Chapter 2
UNCOVERING THE DECEPTION
“Her name is Lauren Keeley.”
Liv is sitting across from me at the kitchen table in yesterday’s clothes, hair twisted up with a pencil, a mug of coffee she hasn’t touched.
She slept in the guest room and was sitting at this table when I came downstairs.
Tabitha is at my mother’s. I called at seven and said I needed a few hours, and my mom said “of course, baby” in the voice she uses when she can hear something wrong but knows better than to ask.
“Lauren Keeley.” Liv pulls my laptop across the table and opens it. “Spell the last name?”
“K-E-E-L-E-Y.” I slide my phone next to the laptop, the screenshots bright against the wood grain.
They look worse in daylight. Sharper. The smudgy, wine-blurred nightmare from last night has cured into something high-definition and undeniable—his arm, her waist, that smile, the caption.
Evidence. “She dated Jermaine junior and senior year. He mentioned her maybe twice in fifteen years. Told me she was nothing serious.”
“Of course he did.” Liv’s fingers are already moving. “Instagram first.”
Lauren Keeley’s profile loads. Public. Wide open.
Blonde in the profile picture, white sundress, teeth that look expensive.
Bio says Sacramento area with a little palm tree emoji, and below it a grid of photos stretching back months—brunch plates and sunset cocktails and the curated life of a woman who wants to be seen.
“Not even private.” Liv shakes her head. “Bold.”
She starts scrolling, and my coffee turns to acid in my stomach.
Check-ins. Tagged locations, all in Sacramento.
A cocktail bar in Midtown in January. A sushi place in the Arden area in February—the same restaurant Jermaine told me was “overrated” when I suggested it.
Lauren lives in Roseville, forty-five minutes east on I-80.
I know this because Jermaine mentioned it once, years ago, when her name came up at a dinner party and he waved it off like an old sock he’d thrown away.
So why is she eating dinner in my city every other week?
“She’s been coming here,” I say. My voice sounds clinical. Detached. Like the part of me that’s falling apart has been sealed off behind glass and the part that’s still functioning is reading autopsy results.
“Regularly.” Liv scrolls further, her jaw tightening. “Going back to at least October. Eight, nine months.”
“Wait.” Liv stops. Taps a photo from March. Two wine glasses on a dark table, candlelight, the caption sometimes the best plans are the ones you don’t make with a red heart. No tags. No people in the frame. Just the glasses and the table and, behind them, slightly out of focus—a booth.
My lungs stop working.
Dark leather. Brass tacks running along the edge of the seat. And on the wall behind the booth, partially visible, a small framed watercolor of the Tower Bridge.
“That’s The Firehouse,” I say.
Liv turns to me. “You’re sure?”
“I’ve sat in that booth.” The words come out low and hard.
“I’ve eaten the prix fixe in that booth at firm dinners.
I’ve made small talk with the managing partner’s wife about kindergarten waitlists while Jermaine scrolled his phone under the table and I pretended it didn’t bother me.
” My fingertips are white against the wood.
“He took her to The Firehouse, Liv. Four blocks from his office.”
Liv doesn’t say anything for a moment. When she speaks, her voice has dropped—not softer, colder. Older. “This isn’t a reunion fling, Mara. This looks like an ongoing affair.”
I nod. The word affair fills the kitchen like smoke.
Not a drunken kiss at a college bar, not a one-time mistake he’ll confess to with tears and promises.
A second life. Eight months of restaurants and tagged locations in my city while I was packing Tabitha’s lunch and folding his shirts and standing in this kitchen in a black dress asking if he wanted to have dinner with me.
“Check Facebook,” I say. “See if there’s more.”
Liv types the name and hits enter. The search results load—and there are a dozen Lauren Keeleys staring back at us. A teenager in Ohio. A grandmother in Florida. A redhead in Portland holding a cat.
“Which one?” Liv scrolls through the faces.
“There.” Third row down. The same blonde hair, the same profile picture as Instagram. Roseville, California. I tap the screen. “That’s her.”
Lauren Keeley’s Facebook loads—and this time the door is locked. Timeline hidden. Photos hidden. Friends list hidden. Nothing visible except the profile picture, the cover photo of a sunset, and the About section.
“Locked down,” Liv says. “She’s smart where it counts.”
“Hold on.” Something has caught my eye. The intro section, the part Facebook shows no matter what you hide—the bare minimum of a person. Current city: Roseville, CA. Relationship status: blank. And below that, in plain text, the line that makes the floor shift under my feet.
Paralegal at Harper & Locke LLP
The kitchen goes silent. Not quiet—silent, like the air itself has stopped moving.
Tabitha’s crayon drawings flutter on the fridge from the AC vent, and the coffee maker ticks as it cools, and through the window I can see the neighbor’s sprinklers arcing over their lawn in the Sunday morning light, and none of it seems real because the only real thing in this room is the name of the firm on that screen.
“She works at Harper & Locke?” I hear myself say it—thin, high, a voice I don’t recognize.
Liv turns to face me fully. “Mara—“
“Harper & Locke is Jermaine’s firm’s biggest competitor.” I’m on my feet. I don’t remember standing. “They’ve been poaching clients from Jermaine’s firm for years. His partners talk about them like a blood feud. Liv, she’s not just some woman. She’s a paralegal at a rival firm.”
Liv closes the laptop lid halfway, the screen going dark. She looks up at me with something I’ve never seen on her face before. Not pity. Not even anger. Something that looks almost like fear.
