At the risk of my cup running over,” Bradley said with a wink at his ability to stay with the metaphor, “it’s probably good that he made it. He’ll support you next year. You two got along well, right?”
Vanessa had that pit-in-the-stomach feeling she sometimes got that Bradley knew. That he was goading her to admit it.
“I guess,” she said.
“I’m sure he loves you. How could he not love you, Vanessa?”
She looked at Bradley through narrow eyes. That was certainly an odd turn of phrase for her husband to describe another man’s feelings for his wife.
“I’ll put Zoe down tonight,” Vanessa said, perhaps changing the subject too abruptly. “You can be off the clock.”
“You sure? You’re the one who worked all day.”
Was Bradley gaslighting her with that comment too? Was it his way of saying that he knew she hadn’t been working?
Vanessa decided to curb her paranoia. Everything was fine. Matt had made partner and Bradley wasn’t any the wiser.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Turning to Zoe she said, “Let’s get you ready for bed, little bunny.”
The year Zoe was born, Bradley made Managing Director at Garfield Partners, which was a feat even more impressive than making partner at Rawls Ryan, at least according to him. With Bradley’s promotion came a seven-figure bonus.
Vanessa wanted them to use that money to put an end to their renter days and buy an apartment in New York City. But even with his newly found riches, a Manhattan home with a Central Park view was beyond their means, and to Bradley, anything less was unacceptable. In Westchester, however, they could live in a home befitting a king, which Bradley had come to see as worthy of his newfound station in life.
Relocating to the suburbs was the last thing Vanessa wanted to do, however. She had been reared in Manhattan, in a modest two-bedroom rental. To her, it wasn’t the opulence (or lack thereof ) of their apartment, but the city’s pounding rhythm, diversity of people, and never-ending things to do that made it the ideal place to raise Zoe. Vanessa wanted her daughter to enjoy the freedom she recalled from her own teenage years, when she could go wherever she wanted whenever she wanted, without needing a driver’s license or a parent-chauffeur. To experience museums and concerts and different types of people not only when traveling on vacation, but every day of her life.
There were also selfish reasons that Vanessa didn’t want to move out of the city. Her work schedule already required fifty-plus hours a week at the office, which necessarily included weekend time. Adding a two-hour round trip commute meant that her already limited time with Zoe would be further reduced.
She could have stood her ground, of course. Nothing prohibited Vanessa from telling Bradley that she wanted to stay in Manhattan.
But she didn’t. Instead, she moved into a 7,500-square-foot house in Rye, New York. Vanessa had come to see that house as a metaphor for her life. Impressive from the outside, but dark and lonely within.
A little more than a year later, Bradley was sacked at Garfield. He never truly explained what had happened, dancing around the reason with corporate speak that gave rise to more questions than answers. He had a disagreement with a coworker that had gotten out of hand, was what he’d said. A part of that rang true. Vanessa, more than anyone, knew that Bradley had a temper that he couldn’t always control, and therefore it was of no surprise that it got the better of him at work too. But when she voiced suspicion that one of his shouting episodes would merit termination, her husband had said simply, “It was worse than that.”
She decided that the why didn’t much matter. Whatever Bradley had done—whether he’d punched his boss or was threatening to murder someone—wasn’t going to change the fact that he no longer had a million-dollar-a-year salary.
She had never cared about the money, but she knew that Bradley did. Too much, she’d always thought, to the point that it completely defined how he saw himself in the world.
Bradley tried for months to land at another firm, but those doors were seemingly now permanently closed. With little choice, he took a position with a do-gooder, nonprofit firm. What the new job lacked in remuneration it at least made up for in the ability to spin a face-saving narrative. Bradley now told anyone who would listen that leaving Wall Street had been by design. He had grown weary of pursuing the almighty dollar and wanted to make the world a better place for Zoe.
Vanessa was accepting of his new career, hoping that it would bring about changes in Bradley too. But first and foremost, she was practically minded that the reversal in their financial circumstances required a correction in their lifestyle too. She urged that they sell their home and find something more appropriate given their reduced joint income. Bradley wouldn’t hear of it, however. Vanessa didn’t need to be a shrink to know that if nothing changed about her husband’s life, at least outwardly, he did not have to reckon with the fact that he was no longer the man he imagined himself to be.
“How are we going to pay our mortgage?” Vanessa asked.
“We can get by on our savings until you make partner,” he quickly replied.
“What if I don’t make partner?”
“We’ll jump off that bridge, then.”
Again, Vanessa could have insisted he do what she wanted for a change. And again, she didn’t.
Instead, she took on the pressure of being solely responsible for her family’s financial survival.
“What shall we read tonight?” Vanessa asked her daughter.
“How many?” Zoe answered.
“Three.”
“Can we do four? Please, Mama?”
“Yes. Four. But then sleep.”
Zoe jumped out of bed and darted toward her bookcase. She was taller than the second shelf, which was a recent occurrence.
Like all the other spaces in their home, Zoe’s bedroom was far too large for its purpose. More than once, Vanessa had found her daughter playing with her dolls in the closet. “What are you doing in there?” Vanessa had asked the first time. “I like this little room more than my real room,” Zoe had answered, even though the room’s furnishings were designed to add a sense of little girl whimsy—a dollhouse that served as Zoe’s dresser, a canopy bed that conjured the image of Cinderella’s carriage, and a mural of rolling hills on the main wall.
“These,” Zoe declared triumphantly, returning to the bed with four books piled high in her hands.
It was the usual suspects: Not Quite Narwhal, the tale of a unicorn who thinks she’s a narwhal; Llama Llama Red Pajama, which was a recent purchase and Zoe still giggled at the rhymes; Owl Babies, which was Vanessa’s favorite of the bunch, soothing her guilt for being away from Zoe so much with the never-in-doubt assurance that the owl mother would always return; and, of course, Goodnight Moon, which had been the anchor of the bedtime rotation since Zoe first began choosing her own books.
“Which order?” Vanessa asked.
Zoe scrunched her face up. Then she shuffled the books, placing Llama on top, followed by Narwhal, Owl Babies, and no surprise to Vanessa, Goodnight Moon last.
“Like this,” she said in her little voice.
Zoe was fast asleep even before the end of Owl Babies, but Vanessa still read to the last page.
She thought about going through Goodnight Moon too, but settled upon whispering hush and then reciting from her own memory the ending before kissing Zoe on the top of the head and breathing in her scent for the last time that evening.
Bradley was sitting up in bed when Vanessa entered their bedroom. From the sound of the television, she knew it was football.
Still, she said, “What are you watching?”
“The Rose Bowl. Come join me.”
“In a minute. I think I’m going to shower first.”
Behind the locked door of the bathroom, Vanessa cherished the few moments when she could escape Bradley’s gaze. When she returned, she’d have to engage her husband, pretending that she was not the type of person who had spent New Year’s Day in a five-star hotel having sex with her lover.
The story Vanessa told herself to assuage her guilt was that she had simply made a mistake in marrying Bradley. She had been too young (twenty-three when they met) and maybe he was too old (thirty-one). Early on she had felt the pull of an established man, but now she chafed that Bradley more often than not treated her like a child.
Her sadness led her to Matt, who had pursued her with an urgency like his life depended on it. She liked being needed in that way, and in short order, she realized she needed Matt too.
Over the past four months, the few hours of weekly bliss with Matt had allowed her to endure the rest of her life with Bradley. It was an existence she couldn’t sustain for much longer, however. Nor did she even want to. Matt’s ascension to the partnership was the first step of a plan that ultimately ended with leaving Bradley and she and Matt living happily ever after.
