Chapter 2
EASY LIES
By the time Preston finally walks through the door, it’s dark and the kids are already in bed.
I’ve been sitting at the kitchen island with a glass of wine I can’t taste, listening for the garage door like a dog waiting for its owner.
I showered. Put on real clothes—not nice clothes, just not the sweatpants, because some pathetic part of me wanted to be sitting here looking like a person when he got home. Like that would change something.
His keys hit the counter. Briefcase on the bench. He loosens his tie on the way to the fridge and pulls out the plate I made him—grilled chicken, potatoes, asparagus—and puts it in the microwave without looking at it.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” He watches the plate rotate.
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my fingertips. I take a sip of wine. Set the glass down carefully because my hand wants to shake and I won’t let it.
“How was the Hopper Hill Gala last weekend?”
His hand pauses on the microwave handle. Half a beat. Then he opens it.
“The gala?” He pulls out the plate, grabs a fork. “Boring. Three hours of handshaking. You really didn’t miss anything.”
He sits across from me. Cuts into the chicken. Chews.
“Estelle Holloway said it was black-tie.” I keep my voice light. Two friends chatting. Nothing in the air. “Said there was a band.”
“Estelle Holloway exaggerates everything.”
“She does.” I smile. “She mentioned some woman at your table. Dark hair? Said she seemed lovely.”
“Sloane.” He says it the way you’d say stapler. ”My EA. She handles event logistics, so she was there. Spent half the night on her phone.”
He puts a piece of potato in his mouth. Glances at me—quick, flat, checking.
I nod. “Sounds dull.”
“It was.”
“Want more wine?”
“I’m good.”
That’s it. That’s the whole conversation. He finishes eating, puts his plate in the sink—again—and goes upstairs. I hear the shower. I hear it stop. One creak of the bedsprings through the ceiling, then nothing.
And he lied to my face without a single flicker.
Not a stammer. Not one extra word. He said her name like she was furniture and went back to his chicken. Sloane. My EA. Like I asked about the weather. Like there was nothing to find in the question.
I grip the edge of the counter and my stomach rolls—a physical, lurching thing, the wine climbing back up, my throat tightening around it.
Because either he’s been lying so long it’s reflex, or he doesn’t think I’m smart enough to catch it, and I don’t know which one is worse.
I don’t know which version of my husband I’m supposed to grieve right now—the one who’s a practiced liar, or the one who thinks I’m too stupid to notice.
Maybe he’s telling the truth. The thought arrives like a life raft and I grab it with both hands.
Maybe Estelle misread it. Maybe this Sloane really was just working the event.
Maybe the woman at his table was a colleague and Estelle—dramatic, exaggerating Estelle—turned it into something it wasn’t.
Maybe.
I wash his plate. Wipe the counters. Turn off the lights. Go upstairs. Brush my teeth. Get into bed beside him. He’s on his side, back to me, breathing deep and steady, and I lie in the dark three feet from his spine and try to talk myself out of what I’m about to do.
You’re being crazy. You’re a tired mom who heard gossip in a parking lot and now you’re spiraling. Go to sleep. It’s nothing.
But my phone is on the nightstand and my hand is already reaching for it.
Hopper Hill Gala San Diego.
The event has its own website. I tap through to the photo gallery—professional photographer, every shot tagged and captioned—and I scroll with the screen brightness turned to its lowest setting so the glow won’t reach him.
Rooftop terrace. Harbor lights. Champagne flutes catching the flash.
I scroll faster. My thumb is trembling on the glass.
There.
Preston in a black tux I’ve never seen. His arm around a woman—tall, dark hair past her shoulders, a silver dress that’s nicer than anything I’ve ever owned, backless, shimmering.
She’s tilted into him, laughing, and his hand is on her waist. Not her back.
Her waist. The low curve of it, fingers spread, possessive and easy, the way you touch someone you’ve touched a hundred times.
My throat closes.
