Chapter Eleven
I FIND GIGI ALONE ON the dock at six-fifteen on a Monday morning.
Jim is still asleep in Cabin Four. Cody is in the kitchen doing breakfast prep. The other guests won’t stir for another hour. Gigi is sitting on the end of the dock in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, her phone face-down on the planks beside her, staring at the river with a blank, tired expression.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for weeks. I chose it carefully. “Gigi, we need to talk.”
She looks up, and something flickers behind her expression, fast and wary, before her face smooths into pleasantness. “Sure. What’s up?”
I sit down on the dock bench across from her, leaving four feet of space. The river runs past below our feet. The morning is quiet and cold.
“I know about you and Cody,” I say.
“What do you—”
“Three years. Every summer since Jim first brought you here. The off-season visits to Stanley that you told Jim were spa weekends in Sun Valley. The emails, the texts, and the shared photos.” I let that settle. “The file cabinet in my office where you went looking for the property deed last week.”
Gigi’s face changes. Not all at once. The pleasantness thins, stretches past its tolerance, and then it’s gone, and what’s underneath isn’t charm or composure. It’s calculation.
“I don’t know what you think you saw—”
“Gigi, I’ve read your emails to my husband. I have screenshots of three years of correspondence on my attorney’s server. Do you want to keep going with this, or do you want to listen?”
She stops talking.
“I know about the investor,” I say. “Craig Devlin at Ridgeline Development. Cody’s been telling him he owns this lodge, and you’ve been pushing Cody to close the deal so you can use the money to leave Jim.
I know about the off-season trips. November, February, and April.
I know about the dinners and the hotels Cody charged to my business credit card.
I know about the jewelry he bought you and expensed as lodge décor. ”
Gigi’s hands are in her lap, fingers laced together, pressing hard enough that the color is leaving her fingertips.
“You don’t understand,” she says. “You don’t know what it’s like being married to Jim.
He’s a good man, I know he is, but he’s twenty-five years older than me, and he’s already done everything he wants to do with his life, and I’m just starting.
I’m trapped in a marriage that looks perfect from the outside and feels like a waiting room on the inside. ”
She pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them.
“He wakes up at five, fishes until noon, reads a book, goes to bed at nine. That’s every day.
Every single day. He’s happy. He’s completely happy.
I’m twenty-eight. I’ve already seen the rest of my life and it looks exactly like yesterday. ”
Part of me understands that. Part of me can see how a woman who married for comfort would suffocate in it. I hold that understanding at arm’s length because it has nothing to do with what she did to my marriage.
“That’s between you and Jim,” I say. “It stopped being about your marriage when you started sleeping with my husband and planning to sell my lodge.”
“I wasn’t trying to sell your lodge.”
I scoff. “You were trying to fund your divorce with the proceeds of a sale that Cody doesn’t have the authority to make. The deed is in my name. The license is in my name. The insurance is in my name. You saw that in the file cabinet. That’s why you’ve been panicking for the last week.”
Gigi doesn’t deny it. She looks at the river, then at her phone, then back at me. “Maybe if you’d paid more attention to Cody, he wouldn’t have—”
“Stop.” I don’t raise my voice. “You’ve been coming to my lodge for three summers. You’ve eaten at my table, slept in a cabin I maintain, and smiled at me over coffee while you were sleeping with my husband. You don’t get to tell me this is my fault.”
“I could tell Jim it was mutual. That you knew.”
“Go ahead. I have three years of timestamps, credit card receipts, and a correspondence trail that starts two days after your first visit, all backed up in multiple places. Jim can read the emails himself and decide who knew what.” I let that land.
“Do you really want Jim reading those emails, Gigi? Because I’ve read them. I know what you said about him.”
That stops her. Whatever she wrote about Jim in those messages, the bored contempt, the complaints about his age and his comfort with his own life, she knows what happens if Jim reads those words. The prenup won’t be the only thing working against her.
“What do you want?” Gigi says. Her voice is quieter now.
“I want you to understand what’s happening.
There is no sale. There is no investor deal.
There is no money coming from this lodge for you or for Cody.
The business runs on my license, my insurance, and my name.
You came here looking for an exit strategy, and there isn’t one.
Not through Cody, and not through my property. ”
Gigi’s shoulders drop. Her laced fingers go loose in her lap. She doesn’t look caught or angry. She looks done. The bridge she’s been running toward was never connected to the other side, and she knows it now.
“Jim has been coming to this lodge since my father was the guide,” I say. “Almost twenty years. I’m going to tell him the truth myself, privately, with the respect he’s earned from two decades of loyalty to this place. You don’t get to control that conversation, and neither does Cody.”
“When?” she asks.
“When I’m ready.”
She sits on the dock for a long time after I stand up. She doesn’t look at me. She looks at the river, the mountains, and the lodge where her husband is sleeping and her lover is making breakfast. Every piece of her plan has just been taken apart.
Without another word, I walk up the gravel path to the main building and close the door behind me. Cody is in the kitchen making eggs, a podcast playing on his phone, and he smiles when I come through.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning,” I say, pour myself a cup of coffee, and take it to my cabin.
The dock is visible from my window. Gigi sits there for another twenty minutes before she stands and walks slowly back toward Cabin Four.
She looks smaller than she did an hour ago.