Blythe and Harlan, arriving that afternoon, had walked into eight months of it and read the whole story in a shoe rack and a child’s drawing.
But Harriet had lived every hour of those eight months, alone, and had gotten up every one of those mornings, and the getting up was the strength, though it never once looked like it.
“Weston didn’t just leave for another woman,” she finally said.
“He planned it for nearly a year.”
Blythe looked up, her face gone pale.
The other woman was named Nadia — a twenty-eight-year-old assistant at the corporate law firm where Weston worked as an associate.
Harriet had found out too late.
By then he had already been moving assets around as though his fifteen-year marriage were a case file he was quietly closing.
Chapter 5 — Out of Reach
The family home upstate, bought right after their wedding, had been re-titled with a forged deed dated before the marriage.
The lakeside cabin, built over four years with money they had both earned, had been legally “gifted” to Nadia’s mother.
The family car had been sold to one of Weston’s old fraternity brothers for a fraction of its worth, on paper.
“He put everything out of reach of the marital estate,” Harriet said, flat.
“Or he thought he did.”