His Three Minutes Cost Him His Wife Chapter 01
Nico Valenti had stuck to one routine for eight full years.
He was the heir to the Valenti family, acting chairman of Valenti Holdings.
To the public, he ran the corporation. Behind closed doors, he controlled all freight lines out of South Pier.
Every single night at exactly eleven, he made one phone call.
It never lasted longer than three minutes.
“Serena suffers from crippling insomnia. Her doctor says she needs someone to talk her down before bed.”
“Why does it always have to be you?”
“Serena took the full force of that South Pier car crash for me.
The Vale clan also covered a federal racketeering bureau probe that would’ve sunk our family. She saved my life.”
Eight years.
Over twenty-nine hundred three-minute calls.
I’d forced myself to be understanding for far too long.
Until our third wedding anniversary. Nico finally carved time out of his schedule to take me on the honeymoon we’d put off for years.
We stayed at an exclusive private manor hotel tucked away on the Italian Lakes.
No Valenti associate dared leak word of his private getaways. But this time, he swore the trip was only for me.
The day before we flew home, he stepped into the shower.
I laid back on the hotel bed, scrolling through photos we’d shot that afternoon.
His phone buzzed with an incoming video from Serena Vale.
On the screen, she stretched out across our marital bed.
She wore my silk house robe, her head resting on my pillow, grinning straight at the camera.
“Nico, can we talk one minute longer tonight?”
“I miss you so bad.”
“We’ve only got three minutes till our usual call time.”
It hit ten fifty-nine when Nico stepped out of the shower, water dripping down his jawline.
I held his phone out to him.
He glanced at the screen without a flicker of shock, then took it from my hand.
“Why were you going through my phone?”
“It popped up right in front of me when it went off.”
He unlocked the device, his tone flat, like none of this mattered at all.
“Serena stopped by to feed our cat these past few days.”
“She got tired and laid down for a minute, that’s all.”
“She laid down on our marital bed?”
Nico tied the sash of his bathrobe tight, falling silent for two beats.
“A bed’s just meant for sleeping in, isn’t it?”
He grabbed his phone and stepped out onto the terrace, sliding the glass door shut behind him.
I could still see the soft, tender look on his cheek through the glass.
That gentle glow was something I hadn’t seen directed at me in ages.
He never brought the incident up that night once we climbed into bed.
He rolled onto his side, tugging all the covers toward himself, his back fully turned to me.
I stared at the back of his head in total darkness.
His breathing evened out fast.
I twisted onto my other side, awake until sunrise.
We landed back in New York the following afternoon.
Nico tossed our suitcases down by the front entry without a second glance.
“There’s clan business I need to handle. I’m heading out.”
He didn’t even bother changing out of his travel coat before he walked out the front door.
I wandered alone into our master suite and stood beside the bed for ages.
He’d swapped out my luxury thread-count sateen bed linens for a plain gray set.
My original sheets were crumpled and stuffed all the way at the back of the closet.
I knelt and pulled the bundle free.
A faint, sweet foreign perfume clung to every fiber, sharp as a needle stabbing the back of my throat.
Serena had worn my robe, laid in my bed, and tossed out my sheets to replace them with her own.
I opened the fridge to find a tin of cranberry shortbread tarts stacked neatly inside, topped with a pale pink sticky note.
[Nico, your favorite cranberry batch.]
In the kitchen cabinet sat a full hand-gilded ceramic dinner set, paired with hand-embroidered linen coasters stitched with the words Serena Only.
My matte white stoneware suite had been shuffled to the very back shelf, coated in a thin layer of dust.
One plate’s rim was chipped clean through.
I’d hand-picked that four-piece set the first year we married. Only three plates remained unbroken now.
I pulled out my phone and snapped photos of every single thing she’d moved or replaced.
That evening, I sat at the dining table waiting for Nico to get home, sliding the gallery across his screen one shot at a time.
He skimmed the images once and pushed my phone right back to me.
“I had no idea any of this happened.”
“What about the sheets?”
“She said the satin fabric felt too slippery to sleep comfortably, so she swapped them out.”
“She couldn’t stand the sheets I bought for our own bedroom?”
I lifted my gaze to meet his eyes.
“This is our bed, Nico.”
Nico’s brows knit tight together.
“Clara.”
“Serena’s all alone in the world. Can’t you go easy on her just this once?”
He slipped off the custom suit I’d picked out for the South Pier freight monopoly victory banquet, draping it loosely over a dining chair.
He wore the suit I’d tailored for him just to defend another woman to my face.
“Her therapist says her mental state’s extremely unstable right now. I’m terrified something terrible will happen to her if I leave her alone.”
“Do this for me, just let it slide.”
Every time she wallows in sadness, I’m expected to tolerate everything.
Her unstable moods are always used as an excuse to make me step back.
She once took that car crash hit for him, and Nico uses that debt to let her invade every part of our shared house.
Nico dumped every demand of compromise onto my shoulders, while every ounce of soft care he owned belonged solely to Serena.
A bitter ache flooded my chest. I said nothing at all, walking quietly to the guest wing to sleep alone.
Not long after I shut the guest door, I heard the terrace glass slide open at exactly eleven o’clock.
I caught Nico’s quiet, warm laugh floating through the walls.
“Did you have a good day?”
“Mhm.”
“I missed you too.”
Three minutes, exactly as always.
The glass door clicked shut again.
Footsteps crossed the living room and paused directly outside my guest bedroom door.
Then they turned and walked away entirely.