Next photo. Same woman. His hand on the small of her back, guiding her through a doorway. She’s looking up at him. He’s looking down at her with an expression I haven’t seen on his face in—God. Years. Maybe ever. Not for me. He’s never looked at me like that.
Next. Seated at a round table, side by side. Her hand on his forearm. They’re mid-conversation with another couple and their bodies are angled toward each other like magnets—mirroring, synchronized, the invisible choreography of two people who are together.
The comments under the album. I read them with the phone pressed almost to my nose.
Great to see Preston and his partner! Stunning couple.
Power couple alert!
So glad Preston brought Sloane—she’s such a gem.
His partner. Brought Sloane. These people don’t know I exist. They think this woman—Sloane, my EA, spent half the night on her phone—is his wife.
I close my eyes and press the phone against my chest and the bed lurches under me like the mattress dropped six inches.
My whole body goes hot, then cold, then hot again, and there’s a sound building in my throat—a laugh or a scream, I can’t tell which—and I bite the inside of my cheek so hard I taste copper.
You knew. Some part of you already knew.
I screenshot every photo. Every comment. I save them to a folder I create right there in the dark, three feet from his sleeping body, and I name it “Receipts.”
My hands are steady now. The shaking is gone. Something else has taken its place—something cold and dense and sharp-edged that sits behind my ribs like a blade turned sideways. Not grief. Grief is soft.
This is not soft.
The next evening I pick my moment.
Preston’s at the kitchen island—laptop open, bourbon poured, still in his work shirt with the sleeves rolled.
The kids are upstairs. Lily’s reading to Nancy.
Rosie’s in the bath—I can hear her splashing through the monitor clipped to my waistband, which means I have maybe five minutes before she tries to climb out.
I open the fridge. Pull out leftovers. Start plating.
“Can we talk about Friday?” I keep my voice easy, my back to him. “The Headley dinner?”
He holds up a finger without looking at me.
Still typing. I stand there with a plate in my hand like a waitress while he finishes whatever email matters more than I do.
He closes the laptop halfway, picks up his bourbon, takes a sip.
Finally turns his head in my direction—not his body, just his head, the absolute minimum.
“What about it?”
“I need something to wear.”
“So wear something.” He says it to the bourbon glass, already turning back to the laptop.
“Nothing fits, Preston.” I set the plate in front of him. He doesn’t look at it.
He leans back on the stool and rolls his neck like this conversation is physically tiring him. “What about the black dress? From Christmas.”
“That was three years ago.”
“So?” He finally looks at me, eyebrows raised, like I’m the one being unreasonable.
“So it doesn’t fit.” I set a second plate down harder than I mean to. The fork rattles. “I’ve had a baby since then.”
“Brittany.” He says my name the way you’d say traffic. An inconvenience. A delay. “The dinner is in two days. You’ve known about it for a week.”
“You told me about it yesterday.”
“I told you last—” He stops. He knows I’m right but he won’t say it. “Fine. Go buy a dress.”
“Great. When? Tomorrow I have Rosie’s speech eval at nine, Nancy’s class Halloween party at eleven, Lily’s dentist at two-thirty, and I need to pick up your dry cleaning because you asked me to on Monday. When do you want me to go shopping?”
He stares at me. Not at my face—past it, at the wall behind me, the way he does when he’s decided a conversation isn’t worth his full attention.
“I don’t know, Brittany. Figure it out. You’re home all day.”
Home all day. The words land like a slap.
I’m up at 5:45 every morning. I make four breakfasts, three lunches, I drive carpool, I schedule every appointment, sign every form, clean every surface, cook every meal, manage every tantrum, and I do it alone—completely alone—while he sits in an office someone else built and takes a woman who isn’t me to galas I’m not invited to.
Home all day. Like I’m lounging. Like I’m watching television in my robe eating bonbons while the house runs itself.
“I’m not home all day.” My voice comes out harder than I planned. “I’m working all day. I just don’t get paid for it.”
