The Rome Affair

The Rome Affair
Laura Caldwell

It was an affair…to regret.Rachel Blakely's charmed life is significantly tarnished after her husband Nick's infidelity, but she wants to give her marriage a second chance. Then a business trip to sun-drenched Rome with her best girlfriend Kit leads to a night of passion with a stranger–a one-night stand meant to signify the end of a painful chapter in her life.Rachel returns home determined to put the past behind her, and at first life seems golden again. Nick is more loving than ever, and following his promotion to senior partner in a prestigious plastic surgery practice, the couple is welcomed into Chicago's high society, where beautiful people live beautiful lives.But there is a dark side…one that sends Rachel's life spiraling into a nightmare. It's clear everyone is guilty of something. But whose secrets will lead to murder?

Laura Caldwell

The Rome Affair

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Coming Next Month

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, my agent, Maureen Walters, and the crew at MIRA—Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Katherine Orr, Craig Swinwood, Sarah Rundle, Don Lucey, Steph Campbell, Margie Miller, Rebecca Soukis, Carolyn Flear, Kathy Lodge, Dave Carley, Gordy Giohl, Erica Mohr and Andi Richman.

Thanks to everyone who read the book—

Christi Caldwell, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Kelly Harden, Clare Toohey, Mary Jennings Dean, Pam Carroll, Karen Uhlman, Joan Posch, Dustin O’Regan, Beth Kaveny, Jane Jacobi Mawicke, Ted McNabola and Kris Verdeck.

Thanks also to those who helped me with my tireless questions about murder prosecutions, including Detective Kevin Armbruster, criminal defense attorney Catharine O’Daniel, former prosecutor James Lydon and former police officer Giovanna Long.

Most of all, thank you, thank you, thank you to Jason Billups.

Prologue

She sees lights. Lights in the sky—stars, she corrects herself—and lights from beautiful apartments with accomplished people inside. She is close to those people right now, very close, but she wonders if any of them will notice her dying.

She has never been the type to imagine her own death. In fact, she has felt immune to it, as if death was something that happened to other people. She always assumed there was time.

But there is precious little time left. It has been only an instant since it started, and she knows there are maybe one or two such moments left.

And strangely, there is relief.

1

I understand now that innocence is relative. I know that the night before I left for Rome, I felt jaded. After all we’d been through, I thought I’d aged somehow and lost my sparkle. I only wish I’d grasped then that the fall from innocence was a very long one.

“Why do you want to go to Italy with Kit?”

Nick sat on the bed and watched through the bathroom doorway as I went about my nighttime ministrations—cleanser, toner, moisturizer, eye cream. Why I used all this crap, I wasn’t sure.

“I have a pitch at that architectural firm, and you can’t go because of work,” I answered. I leaned toward the mirror and dabbed cream around my left eye.

“You’ve hardly seen Kit in years,” Nick said.

“You don’t have to see a friend to be a friend.”

Although Kit had been a bridesmaid in our wedding four years ago, she’d moved to California shortly after to try her hand at acting. We didn’t talk every week, or even every month, but we never lost the bond best girlfriends have. After a few years of escalating credit-card debt and many failed auditions, Kit was back in Chicago, and I was more grateful than ever to have her near. At thirty-five, most of my friends were moms—what I thought I’d be, too—and they were no longer available for nights at wine bars, let alone trips to Rome.