hey say revenge is a dish best served cold.
But mine is going to be hot, like my fury.
I was born ordinary.
An average woman from a small town in the Midwest like a thousand other small towns, like a thousand other women who transplanted themselves to New York. My accent is flat, my hips are too wide. Walking around Manhattan, I will never be anything other than background noise. Never the star.
That's why I disguise myself daily, reinvent myself with makeup and costumes.
The online living doll. Every day something new. Every day I wipe away the makeup, pop out the contacts, and there I am again staring back in the mirror– Quinn. Ordinary.
Yet I have never felt more utterly ordinary and typical than when I lock myself into my husband's home office and pilfer through his things like a thief, looking for evidence of his unfaithfulness. How many other perfectly wonderful women have made this same mad dash, this same frantic, heart—racing, desperate scramble through his drawers, his trash, his laptop, wanting proof. Knowing if you find some‐ thing, your marriage is over. Knowing if you don't, it is anyway, because you already know, whether he admits it or not. The truth is seared on your heart, where he branded it there with his averted gaze and his many nights spent away from home.
This alone nearly breaks me because even though I am ordinary, Nash made me feel special.
Now I no longer am. Nothing special.
Just another wife whose husband cheated. A damn cliché.
So I rummage over his desk, fingers trembling, wanting a receipt to a hotel, wanting an email. Anything.
But what I get takes me from ordinary to an actual illu‐ sion. From a slightly neurotic wife living in a loft apartment in Bushwick with her husband to…nothing. My marriage as I thought it was doesn't even exist.
I stare at the computer screen, opening one tab after another, finding profile after profile after profile, all with Nash's smiling face beaming back at prospective dates, and I am not a wife. I am nothing to him. He is a stranger and I am his victim.
Because Nash is a liar and a con artist.
There are hundreds of messages flying between him and others in a kink community, large sums of money trans‐ ferred in and out of various accounts with so much frequency and randomness, I can see no pattern. There are business dealings I knew nothing about, references to the rent on his apartment in London, which I didn't know existed. A condo in a high—rise in Miami. A cabin upstate, where he has cords of wood delivered regularly.
My fingers click and click and click, shifting through a labyrinth of lies, and I am so distracted and confused I view each piece of information like a stone on a pile of rubble after an earthquake. I lift it frantically, glance, toss it. I'm scrambling for the bottom. For the human being crushed beneath that spontaneously constructed wall of ruin.
The shattered and broken remnant of who Nash actually is.
Or maybe who I am now.
In a hidden drawer under the desk there is a passport with my husband's face on it, but not Nash Edward Thorn‐ ton, his name, or so I thought. This says Edward Alton. Then a credit card that says Warren Billings. And a driver's license for Aristotle Martmont, with Nash's expression unsmiling and serious in the photo. I shiver. Aristotle looks dangerous, sinister.
And yet… I sleep beside Aristotle, though I didn't know that. On the nights Nash forces himself to come home, anyway.
Which name belongs to Nash? Who is he really? And why, why, why?
I am still there when he finds me, sweat running between my breasts, my eyes glazed, breathing shallow. I hear him jimmy the lock and come in. I feel his presence in the doorway as he assesses the situation. He doesn't speak. I imagine there is nothing to say.
"Why?" I beg him, despising the tremble in my voice. I ask the only question that seems to matter at this point. "Why did you marry me? Why would you do this to me?"
He dragged me into his imaginary life and I guess, in a way, that does make me special. In the worst possible way.
His jaw works and he slides his hand into the pocket of his jeans. His work clothes. Jeans and a flannel, because he told me he is in construction. Which he's not. Every day he pretends to go to work, like he's Joe Blue Collar, and every fucking day I believe him because who would lie about that?
"Because I fell in love with your innocence."
I swallow down the bile that rises in my throat as I realize how I must have looked to him, wide—eyed and naïve, fresh off a bus, prime for plucking. I thought I was Cinderella and he had rescued me. I knew he had family money, connec‐ tions, wealth and women at his disposal, and he chose me. Little Quinn Rivers, still a virgin. The miracle I guess was that he married me at all after he no longer had my purity to intrigue him.
For all I know we're not even legally married. Maybe that was a sham too.
"And now?"
He moves into the room, and his gait is different, a confi‐ dent stalker—style stroll that I have never seen before. I'm suddenly afraid. But he stops in front of me and strokes a finger down my cheek, causing me to shiver.
"Now I realize that innocence is meant to be admired. Not touched. The doll should stay on the shelf so she doesn't get dirty."
That's when I know what else he has lied about. Nash swears he has never really looked at my web channel, where I pose as a living doll and give tutorials on how to create the effect with makeup, lenses, clothes. Nash says he never looks because he doesn't want to see the fetish—ized version of me. The woman in little girl clothing.