“Here we go.” He picks up his bourbon, leans back. “The martyr routine.”
“It’s not a routine, it’s a fact. I do everything in this house. Everything. You don’t know where the pediatrician’s office is. You don’t know Nancy’s teacher’s name. You have never once packed a lunch—”
“Because I have a job, Brittany. A real one. One that pays for this house and that kitchen you’re standing in.”
The words hit and I feel them—physically, a hot spike in my chest, a ringing in my ears. A real one. Seven years of keeping three children alive and a household running and he just called it not real. Not work. Not a contribution. Decoration at best. Charity.
I open my mouth to fire back, but he’s already ahead of me.
He does the thing—the look. I’ve felt it a hundred times but tonight I watch for it, and seeing it with clear eyes is so much worse than just absorbing it.
His gaze drops from my face to my chest, my stomach, my hips, all the way to the floor, and drags back up.
It’s not desire. It’s assessment. He’s measuring everything that’s changed since he married me, everything that’s expanded, everything that doesn’t match whatever image he keeps in his head of a wife worth being seen with.
“Maybe if you put in a little effort,” he says, “you wouldn’t be panicking about a dress two days out.”
Effort.
I put in effort every single day. I put in effort at 5:45 AM when I peel myself out of bed on four hours of sleep.
I put in effort when I carry twenty-nine pounds of screaming toddler down the stairs.
I put in effort when I cut sandwiches into the right shapes and wipe marker off the walls and get on my knees to mop up milk while he steps over me to take the coffee I poured.
I put in so much effort that my knees crack when I stand up and my back seizes every morning and I haven’t slept through the night in three years.
But that’s not the kind of effort he means.
He means my body. He means fix it. He means I should look the way I looked before I grew three human beings inside of me and pushed them out and fed them from my chest and held them through fevers and nightmares and first days of school while he—what?
While he took Sloane to rooftop terraces in a tux and let strangers call them a couple.
“Join a gym,” he says, turning back to his laptop. “Go for a walk. Do something.”
Do something. I do everything. I do every single thing in this house and you do nothing and you don’t see any of it and you never have.
“With what time, Preston?” It comes out loud—louder than I meant, loud enough that I hear Rosie pause on the baby monitor, and I don’t care.
“When am I supposed to go to the gym? Between the 5 AM wakeup and the three lunches and the carpool and the speech therapy and the dentist appointments and the cooking and the cleaning and the—all of it, every single thing I do all day while you’re at the office? When?”
He sets the bourbon down. Slow, deliberate, the glass clicking against the granite like a gavel. He looks at me—really looks, for the first time all night—and his face is flat. Bored. The expression of a man watching a tantrum he’s seen before.
“Well.” He closes his laptop. Stands up. “Obviously you want to fight tonight, and I’m not going to do that.” He tugs his cuffs straight, picks up his bourbon, and walks past me toward the hallway. “I need to relax. I’ve been working all day.”
Working all day. Like I haven’t. Like the word only counts when there’s a paycheck attached.
He walks out. I hear his footsteps down the hall. I hear the study door close. Not a slam—that would mean he felt something. Just a quiet click. Done. Conversation over. He decided it was over, so it’s over.
I’m standing alone in the kitchen holding a fork I don’t remember picking up, and I’m shaking—hands, arms, shoulders, jaw—vibrating with something so big it doesn’t have a name yet.
Not sadness. Not even anger, exactly. Something underneath both of those.
Something that’s been buried under seven years of I’ll figure it out and you’re right and fine and is only now clawing its way to the surface.
I close my eyes. Press my fists against the counter until my knuckles ache.
He said the word “effort” to you. While Sloane wears silver backless dresses to galas where people call her his partner. While you pack his briefcase and hang his keys and cook his meals and raise his children. Effort.
My eyes are burning but they’re dry. Something in me won’t let the tears come. Something in me has gone past tears into a place that’s harder, quieter, and much, much more dangerous.