Page 36 of Billionaire Hunt

“No!” they shouted simultaneously.

I believed them. “We totally would have told you if we had found out he was cheating.”

Emmaline added, “It would have been all over the news because we would have jumped him and his mistress if we had caught them in action.”

I knew they were being sincere. “Well, I’m glad you guys didn’t have to get involved in the mess I called a relationship.”

“But maybe we should have said something? I don’t know. None of us really grew up knowing what a functional marriage looked like,” Lacey said.

She was right. Lacey was raised by her single aunt and didn’t really know her parents. Emmaline had been estranged from her parents until recently and then there was me, emancipated at the age of 16 and living with my grandmother. Clearly, we were also survivors...like that Destiny Child’s song. I wondered which one of us was Beyoncé then, hopefully me.

I knew I was delirious from the pain then since I was comparing myself to a gorgeous pop singer.

As we said our goodbyes, I hung up even more confused than I started. I felt as if everyone had known I had been living a charade, but they had been too chicken to tell me. I felt like a fraud. I had thought my marriage was working. Isn’t that why I stayed with Wyatt? I had loved him, right? Hadn’t I? Now I couldn’t be too sure.

Had I married him for security or because I thought I loved him? I had thought marrying him had been the right thing to do. Now I wasn’t so sure anymore.

And if I was unsure of how I felt about my husband of eight years then could I really trust how I was starting to feel about Erik? Did I really care for him or was I just replacing one guy with another? Was that what I was doing, swapping one set of problems for another?

Maybe that was my specialty, finding men that couldn’t emotionally commit. Isn’t that what Wyatt and Erik had in common? Otherwise they were like night and day.

But did it actually matter? Because at the end of the day, all I would ever be to Erik was a friend and the occasional lover. He wasn’t looking for anything real or long-term.

And neither was I. At least, that’s what I was going to tell myself to get through another lonely night.