Chapter 4
THE WAY THINGS FALL APART
“The affair doesn’t help you.”
Paulina Klein says it without looking up from the folder. She’s been reading for four minutes—my screenshots, my sticky tabs, my eight months of organized devastation—and those are her first words.
Something cold slides through my chest. “What do you mean it doesn’t help me?”
“Colorado is a no-fault state. The court doesn’t care who cheated. It’s not a factor in property division, not a factor in maintenance. Your husband could have slept with half of Denver and the judge would divide your assets exactly the same way.”
The air leaves the room. I came here with a folder full of proof and a week of barely sleeping and she’s telling me none of it counts. The texts, the photos, the hotels—everything I organized with sick, meticulous care at Deborah’s kitchen table—and the legal system has decided it’s irrelevant.
“Then what was the point?”
She holds up one finger. Not dismissive—surgical. Wait. I’m not finished.
“I said the affair doesn’t help with division. I didn’t say the folder is useless.” She turns to the hotel confirmations. “These charges. The Kimpton, the other two. Which accounts?”
“The Kimpton is his personal card. The other two are on the joint Visa.”
“He used marital funds to finance an affair. That’s dissipation of marital assets—and dissipation, the court does care about.
” She makes a note in handwriting so tight it looks like code.
“Colorado divides assets equitably, not equally. Equitable means what the judge decides is fair. Dissipation gives me an argument that fair means you get more. But equitable also means it’s not guaranteed.
It’s a judgment call. Another judge, another day, different number. ”
Equitably, not equally. The distinction cracks open under me.
Not fifty-fifty by default. What a judge thinks is fair.
Someone I’ve never met gets to decide what my seven years were worth based on arguments I won’t get to make myself, in a system that’s already told me the central wound doesn’t count.
“The house,” I say. “I designed every room. I managed the renovation—I chose every material, every fixture, I was on-site for months—”
“Doesn’t matter.”
My lungs lock. The words land on the same bruise Clarence hits every time he calls my work cute—the place where effort and skill get flattened into something decorative.
“Sweat equity isn’t financial equity. The mortgage is in both names. Unless you can demonstrate disproportionate financial contribution to the down payment or the renovation costs, the house goes into the pot as a shared marital asset.”
The kitchen. The reclaimed wood table I sanded and refinished by hand, my palms raw for a week.
The copper pendants I drove to Fort Collins to pull from a salvage yard.
Every room in that house has my hands in it.
And Paulina Klein is telling me that none of it registers on the scale the court uses to measure what’s mine.
“My business. That’s separate—the LLC is in my name.”
“When was it formed?”
“Three years ago.”
“During the marriage.”
The way she says it tells me what’s coming before she says it.
“Assets acquired during the marriage are presumptively marital property. If your business increased in value—and from what you’ve told me, it has, significantly—his attorney can argue he’s entitled to a share of that increase.”
The rage hits like a wall of heat. Clarence called my business a hobby. Told a table full of our friends to manage their expectations. Dismissed three years of work I built while he was checking into hotels with another woman. And now the law might hand him a piece of it.
“He spent years tearing my work down. He told people it wasn’t a real career.”
“I believe you.” Paulina’s eyes are level.
No warmth, no pity—just a steady, clear-eyed assessment that reminds me of looking at a blueprint and seeing exactly where the load-bearing walls are.
“The court won’t factor that in. I’m not telling you this to discourage you.
I’m telling you what the terrain looks like so you walk in with your eyes open. ”
My teeth ache. I’ve been clenching my jaw so hard the pressure has crawled up to my temples, and I make myself release it, muscle by muscle, while Paulina turns to the page I flagged with a red tab. Boring but stable.
“This, however, helps.” She reads the text once.
Twice. “In a no-fault state, credibility is everything. When we argue dissipation—that he wasted marital assets on an affair—he’s going to claim the spending was trivial, or that you had equal access to the accounts, or that the marriage was already functionally over.
This text proves he knew it wasn’t over.
He was actively maintaining the marriage as cover.
Boring but stable is a man describing his strategy, not his feelings. Any judge will read it that way.”
