Chapter 2
Two years ago, I was catering a fundraiser for the Nashville Arts Council and training a new line cook who burned the roux twice. Mom was healthy. Holly had been dead for six months. Dom and I were running Three Table on adrenaline and mutual refusal to stop moving.
Wynn rented an apartment I didn’t know about during the same quarter I was rebuilding a catering business after losing my best friend.
I screenshot every charge and save them to a locked folder on my phone.
At ten, Wynn comes downstairs in gym clothes. Athletic shorts, a dry-fit shirt, his good running shoes. He looks relaxed, rested, like a man whose weekend plans involve nothing more complicated than a bench press and a protein shake.
“I’m going to hit the weights,” he says. “Might grab lunch with Donovan after.”
“Donovan from work?”
“Yeah. He wants to talk about the east warehouse schedule. Easier to do it over burgers than in a conference room.”
He’s lying. I can see it now, the particular smoothness of a story he’s told so many times the edges have worn off.
The detail about Donovan is a nice touch.
Specific enough to sound real, casual enough to discourage follow-up questions.
He’s been doing this for two years, and I’ve been accepting the details without examination because I had no reason not to.
“Have a good workout,” I say.
He kisses my cheek, grabs his keys from the hall table, and walks out the front door.
I stand at the kitchen window and watch his car back out of the driveway, turn left, and disappear around the corner.
Left is the direction of both the gym and the apartment.
I have no way of knowing which one he’s driving to.
The doubt is new. The math is new. I’ve never had to calculate where my husband is, and now I’m running every absence backward through a filter I didn’t know I needed.
Every late night at the office. Every Saturday morning errand that took three hours.
Every business trip that started on a Thursday and ended on a Sunday when the distribution centers close on weekends.
I call Dom at eleven. “Can you meet me at the kitchen?”
He doesn’t ask why. He says, “Twenty minutes.”
THREE TABLE’S PREP kitchen is empty on Sundays.
The ovens are off, the stainless steel counters are wiped clean from Saturday’s event, and Holly’s framed photo watches us from the shelf above the spice rack.
It was taken at our first catering gig, a fortieth birthday party for a dental hygienist in Green Hills.
Holly is holding a tray of stuffed mushrooms and laughing at something outside the frame.
Dom hung it the week after she died, and neither of us has ever discussed moving it.
I tell Dom everything.
Wynn at the festival. Ellora Voight. The pregnancy. The apartment building on Shelby Avenue. The rent charges on our joint card, running for two years.
Dom listens without interrupting. He’s standing on the other side of the prep counter, arms crossed, weight on one foot, the posture he uses for bad numbers on a catering bid. When I finish, he doesn’t say what I expect.
He says, “I recommended that agency.”
It takes me a second.
“Claiborne Hospice,” he says. “When your mom was diagnosed. I told you they were the best. I said Holly’s care was compassionate and professional, and I said you should call them.”
“Dom...”
“I put Ellora in your mother’s house.”
“You recommended a hospice agency. You didn’t introduce my husband to his girlfriend.”
He shakes his head. He’s not hearing me, or he’s hearing me and it doesn’t matter because the guilt has already set itself in a place logic won’t reach.
This is how Dom handles things he can’t control.
He assigns himself responsibility for the parts nobody could have predicted and works the problem until the debt feels paid.
“This isn’t about you,” I say. “This is about Wynn. This is about a nurse who crossed a line. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I vouched for them, Nat. I told you to trust them.”
“I did trust them. They didn’t deserve it. That’s on her and Wynn. Not you.”
He’s quiet. He looks at Holly’s photo for a long moment, then back at me. “How can I help?”
“I need to find a divorce attorney. A good one. I need you to stop blaming yourself long enough to help me figure out what I’m dealing with.”
He nods once, shoulders drawn up and mouth flat. Not anger at me. He just realized that his recommendation, his good intention, delivered Ellora directly into my mother’s house. He’ll carry this. I know that. Dom carries things even when he shouldn’t.
“I have a name,” I say. “Felicia Dega. Shelly Odom mentioned her three years ago after her husband’s DUI. I’ll see if she does divorce too.”
“Call her today.”
“I’m calling her in five minutes. I wanted to tell you first.”
