Chapter 10 #3
After texting with Devin, I found myself thinking about Alison Crawford again.
The woman who was currently destroying my marriage while probably having no idea I existed as anything more than an abstract concept.
The brilliant lawyer who was helping my husband build his career while I sat at home researching how to take half of everything he owned.
I googled her name and found her LinkedIn profile immediately.
Harvard Law School, just like Brett had mentioned with that tone of admiration that made my skin crawl.
Five years at Morrison, Clinton & Associates before joining Eastmark Pharmaceutical.
Impressive credentials, professional headshot that made her look competent and trustworthy.
Then I found her Instagram account.
The photos were exactly what you'd expect from a successful woman in her thirties.
Tasteful shots of dinner parties and weekend trips, group photos with attractive friends who looked like they belonged in social media advertisements for graduate school programs. Nothing inappropriate or unprofessional, just the curated life of someone who'd never doubted she deserved good things.
I scrolled through months of composed images, looking for any evidence of her relationship with my husband.
Nothing obvious, but there were subtle signs if you knew what to look for.
Expensive dinners at restaurants I recognized from Brett's credit card statements.
Weekend trips to places that matched his business travel schedule.
Then I found the post that made my coffee cup slip in my hands.
Three months ago, Alison Crawford had gotten engaged.
The photo showed her left hand displaying a diamond ring that looked really expensive. The caption read: "I said yes! Can't wait to marry my best friend and build an amazing life together. #engaged #blessed #futuremrsthompson"
I stared at the screen, trying to process what this meant. Alison was engaged to someone else. Someone named Thompson who looked like a nice tech bro in the photos she'd tagged him in. Clean-cut, successful, and probably never lied to anyone about where he was spending his weekends.
So why was she kissing my husband in VIP boxes while planning her wedding to someone else?
"What the hell," I said out loud to my empty kitchen, scrolling through more photos of her ideal life with her ideal fiancé who had no idea his ideal girlfriend was having an affair with a married pharmaceutical executive.
The possibilities were all terrible. Maybe she was using Brett for career advancement while keeping her real relationship separate, or maybe she was planning to leave her fiancé for my husband.
Or was she just having fun with a married man while maintaining her respectable engagement to someone more appropriate?
Whatever her motivations, she was apparently even more duplicitous than I'd realized. At least Brett was only lying to one family. Alison was lying to everyone.
My phone rang as I was spiraling through the implications of this discovery, Brett's name on the screen right on schedule for his evening check-in.
"Hey," I answered, stunned at how normal I sounded while my world rearranged itself around this new information.
"Hi, beautiful. How was your day?"
Beautiful. He kept calling me that, like it was a habit instead of an observation. Like endearments could make up for the fact that he was building a life with someone else who was apparently building a life with someone else entirely.
"Good. Quiet. Kimberly called about her exam, and Devin's UConn meeting got postponed until next month."
"Oh, that's too bad. He must be disappointed."
"He's handling it well. These things happen." Unlike affairs, which were choices people made every single day.
"Listen, don't hold dinner for me tonight. Rogers called an emergency meeting about the European timeline. Could run pretty late."
Emergency meeting. Right. More likely he was having dinner with his engaged girlfriend while her unsuspecting fiancé thought she was working late on legal briefs and I thought my husband was solving corporate crises.
"Okay," I said. "I'll save you a plate."
"Thanks. You're the best. Love you."
"Love you too," I said out of habit, and immediately regretted it.
After he hung up, I sat in my kitchen surrounded by evidence of my husband's betrayal and his girlfriend's duplicity, feeling like I'd stumbled into someone else's soap opera.
Three months ago, I'd been a woman with marriage problems. Now I was apparently married to a man who was having an affair with a woman who was engaged to someone else.
The situation would have been funny if it weren't my actual life falling apart in real time.
I closed my laptop and started making dinner, thinking about the long road ahead. Discovery periods and asset division and depositions where lawyers would pick apart every detail of our marriage looking for ammunition.
But I wasn't scared anymore. I was ready.
Ready for war, ready for freedom, ready for whatever came after twenty-three years of being Mrs. Brett Holmes.
Brett had no idea what was coming. Neither did Alison Crawford, future Mrs. Thompson, current destroyer of marriages.
But they'd find out soon enough.