The sentence rearranges something in my chest. Not relief—something more structural. A beam sliding into place where I didn’t know I needed one. The phrase that gutted me might be the phrase that saves me.
“I want to file.”
“Good. But first.” Paulina sets her pen flat on the legal pad with the precision of someone placing a scalpel on a tray. “Walk me through your contact with the other woman’s family.”
My spine stiffens. “I met with her father. Patrick Collier. I showed him the texts.”
“Under what pretense?”
“A business meeting. I used my design work as a reason to get in the room.”
“You fabricated a professional pretense to confront your husband’s mistress’s father in person.
” Not a question. A diagnosis. “That’s not actionable, but it’s unusual.
And Clarence’s attorney is going to be looking for unusual.
The dinner party where everything was fine, then his wife secretly engineers a face-to-face with the other woman’s father—you understand how that narrative gets constructed. ”
The heat climbs my neck. Unusual sits next to erratic sits next to crazy wife—the pile of words that men and their attorneys stack around women who respond to betrayal by doing something about it.
“I showed him evidence. I didn’t threaten anyone.”
“I believe you. My concern isn’t what happened—it’s what can be implied. No more contact with Patrick Collier. No more contact with Annabelle. You told the father. Fine. Now you stop. You let the legal process work and you don’t give opposing counsel a pattern to point to.”
A pattern. Three contacts. The restaurant. His text. The night I almost called him back before I stopped myself. Paulina Klein is drawing a line and the line runs directly through the only person who’s made me feel sane in the past week.
“Understood.”
“I’ll have the petition drafted by Thursday.
You’ll review it before we file. And Ginny—“ She waits until I look at her. “This is going to be a fight. Not a sentencing. He’s not going to be punished for what he did. He’s going to negotiate for what he thinks he deserves.
Your job is to make sure he gets less than that. ”
I nod. Stand. My legs feel like they belong to someone taller—unsteady at a new height. I walk out of her office and the elevator doors close and I press my back against the brushed steel wall and the breath I’ve been holding for forty-five minutes comes out in one long, shaking exhale.
This is real. I’m filing. I’m going to divorce my husband.
My phone buzzes. I check it expecting Deborah.
A Denver number I don’t recognize.
Ginny—this is Patrick Collier. I owe you an apology for how I left things. I found your number through your business site. I hope that’s not overstepping. If you’re willing to talk, I’d like to hear how you’re doing.
I read it standing in the elevator. Read it again in the lobby. Read it a third time on the sidewalk where the afternoon sun hits my face and the wind pulls at my blazer and Paulina Klein’s voice is still ringing in my head—no more contact with Patrick Collier.
Deborah’s voice, underneath it: He’s going to go home and sit with it. That’s what people who actually think look like.
I save his number. I don’t reply yet.
But I save it.
“I’m thinking we angle the pass-through to the right,” Wanda says, sketchbook open against her forearm as we walk. “Gives the bartender a sightline to the front door.”
“That’s the move. Everyone who walks in gets seen—the bar becomes a welcome point instead of a wall.”
“I love that.” She scribbles something and flips the book shut. “I’m starving. How much farther?”
“Half a block.” I nod toward the blue awning ahead on Platte. The Italian place Deborah swears by—good pasta, big windows, the kind of spot that makes clients feel like you know things.
We’re ten feet from the door when I look through the front window and my stomach drops so hard my vision whites out at the edges.
Corner table. Eight feet from the glass.
Clarence. Leaning back with his ankle over his knee, arm hooked along the chair beside him. And across from him—dark hair, cream top, face tilted up toward his with a wide, open smile—Annabelle.
Heat floods my face and my whole body locks, feet rooted to the concrete, and I grab the strap of my bag because the ground is moving under me and if I don’t hold onto something I’m going to sway.
They’re on my street. Six blocks from the restaurant I’m building.
The neighborhood I drive through every morning, park in, walk through with contractors and clients.
He knows this is where I work. He brought her here anyway because it has never, not once, occurred to Clarence that I might exist outside the house he leaves me in.
Then Annabelle reaches across the table and puts her hand on his forearm. Left side. Just above the wrist. The exact spot I reached for at the dinner party—my fingers landing on tablecloth while Lisa watched.