Chapter 4
NIA
I ’ve been at the hospital for less than an hour and I’ve already sutured one deep head lac, been vomited on, had three patient family members scream directly in my face for things out of my control and patients not under my care, and I dropped my entire cup of coffee down the front of my scrubs.
Someone must have said the ‘Q’ word before I came in, because this day has been a nightmare.
It’s after one o’clock in the afternoon when I finally have a minute to rush to the vending machine near the family waiting area. I slip a few dollar bills into the cash slot and punch in the code for a granola bar, and I inhale it in the three available minutes that I can squeeze in between patients.
A small part of me is thankful to be so busy, and glad to know that by the end of this shift, I’ll be too worn down to feel anything other than a deep, bone-crushing exhaustion.
Even though I don’t like seeing people hurt, that small part of me almost hopes that a flail chest or a head trauma will come in just to keep my hands and my mind as busy as possible. I’d even be thankful for a mass casualty at this point.
That’s a horrible thought.
After a quick drink of water, I dive back into my work, flying through the emergency room as needed. It’s another handful of hours before I get another break, and when I finally do, I track down one of my work friends, Matthew, tapping him on the shoulder.
“Have you seen Dyer?” I ask him.
“Does anyone ever want to see Dyer?”
“I need to talk to him about my schedule,” I urge. At a questioning raise of his brow, I add, “I either need some flexibility in my shifts for a while or I’ll need to miss some.”
His eyes flick toward my hand and the band of empty, lighter skin that wraps around my finger where my rings once sat. “Are we talking counseling, missing shifts or…?”
I shake my head. “Attorney, missing shifts.”
“ Fuuuck ,” he sighs, leaning against the wall next to him. “Listen, I can get the information for my cousin’s guy, if you want it. She loved him, said he was like a robot in the court room. Phasers set to ‘kill.”’
“Please,” I tell him. “I’ll take anything.”
“You got it,” he says with a sympathetic grip on my shoulder.
With a quick but sincere thank you, I rush to track down our shift coordinator to ask him for some leniency and flexibility in the coming months.
As I explain the need for said flexibility, even though we’re relatively alone, I can feel the rumor mill starting to churn beneath my feet, and I know that by the time I go home tomorrow, everyone in the hospital will know that my world has fallen to pieces.
Then will come the assumptions which will be presented as fact and, because I still love my husband even after what he’s done, I will protect him.
I won’t let nasty rumors spread about him, but I won’t let the truth spread, either. I will lie to keep his reputation safe, because I don’t want his daughter to hear awful things about him.
This is a burden that I can bear on my own.
It isn’t until I’m pulling onto my parents’ driveway after the second half of my shift that I finally get a text from my friend, sharing his cousin’s attorney’s information with me. The address to the office is on the opposite side of the city from me, but if he’s as good as I was told, I’m willing to make the trip.
I click on the attached phone number, waiting with doubt swirling through every sense as the line trills.
“Thank you for calling Arison and associates, this is Linda,” a kind-sounding woman says as she answers.
I choke on unexpected emotion, swallowing it down as I try to greet her. “Hi, Linda. This is Nia Hart – or, maybe it’s Cavanaugh now. I—” I sigh. “I’m calling to ask if Brody Montgomery has any openings for new clients.”
“Yes he does!” She answers far too cheerfully for someone in her line of work.
I try to stay present enough to listen to and respond to her while terror, heartache and doubt claw away at each other through every corner of my mind in a vicious and painful battle for dominance.
Am I actually willing to throw away all of our years together? Am I willing to uproot everything that my daughter knows and holds dear in her life? Am I willing to make her doubt him?
Is it really even me throwing it all away, or did Daniel already do that months ago?
My mind wanders through memories of the past year; late arrivals home and long evenings away, missed dinners and rushes to the shower.
It’s been at least a year. He’s spent at least a year with that woman, maybe even longer.
Sharp, stinging pain claws at every corner of my heart and mind.
When did he decide that I wasn’t enough for him?
When did he stop loving me?
“Mrs. Hart?”
“I’m sorry,” I sigh. “I’ll get the paperwork sent over and will see you on Thursday.”
“We look forward to seeing you,” she tells me. “Have a lovely evening.”
All I want to do after I hang up the phone is to climb into a hot shower and scrub the past twenty-eight hours off of my skin, but I’m too tired. Instead, I drop onto the small mattress that I share with Katie, and I let myself drift off into a comfortable midday sleep.
I shouldn’t have worn a dress. This is too much. It’s too tight. It’s too wrong . These shoes look stupid with it. I look like I have no idea what I’m doing with myself.
This building is huge; ten stories tall and covered from floor to roof in mirrored windows that only serve as a reminder of my awful outfit choice, my own visage reflecting back at me in mockery with every window that I pass as I approach the front door.
