Chapter Three
I READ FOR FOUR HOURS.
I start with the oldest messages and work forward, and I screenshot each page before scrolling past it. Every image goes to my own email address. I’m not rushing. I’m building a file.
The oldest message is from three years ago, June, two days after the Flemings checked out. Gigi’s first email is three sentences. She misses the lodge. She misses their conversations on the porch after Jim went to bed. She hopes he’ll book again next summer.
Cody replied the same night. His message was longer than hers.
By the time I reach the off-season messages, the shape of it is clear.
They emailed every few days through July, weekly through the fall, and daily by Christmas.
The tone shifted from friendly to intimate to necessary somewhere around October, when Gigi started calling him darling and signing off with “Yours.” Three years of a woman I’ve poured coffee for every June calling my husband “darling.”
I keep reading.
Their complaints run parallel. Gigi writes about Jim with bored contempt. He’s too old, too settled, and too satisfied with his own life to notice she isn’t satisfied with hers. She married security and discovered it bored her.
Cody writes about me. He writes about the lodge and his place in it, and the parts that are unfair aren’t entirely wrong.
He says he’s a glorified concierge. He says I make every decision and tell him after.
He says he loves Stanley, loves the life, but this place will always be mine, not ours, and everyone in the valley knows it.
I read that line twice. It stings, and I let it sting, because I need to be honest about whether it’s fair.
Some of it is. I do make the decisions. The lodge is mine in a way it was never ours, because I bought it and built it and hold the license that keeps it operating.
What Cody leaves out of his version is that I asked him for more involvement a hundred times, and he deferred every time.
He was happy to let me carry the operational weight.
He just didn’t want to be seen standing next to a woman who carried it better than he could.
In one thread from last August, they plan an afternoon around Jim’s schedule.
Gigi writes that Jim will be on the water with me until noon, and Cody suggests the meadow at ten.
They use my name and Jim’s name like items on a calendar.
Jim isn’t a person in these emails. He’s a clock they work around.
Last summer comes back to me while I’m reading.
Gigi at the lodge dinner table, wine in hand, telling me the brisket was the best she’d ever had.
I thanked her. I poured her a second glass.
Cody was sitting across from us, relaxed and easy, and I thought how good it was that Jim’s wife had settled into the rhythm of the place.
How comfortable the four of us were together.
Jim and I were the only ones at that table who didn’t know why it was so comfortable.
Around midnight, I get up and fill a glass of water at the kitchen tap.
The lodge is silent. Through the window over the sink, I see the cabins dark against the tree line, Cabin Four at the far end where Jim and Gigi are sleeping.
I stand there until the strangeness of it becomes something I can hold in my hands.
My favorite guest’s wife has been sleeping with my husband for three years, and I’m the last person in this building to know.
I go back to the office and keep reading.
The emails reference texts, phone calls, and a shared photo album I can’t access from this laptop.
The email is the visible layer. Gigi will write “I know what you said last night, but” and Cody will answer “we already talked about this on the phone.” Everything underneath is on their phones, and the phones are tucked next to them in their separate beds in their separate cabins.
I’m in the office reading the version of the affair they were willing to put in writing.
Then I find the visits.
Three off-season trips in the last two years.
Gigi told Jim she was doing spa weekends in Sun Valley with a girlfriend.
The dates show up in Cody’s calendar, synced to his email.
November of the first year, then February and April of the second.
Each trip lasted three or four days. Cody told me he was visiting a college friend in Twin Falls, or scouting an equipment convention in Idaho Falls, or making a supply run to Boise.
I pull up the lodge credit card statement in a separate browser tab and start matching dates to charges.
The November trip shows a hotel room in Sun Valley, dinner at a restaurant I’ve never heard of, and a spa appointment billed as “guest amenities.” The February trip adds two more restaurant charges and a piece of jewelry from a Ketchum shop that Cody expensed as “lodge décor.” Across three visits, the total is just under seven thousand dollars.
Seven thousand dollars from my business, spent on his affair.
He charged their hotel rooms to my lodge.
He bought her jewelry and filed it as décor.
Every charge is a small, deliberate decision made on a credit card attached to an account I opened, in a business that runs on my license, and every receipt will transfer cleanly to my attorney.
I screenshot every statement and add them to the file.
By two a.m., the emails shift. The last six months contain a new thread.
Cody has been writing to someone named Craig Devlin at a Boise address.
The subject lines reference “the property” and “operating structure” and “transition timeline.” Devlin’s signature block reads Ridgeline Development Group.
I don’t know the name or the company, but I know what a development group does, and I know what “the property” means in an email that doesn’t include me.
I screenshot the entire Devlin thread without reading every word. It spans fourteen emails across six months. I’ll go through them tomorrow when the last four hours of affair correspondence aren’t sitting on top of my judgment.
I close the laptop and lock it in the desk drawer.
The river is running past the north wall, same current that was here before Cody, before Clint, and even before my father started guiding this stretch forty years ago. Right now, it’s the only sound in the building.
I’m not deciding whether to end the marriage. I already know I’m done. The question is how, how much I take with me, and how to make sure I keep the thing Cody never built, never earned, and never understood was mine before it was ours.