He Cheated With The Hospice Nurse (He Cheated With... #8)

Chapter 1

DOM COUNTS VENDOR PERMITS with the obsessive focus of a birdwatcher. We’re on the third block of the East Nashville street festival, stepping around chalk drawings and dodging a golden retriever on a retractable leash, and he’s been tallying food trucks since we parked.

“Twelve,” he says. “Plus the taco cart that’s technically a bicycle.”

“So that’s our competition.”

“That’s our future partner list.” He photographs a wood-fired pizza trailer with a line fifteen people deep. “Half these vendors would rather cater than vend. We pitch them a rotating partnership for corporate events, commission model, we handle logistics, and Three Table becomes the hub.”

This is why the business works. I cook. Dom builds systems. Between us, we can feed two hundred people and turn a margin, and we’ve been doing it for four years, ever since the three of us signed a lease on a prep kitchen in a strip mall off Gallatin Avenue.

The three of us, me, Dom, and Holly.

Holly handled client relationships. She remembered birthdays, allergies, the name of every administrative assistant who signed off on a catering invoice.

She followed up on every event with a handwritten note and a sample menu for the next quarter.

Clients renewed because Holly made them feel remembered.

She died two and a half years ago from glioblastoma, eight months from diagnosis to the funeral I catered because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.

Dom and I kept the business. He lost his wife.

I lost the best friend I’d had since sophomore year of high school.

We cooked our way through it because the alternative was sitting in our respective empty rooms staring at the walls.

We’d both done enough of that in the first month to know it would destroy us.

“What about this festival specifically?” I ask. “Annual commitment or one-off?”

“Annual. Six-year run. Organizer’s name is Jana Wittney, Nashville Arts Collective.” He checks his phone. “I’ll reach out Monday.”

I nod and keep walking. The crowd is thick for a Saturday.

Families with strollers, couples splitting oversized lemonades, and a bluegrass trio competing with a DJ two booths down.

Dom photographs the layout for his pitch deck while I calculate whether our portable cooling unit can handle a crowd this size.

Wynn is forty feet ahead, standing near the lemonade vendor at the corner.

My chest locks. He’s supposed to be in Memphis.

He left Thursday morning with a garment bag and his laptop case.

He told me he’d be back Sunday night after a distribution center review at the east warehouse.

He kissed my cheek in our kitchen and said he’d text when he landed.

It’s Saturday afternoon in Nashville, and he’s at a street festival three miles from our house.

He’s with a woman. His hand rests on her lower back with the unconscious ease of long practice.

They’ve stopped negotiating who walks faster.

Their steps match without effort, the rhythm of months together, not weeks.

She leans into him to say something close to his ear, and he tips his head toward her.

That tilt, the one where he angles his whole upper body like the other person has gravity.

He used to do that with me. Three years ago, maybe four. I don’t remember when he stopped.

She turns toward a booth selling handmade candles, and her profile comes into full view.

I stop walking. My stomach drops, the freefall ending somewhere behind my navel.

It’s Ellora Voight. She was my mother’s hospice nurse.

She looks the same. Dark hair just past her shoulders, straight posture, the unhurried movement of a hospice nurse comfortable in small rooms, around fragile bodies.

She wore the same calm expression in my mother’s room at two in the morning when she checked the morphine drip and told me the dosage was right.

She explained what “comfort measures” meant in language I could absorb without falling apart, sitting across from me at my own kitchen table with two cups of coffee between us.

She adjusted Mom’s medication when the pain broke through one night in March.

She sat with me in the living room afterward while I pressed my fists into my thighs and tried to stop shaking.

She brought Mom chamomile tea from a shop on 12th Avenue South because the hospital stuff tasted like cardboard.

Mom joked that Ellora was the only medical professional who’d ever tried to improve the menu instead of just the medication.

On a Thursday afternoon in February, she got Mom laughing about a soap opera plotline until the oxygen alarm went off, and Ellora silenced it without missing a beat and said, “That’s the best vital sign I’ve seen all week. ”

She came to the funeral. She stood in the back row. When it was over, she walked up to me, wrapped her arms around me, and said, “Your mother was brave, and so are you.”

I hugged her back. I thanked her. I meant every word.