He crosses to the sink, runs water into a glass, and drinks the whole thing. Then he sets the glass down and says, “What else can I do?”
“Help me document. Help me figure out how long this has actually been going on, how far the money trail goes, and whether the apartment predates Ellora or if he rented it for her.” Surely not. He didn’t even know her two years ago.
I pull out the credit card screenshots. “Two years, Dom. That’s before my mom got sick. That’s before Ellora. It has to be, right?”
“So the apartment wasn’t for the affair.”
“I don’t see how. The apartment was about the exit. Ellora just moved into the space he’d already built for himself and whoever came before her.” The thought guts me. Tears scald my eyes that I refuse to let fall. Dom puts a hand on my shoulder until the urge passes.
FELICIA DEGA ANSWERS on the second ring. Her voice is direct and unadorned. She charges by the hour and doesn’t waste the minutes.
“Natalie Huer Keeler. Shelly Odom mentioned your name three years ago, and I’m calling because I need a divorce attorney.”
Her tone is brisk but not without warmth. “I remember Shelly, and I handle a variety of case, including divorce. What’s the situation?”
I give her the summary. Husband, seven-year marriage, discovered yesterday with another woman at a public event.
The other woman is visibly pregnant. My husband maintains a leased apartment I didn’t know about for two years.
I leave out Ellora’s name and the hospice connection.
I want Felicia’s attention on the legal architecture before I complicate it with the emotional one.
“Do you have documentation?” she asks.
“Screenshots of the recurring rent charges on our joint credit card. Photographs of the apartment building and address. I haven’t confronted him.”
“Good. Don’t. Don’t confront, don’t contact the other woman, and don’t move money between joint accounts.
Definitely don’t change locks. Document everything you can access legally.
Financial records, shared accounts, and credit card statements.
Don’t search his phone or hack his email.
Anything you find needs to be admissible, which means you obtain it through channels you’re entitled to access. You’re on joint accounts?”
“Checking and savings. One joint credit card. He has a separate corporate card through his employer.”
“Pull statements for the last twenty-four months on everything joint. Look for patterns. Recurring charges you don’t recognize or expenses in zip codes that don’t match his stated travel. Can you do that without alerting him?”
“The statements are online. I handle our household finances. He’s never logged in.”
“Good. Pull them tonight. We meet this week. I’ll have my assistant call you with times. Bring the screenshots, the financial records, and a written timeline of everything you know. Discovery will fill in the rest, but the more you can give me upfront, the faster we move.”
She pauses. “Tennessee is an equitable distribution state. The two years of apartment payments are significant. If he’s been diverting marital funds to maintain a separate residence, That’s dissipation, and dissipation changes the math on property division considerably.”
“How considerably?”
“Enough that his attorney will wish the apartment didn’t exist. I’ll walk you through the numbers when we meet.”
I thank her and hang up. The call took seven minutes.
Dom is still at the counter when I come back into the kitchen.
He’s pulled out a legal pad, the yellow kind he uses for event logistics, the same ones Holly used to keep in the office.
He’s written two things at the top of the page in his block handwriting.
The rent charges, two years running. Ellora’s name, Claiborne Hospice.
“I started a timeline,” he says.
I look at the pad, then at him. Three and a half years ago, I stood in this kitchen with Dom and Holly and toasted our first five-figure catering contract with cheap champagne.
Two and a half years ago, I stood in this kitchen the night before Holly’s funeral and sorted dessert trays while Dom sat on the floor by the walk-in cooler and didn’t speak for forty-five minutes.
We’ve built this business from both versions of this room, the version where we celebrate and the version where we grieve.
“Thank you,” I say.
He clicks the pen. “Where do we start?”
This isn’t an affair. I keep coming back to that.
An affair starts with a person, a lapse in judgment, and a series of terrible decisions driven by proximity and opportunity.
Wynn rented an apartment two years ago. He furnished it.
He paid the rent every month from an account I manage while I handled our mortgage, our insurance, and our quarterly tax payments for the business.
He built a second life on the foundation of the first one, Our life was just the scaffolding.
This is a parallel life. He’s been living in it for two years, and the only reason I know is that I went to a street festival in his neighborhood.