“That’s not just an affair,” she says.
The sun has shifted. It was coming through the kitchen window this morning, warm and eastern and almost gentle. Now it’s low and gold from the west, throwing long shadows across the table where my laptop and my phone and three mugs of cold coffee sit like evidence at a crime scene.
We’ve spent the last five hours building a timeline.
Every check-in, every tagged location, every visible comment on Lauren’s Instagram—all screenshotted, dated, organized in a shared album on my phone.
The pattern is clear: first visible contact last September.
A Sacramento check-in every two to three weeks through the fall.
By December, every other Thursday—the same night Jermaine started coming home late from “depositions” and “client dinners.”
Liv leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. “The laptop.”
My stomach tightens. We talked about this last night—I wanted to open it at midnight and Liv held me back. Now she’s the one saying it.
“His office is upstairs,” I say. “He never logs out of anything.”
“I know.” Liv holds my gaze. “And you know what we might find.”
I do know. That’s the part that makes my hands unsteady—not the fear of what’s there, but the certainty of it.
Opening that laptop isn’t a door I can close again.
Right now I have check-ins and tagged photos and a deleted Instagram comment.
Circumstantial. The kind of thing Jermaine could explain away with that half-smile and his attorney’s vocabulary—she’s an old friend, you’re reading into things, come on, Mar.
The laptop is different. The laptop is knowing.
“He gets back tomorrow,” I say.
Liv nods. “So let’s go.”
The office is at the end of the upstairs hallway.
Door open, the way he always leaves it—because who would go in?
His wife, who hasn’t set foot in here since she stopped bringing him coffee during late-night work sessions a year ago when he said she was distracting him?
I flip the light on. Gray walls, a mahogany desk, law books he keeps for aesthetics.
His silver laptop is centered on the desk, closed, charging.
I sit in his chair. It smells like him—cedar and the leather conditioner he uses on his briefcase. My throat burns.
“You don’t have to,” Liv says from the doorway.
I open the laptop.
The screen wakes up. No password prompt—he’s set it to auto-unlock, the breathtaking arrogance of a man who has never once considered that his wife might look. His email is already open. Gmail, the personal account, not the firm’s.
The inbox loads and her name is right there, third from the top. Lauren Keeley. Subject line: this weekend ??
“Liv,” I say. “Come here.”
She crosses the room and leans over my shoulder. I click the thread.
It unspools like a detonation in reverse—the most recent message at the top, then scrolling down, down, through weeks and months of messages that get more explicit the further back I go.
Photos she sent him. Photos he sent her.
A hotel confirmation in Napa for a weekend he told me was a bar association conference.
A thread about a lingerie set she bought—his response is three lines that make bile rise in my throat.
I photograph the screen. Again. Again. My hands are steady now—the shaking stopped somewhere around the fourth email. Something has gone quiet inside me, cold and precise, the eye of a hurricane that hasn’t finished yet.
“Mara, stop,” Liv says. “Go back up.”
“I’m not done—“
“Go back up. Scroll up. The one from two weeks ago.”
I scroll. Liv reaches past me and taps the screen. An email from Jermaine to Lauren, the subject line quick question—nothing explicit, nothing romantic. Just text.
Hey—can you check something for me? The Hargrove settlement is supposed to finalize next month. Numbers below. Jasper’s people are pushing for the higher figure but I think they’ll land at 4.2. Any read on whether your side has heard anything?
Below the text, a string of numbers. Settlement figures. Case details. Client names.
“Is that—“ Liv starts.
“That’s the Hargrove settlement.” My voice has gone flat. Dead. “That’s Jasper’s account. Jasper is Jermaine’s biggest client—he manages a family office, old money, the kind of client you build a career around.”
Liv pulls a chair beside me and sits down. “Scroll.”
I scroll. Between the explicit photos and the hotel bookings, threaded through eight months of an affair like a second secret hidden inside the first—professional emails.
Case strategies. Settlement figures. Client names and account details, sent from my husband’s personal email to a paralegal at the firm that has been trying to poach his clients for years.
“He’s feeding her information,” Liv says. Her voice has gone very quiet. “Client information. To Harper & Locke.”
“Not to Harper & Locke.” I’m photographing every screen, every email, my thumb moving with mechanical precision. “To a paralegal at Harper & Locke who’s sleeping with him. She doesn’t even have to steal it. He’s handing it over between sexts.”
“Mara.” Liv grabs my wrist, stopping my hand. Her fingers are tight. “Do you understand what this is?”
I look at her. Something has crystallized behind my eyes—hard, bright, the opposite of tears. The grief from last night, the shaking hands and the burning throat and the desperate urge to scream—all of it has been replaced by something much more dangerous. Something with edges.
“This isn’t just a divorce,” I say.
“No.” Liv lets go of my wrist. “This will end of his career.”
I photograph the last email. Close the laptop. Set it back exactly where it was, centered on the desk, charging cable in the same position. Jermaine won’t know anyone touched it. Jermaine won’t know anything until I’m ready for him to know.
We go downstairs. Liv pours wine—the good bottle, the one I’ve been saving for no particular occasion. She fills two glasses and slides one across the kitchen table, and we sit in the chairs where this morning we were two women Googling an ex-girlfriend, and now we are something else entirely.
“What do you want to do?” Liv asks.
The question from last night. Same words. But the woman she’s asking has changed.
“I want a lawyer,” I say. “And then I want to burn his life to the ground.”