Ellora is visibly pregnant. Five months, maybe six. Her shirt stretches over the curve, and Wynn’s hand drifts from her lower back to the side of her belly, tender and proprietary, his claim on her visible, unmistakable.

I stand in the middle of a crowded street with vendor assessments in my back pocket and my husband’s hand on his pregnant girlfriend’s stomach. The pregnant girlfriend is the hospice nurse who cared for my dying mother.

“Nat.” Dom is beside me, phone in one hand. “What do you need?”

“Ten minutes. I’ll meet you at the car.”

He looks at my face. He doesn’t ask. He nods once and walks back toward the kebab truck, and I’m grateful, because Dom has never once in four years demanded an explanation I wasn’t ready to give.

I follow them. I stay behind a family with a double stroller, holding twenty feet of distance, watching my husband walk Ellora Voight several blocks from the festival to a four-story apartment building on Shelby Avenue.

He holds the entrance door. She walks through with one hand resting on her stomach. The door closes.

I photograph the building, the street number, the property management sign posted by the entrance, and the cross street. Then I walk back to the festival and find Dom at the car.

“Ready,” I say.

He drives. I watch the road for the nine minutes to my house. Neither of us speaks.

WYNN COMES HOME AT seven-fifteen. He drops his bag in the hallway and walks into the kitchen.

“Flight got in early,” he says. “Landed around four. Figured I’d just come home instead of staying the extra night.”

“How was Memphis?” I set his plate on the counter.

Chicken thighs with lemon and rosemary, roasted asparagus, and rice.

I’d cooked for two on autopilot, seasoning by touch, the muscle memory of a thousand weeknight meals running while the rest of me reorganized seven years of marriage into what I thought was happening and what was actually happening.

“Long.” He picks up his fork. “Dillon still has the east warehouse behind schedule. Loading dock timing is a disaster. I’ll probably need to go back in a couple weeks.”

He eats. He checks his phone twice during dinner, tilting the screen away from me both times. I’ve watched him do this for months, maybe longer, and dismissed it as work email, deal flow, work, email, deal flow, logistics across four states. I’d never had a reason to file it as anything else.

He asks about my weekend.

“We scouted the East Nashville festival for a potential catering partnership,” I say. “Dom thinks we can build a vendor network.”

“Yeah? Good foot traffic?”

“Twelve food trucks. Standing room only.”

“Dom’s always got an angle.” He finishes the asparagus. “What would the partnership look like?”

“Commission model. We handle logistics, and they rotate through our events. It could open up the corporate side.”

“Smart.” He nods. He doesn’t ask which festival. He doesn’t ask which neighborhood. He doesn’t know that I stood forty feet from him this afternoon, watching him touch another woman’s pregnant belly in a crowd where nobody recognized either of us.

“Sounds promising,” he says, and takes his plate to the sink. He kisses my cheek on the way past. “I’m going to shower.”

I listen to the water run upstairs while I wipe down the counter and put the leftovers away.

His garment bag is on the bedroom floor, still zipped, packed for a distribution center review in Memphis that didn’t happen, in a city he didn’t visit, on a trip he fabricated while I cooked dinner and asked about his day.

When the kitchen is clean, I sit at the table and open the notes app on my phone.

4120 Shelby Avenue.

Ellora Voight. Claiborne Hospice.

Pregnant, 5 to 6 months.

Nine months ago, I buried my mother. Ellora was the last medical professional to touch her. She smoothed the blanket over Mom’s feet ten minutes before she died. She looked across the hospital bed at me and said, “She’s comfortable, Natalie. She isn’t in pain.”

I believed her because hospice is built on trust. You let a stranger into the most private room of your life, hand her the medication that separates your mother from screaming, and you trust her judgment because the alternative is handling it alone.

I trusted Ellora with my mother’s death.

She was competent, present, and kind. I will never be able to separate the gratitude from what I saw today.

I’m not going to confront him. I’m not going to throw his garment bag onto the front lawn or call a friend at midnight. I’m going to document every detail I can access and find out how long this has been happening. Every decision I make from this point forward will come from evidence, not emotion.

I’m a caterer. I don’t serve anything until every component on the plate is ready.