A quick check in with a very pleasant young man behind a wide, circular desk leads me to an elevator that carries me up through the building and to the entrance of the third floor.
Smoothing back my hair as I approach the large mahogany desk at the front of the lobby, I set my bag on the ground next to me and greet the woman sitting behind it with a smile.
“Hello, I have an appointment with Brody Montgomery?”
“Of course,” she smiles, “Mrs. Hart, right? We spoke on the phone.”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Montgomery will see you now,” she tells me.
After a few long beats of her typing and clicking on things at her computer, Linda guides me through the building until we reach a door that looks just like the others on the floor; wooden with a heavily-frosted glass window which takes up the upper half of it. The vinyl lettering on the door spells out Brody Montgomery, LLM , and looking at it makes my heart slam in my chest.
“Mr. Montgomery,” Linda announces as she opens the door, “I have Nia Hart for you.”
When I step into the office, I’m met with a man completely opposite to my expectation. I had prepared myself to meet an older man with a dark energy, maybe balding at the top of his silvering head.
I expected him to look like the shark that I’d heard Brody Montgomery was.
The man in front of me is no old shark. He’s classically handsome, maybe in his mid-to-late thirties with a full head of dark, neatly-styled hair and a thick beard trimmed close to the skin. A warmth sits in the hazel eyes that lie behind a pair of metal-framed glasses, and he stands to greet me with a gentle smile.
“Mr. Montgomery, thank you so much,” I smile with a shake to his hand.
“Brody, please,” he corrects me. Gesturing toward the seat next to me as he takes his again, he adds, “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other. I want you to be comfortable.”
“Then call me Nia.” He offers me a nod and what might be the kindest smile anyone has ever given me, and suddenly I’m too warm.
I scramble for the bag at my feet, yanking out folders filled with paperwork, all of which I pile onto his desk. “Um, I brought our marriage certificate, pictures from our security cameras, tax returns, the car notes—”
“Nia,” he says, reaching for my wrist to stop my movements. As he pulls off his glasses and sets them onto the desk, he focuses his eyes on mine. “Take a breath and hand everything to me so I can look through it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say as I pile all of my stuff onto Brody’s desk with a shaky hand and an equally shaky voice. “This is all just—”
“You’ve done your job already, and you’ve done it well. The next part is my job.” Slipping his glasses back into place, he flips through the first two folders, scanning them with an impressive speed before turning his attention back to me. “Do I seem worried to you?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“No,” he echoes, “because I’m not worried at all.”
I offer him a nod and sit in silence as he moves through each folder once again, more slowly this time. He pulls pieces from each and sets them off to the side, quietly mumbling to himself as he thinks. It’s like watching a machine work; slipping a page out, processing and tagging it.
His mind must be running a million miles a minute as he scans each of them until he has a decent-sized stack of papers next to him, each page tagged with a color-coordinated strip at the side in a code that only he seems to understand.
He presses a button on his landline, and a few moments later, a different woman enters the room dressed in a blazer and a pencil skirt.
“I need hard copies of these in triplicate, please,” Brody tells the woman with a brilliant smile. As she nods and leaves the room with his curated stack of papers, he turns his attention back to me. “Talk to me about the infidelity.”
“He’s, I guess,” I say with a gesture toward the stack of security photos, “been seeing her for…look, I know I’m an idiot for not seeing it sooner, but—”
“Trusting someone you love doesn’t make you an idiot, Nia,” he tells me. “You’re supposed to be able to trust your spouse.”
“I didn’t— we—” I stumble over my words, pressing my fingers to my lips to shut myself up. “Can he claim that it was my fault that he cheated?”
An arch of a brow is joined by an amused smile that threatens to overtake his lips. “He can certainly try to,” he chuckles. “The only thing that causes a person to cheat on their spouse is a desire to cheat.”
With a click of his pen, he reaches for a thick pad of paper and the two of us dive into a discussion which dissects every aspect of my marriage.
We go through every purchase on the credit card statements over the course of the past three months, which is a humiliating exercise in my realizing that my husband was doing all of this right under my nose and I had no idea.
Dinners at restaurants I’d never been to, purchases of jewelry that I never received, but that we were able to match up to the photos from our cameras.
It was all right there, and if I’d just looked closer, I would have seen it. But I’d been so busy with work and with Katie that I never even thought to check. Checks never bounced, our cards never declined, my credit was unaffected…
I feel sick at the thought that he’d been spending my money on her .
My attorney seems to catch onto that, flipping to a clean page on his notepad and loudly clearing his throat.
“Tell me about the child.”
“You don’t have kids, do you?” His brow creases in confusion and I chuckle. “If you did, you’d say ‘tell me about Katie’ or ‘let’s talk about your daughter,’ but you’re talking about her as if she’s some kind of asset to be won.”
