After my husband cheated on me, I became a top-tier powerhouse

"Professor, tell me, am I better, or does Ophelia make you feel better?" The student's question came through the phone. Nathaniel's voice was even, laced with a contemptuous laugh. "You, of course. Her? In bed she's about as fun as a dead fish. Good for ornament, not for the sheets. Besides, what's a full-time housewife next to a girl as clever as you..." The disdainful words kept coming. The eyes pinned on me turned strange and pitying. The women frowned, looking pained on my behalf, then twisted the arms of their husbands beside them and hissed warnings under their breath. "If you ever dare keep a mistress, I'll tear you to shreds." The men's gazes raked over me like X-rays, registering a flicker of surprise at my slim waist and full hips before settling into contempt. Because, in my husband's words, I was nothing more than a parasite who couldn't survive without him. What none of these people knew was that my husband, the celebrated scientist, owed every patent he prided himself on to a license held in my name, and every dollar of research funding he lived off had come from my casual investments. And I was already prepared to make him lose everything. I ignored every stare, muted the call, hit record on the screen, and captured the video. Then I turned to the assistant who'd been helping me and pointed at the belt set with emeralds. "Wrap this one up for me." The gossipy clerk, stunned by how unruffled I was, looked at me with shock and a kind of admiration. "...Of course." I accepted the gift box politely, swiped my card, and walked out. By the time I was back in my car, the two on screen had shifted positions and locations. The woman was half kneeling in front of him, and my husband, his usually gentle, refined face now openly hungry in a way I had never seen, was looking down at her. "Professor Crowe, I can't take it anymore..." Nathaniel panted and pushed her head back down when she tried to lift it. "Little slut. You wanted it on my wife's bed, I gave you that. Now it's your turn to pay up." He reached out and slapped her cheek, the sound sharp. As she swallowed, he let out a satisfied sigh. This was the man who, in bed with me, always whispered that he was afraid of hurting me, the man who held himself in check to the point of agony. And here he was, riding another woman without a single restraint, spilling vulgar talk the whole time. My fingertips went white around the phone, disgust and ice in my eyes. He had never let me see this side of him. So it wasn't tenderness he'd shown me. It was distaste. The man on that screen had nothing in common with the gentle, responsible Nathaniel I had fallen for five years ago. Five years ago, I had gone deep into the desert for research and met Nathaniel there. When the sandstorm swept down on us, we kept each other alive through the killing edge of it, and somewhere between survival and shared breath, feelings grew. After we made it out, Nathaniel brought me to the Sanctum Chapel. With God and the pastor as witnesses, he went down on one knee, held out the ring, and looked up at me with reverence in his eyes. "Ophelia, I love you. Will you marry me?" I knew he was the youngest, most promising scientific mind in Mereland. Rationally, I should have turned him down, no matter how much I cared for him, no matter that he had given me the last of the water and the last of the food out there in the sand. Because I had entered the scientific world at ten, a prodigy whose name was respected internationally, and the price of that brilliance had been a normal life. My identity was kept classified worldwide, known only to the President of the Homeland and a handful of others in real power. I was a national treasure. In terms of pure scientific standing, I was a doctoral researcher with years deep in the field, and Nathaniel was barely past the threshold. What was more, the elder Crowes had said it themselves: their ideal daughter-in-law could not be another driven workaholic like their son. The Crowe family would only accept a wife who would devote herself, fully, to supporting him. Even so, I cleared every obstacle. I gave up every privilege I had in the Homeland and signed the harshest of conditions, agreeing never to conduct research on foreign soil, becoming an ordinary woman just so I could stay at his side. After we married, I became Nathaniel's life manager, his full-time keeper, in charge of his food, his clothes, his home, his travel, while quietly funding his work, feeding him research direction, sparking his ideas. With my help, he rose into a star of his generation. And he loved me too, or so it seemed. Whenever he had leave, he carved out time to travel with me, to see every corner of Mereland. We would sit at the couples' bistro, the wildly popular one, and pick at dishes whose flavors were a little strange. Once I asked him, curious, "Why don't you just rest at home on your days off?" He told me we had married before we'd really had a chance to date, and he didn't want me to carry a single regret. So after the wedding, he wanted to make it up to me, to give me all the small joys of a couple in love. I had thought our love would always be that sweet, that warm. Until one late night a month ago, when Cassandra called me. Cassandra Bellamy, the student I sponsored. Four years ago I had pulled her out of a nightmare, away from people who had meant to harvest her organs. I'd put her through college, and this year, when she said she wanted to pursue a graduate degree, I supported her wholeheartedly and even introduced my husband to her so he could be her advisor. I never expected that on that night, what came through the phone would be the violent, tangled gasping of a man and a woman. Face flushed, I was about to hang up when Cassandra's sweet voice came through. "Dr. Crowe, you took me out to a hotel like this. Aren't you afraid Ophelia will find out and make a scene?" Then my husband Nathaniel's voice. "I'll never let her find out." In that moment, I felt myself drop straight into hell. From that night on, every time I opened my phone, Cassandra would have sent me a fresh set of photos, deliberately, photos of the husband who claimed to love me more than his life entwined with the student I had once rescued. On hotel beds. In the stall of a public restroom. Among the trees in the woods. And today, it was our home. The marital bed. A soft clatter from the call snapped me back. The screen went dark, the line cut. I stared at the dead screen. The grief was long gone. Over this past month, I had gathered enough evidence for the divorce, more than enough to send Nathaniel out with nothing. Then I dialed an overseas number. "I accept your earlier proposal. I have only one condition. Use whatever power it takes to let my current identity divorce Nathaniel Crowe. Five days from now, I'm leaving Mereland."