“That’s because she is,” he tells me plainly. “When it comes to her, I’m not going to treat this like casual conversation among friends. There is a reason that this is referred to as a custody battle . It isn’t going to be easy, and emotion cannot be behind the wheel.”
“Okay,” I nod, taking a steeling breath as I absorb what he’s telling me. “Let’s do this, then.”
With another too-lengthy deep dive into my daughter’s life, interests and history, three more pages of paper are filled with his nearly-perfect script. It makes my own penmanship look like chicken scratch in comparison.
Every wound on my heart is left feeling raw and exposed by the end of our meeting, and I question myself for the hundredth time in making this decision.
In spite of that, the hazel eyes across from me are kind and compassionate; they tell me that maybe he’s been here before, too, and I don’t think he’s judging me.
As I ready myself to leave, I pluck my bag from the floor and pivot, aiming for the exit. I swear I can feel my dress sticking to the backs of my thighs with anxious sweat, and I’m too afraid to check for a loose strap on my shoes, but I’m almost certain there is one.
“Ms. Hart,” Brody calls out. I turn to face him with wide eyes and he uses his own to gesture toward a messy stack of documents on his desk with a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “Your papers.”
Flustered, I drop open one side of the bag and use my free hand to shovel the papers into it. “It’s Cavanaugh now, I think,” I tell him.
“I’ll be sure to have someone change that in our system for you,” he promises, “and we can work on making that change legally at our next meeting.”
This guy has to think I’m a mess . The woman in this office is not the kickass trauma nurse with two degrees and an eight hundred credit score that I am throughout every other walk of my life. This woman is a clown show, struck stupid by embarrassment and vulnerability, and she needs to leave .
How I manage to leave the building with my dress no longer stuck to my skin and the slightest shred of my dignity intact is beyond me.
In an act of what has to be some sick form of self torture, as soon as I walk back into my parents’ house, I pour myself a glass of wine and sit at the kitchen table with my laptop, looking up the stores that I hadn’t heard of from our credit card statements.
As soon as I see the word ‘discreet’ alongside the letters ‘BDSM,’ my phone is in my hand and I’m dialing the contact number.
“Quiet Glamour, this is Debra speaking, how may I help you?” A kind voice on the other line greets me.
I pull a too-deep swig from my wine glass and swallow it down, readying myself. “Hi Debra, this is Nia Hart. My card was used in your store to make a purchase on the seventeenth of last month, and I was hoping that you could tell me what that purchase was.”
“Oh dear,” she says, panic lacing her words. She listens as I read her my card number, and I wait for too long while she digs through her computer system to find ‘my’ purchase. “My system shows that you purchased a set of engraved bracelets. One hammered sterling silver band and one of our infinity chains. I can send over—”
I end the call without a goodbye and I drop my phone onto the table with the screen facing down. My hand covers my mouth as nausea rolls through me, and something squeezes tightly around my throat, threatening to choke the life out of me.
Dan wore that bracelet every day.
In the shower, while we slept, through every meal and every work day. He never took it off. I thought it was strange, but I have – or, had – jewelry of my own that I was the same way about. It wasn’t my place to judge or question him.
My fingers fly a mile a minute as I make my way back to the Kink Kings blog and I pull up the article ‘ How To Train Your Submissive ’ for the sixth time. My eyes scan over the webpage as I scroll, looking for a few specific words that stuck out to me the last time that I was here.
If your submissive misbehaves or ruins a scene, take away their collar. If they can’t play by your rules, they don’t get to play at all. They deserve to be punished for their disobedience. As a Dominant, you are in charge and you make the rules. Don’t ever let your submissive have power over you. The collar is yours to give and take at will.
The attached photo gallery shows a series of intricate necklaces, some simpler pieces such as strips of leather secured with a padlock, anklets and bracelets…bracelets like the one that Dan had, and that I can only assume, that woman had as well.
As I slam my laptop closed, I drain what remains of my wine.
No more than three hours later, I’m laid out on the couch while my parents and my daughter sleep, scrolling through my phone in what might be considered the creepiest deep dive I’ve ever done on another person – but one man in my life has already shown me that my trust was misplaced with him, can I really be held at fault for wanting to be sure that it doesn’t happen again?
Brody Montgomery’s smiling face flashes across my screen as I read client reviews - almost all of whom have been thrilled with him, articles, and even a few video interviews in which he speaks on empowerment and believing in his clients as much as he hopes that we believe in him.
Pictures and even more articles suggest that he’s part of a prominent Catholic family who run the massive church six blocks from the house that I just left behind.
The more that I read, and the more that I listen, the more certain I am that this guy has undergone some serious media training – and I’m no more secure now than I was when I first stuck my nosy head into this online rabbit hole.
With a yawn, I set my phone onto the coffee table and head upstairs to squish myself between my daughter and the wall which supports our shared mattress.