Dumping My Ex For His Uncle novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Happy Birthday, Frankie
A stranger's text sends Frankie to her husband's office on her birthday, where she catches him with his intern and puts her ring in the cake in front of his mother; on the steps in the rain Ellis makes one request: give him a child, and he means Tilly.
The text came at 8:41, while my mother-in-law was explaining why I should quit driving tugboats.
"He isn't at a deposition. His office. Now."
Unknown number.
No name.
I read it under the tablecloth twice.
Across the table, Joan Clagett touched her pearls and smiled at the empty chair beside me.
"Ellis works so hard," she told the table. "Some of us understand what that costs."
Ellis had texted at 8:20.
"Stuck in a depo, babe. Start without me. Happy birthday."
It was my thirty-first birthday.
I had come straight from the harbor.
I'd put a container ship on the pier at Seagirt at six and changed my shirt in the truck.
My hair still smelled like diesel.
Joan had noticed that before she noticed me.
"Work with your hands long enough and it's all you're fit for," she'd said over the soup. "Look at my brother Bram. Drawing on drunks in Fells Point at forty-one."
The partners' wives had laughed.
I'd met her brother once, at my wedding, on his way out the door with Joan's hand on his back.
"Excuse me," I said. "I need to get something from the car."
Nobody looked up.
I didn't go to the car.
I went to the kitchen and asked for the cake.
Tilly had made it that afternoon with the sitter.
It was lopsided and blue, with candy letters that said HAPY BIRTHDAY FRANKIE.
She'd put her toy tugboat on top, because I drive one.
I carried it out the back door into the rain.
Clagett and Clagett was six blocks away, on the twelfth floor of a glass tower on St. Paul Street.
The night guard knew me.
He waved me through and said happy birthday.
I didn't ask how he knew.
The elevator opened on a dark hall.
One office was lit at the end of it.
Ellis's corner office has a glass wall, so clients can see him working.
The blinds were half down.
They weren't down far enough.
Sadie Ruark was sitting on his desk.
She was his intern, a law student, twenty-three.
She'd brought me a fruit basket at Christmas.
Her skirt was pushed up to her waist.
My husband's shirt was open, and his face was in her neck.
On her bare hip, under a square of clear film, was a fresh tattoo.
Two small letters in black script. E.C.
A little anchor under them.
On the corner of the film was a sticker: a red door, and "Keefer's, Fells Point."
I set the cake down on the hall carpet.
I took out my phone and took a picture through the glass.
Then I opened the door and took another one.
Sadie screamed and grabbed for her skirt.
Ellis spun around and knocked his own lamp off the desk.
"Frankie." He held up both hands like I had a gun. "It's not what you think."
"I think it's your initials on her butt."
Sadie made a noise.
"Hip," she said. "It's my hip."
There was a gold anchor on a chain around her neck.
I knew that necklace.
I'd found it in Ellis's desk drawer at home in September, wrapped in tissue.
I had decided it was for my birthday.
I had decided that for three weeks.
I walked over and held out my hand.
"That's mine," I said.
Sadie looked at Ellis.
Ellis looked at the floor.
She unclasped it and dropped it in my palm.
"Frankie, please," Ellis said. "Let's go home and talk like adults."
"You're at a deposition," I said. "I'd hate to interrupt."
I picked up Tilly's cake on the way out.
I didn't cry in the elevator.
I didn't cry in the truck.
I was too busy driving back to the club with a cake on the passenger seat and my hand on top of it.
The dining room was dark wood and white tablecloths and dead men in gold frames.
Joan's guests were on dessert.
Two partners from the firm. Their wives. Joan's friend from the hospital board.
I walked to the head of the table and set the cake down in front of Joan.
The tugboat leaned over in the frosting.
"Frankie, there's dessert," Joan said. "We ordered the crème brûlée."
"This one's from Tilly," I said.
I worked the ring off my finger.
It was a two-carat cushion diamond that had belonged to Joan's mother.
It had never once fit right.
I pushed it down into the blue frosting, right next to the tug.
One of the wives put her fork down.
"What is this?" Joan said quietly.
I turned my phone around and held it out to her.
Sadie on the desk. Ellis's open shirt. The little letters on her hip.
Joan looked at it for one second.
She didn't gasp.
She didn't even blink.
She reached over and turned my phone face down on the tablecloth.
"Sit down," she said. "You're making a scene."
"I'm filing for divorce on Monday," I said.
I said it to the whole table, so nobody would have to repeat it.
"Ellis is welcome to keep the intern. I'm keeping my daughter."
The partner at the end of the table coughed into his napkin.
That was when Ellis ran in.
His hair was wet and his shirt was buttoned wrong.
He looked at the cake, then at the ring sticking out of it, then at his mother.
"Mom, I'll handle this."
"You will," Joan said. "Outside."
I took my phone back and walked out past him.
He followed me down the club's front steps into the rain.
"Frankie, wait. Please. Just give me one minute."
I stopped on the bottom step.
The rain was coming down hard enough to bounce.
He came down beside me and didn't touch me.
That was smart of him.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. You want a divorce. I won't fight you."
I hadn't expected that.
"Take the house. Take the truck, the savings, all of it. I'll sign whatever you want, uncontested."
"Why?"
"Because I did this." He wiped rain off his face. "I owe you."
For a second, I almost believed he was ashamed.
"I have one request," he said. "Only one."
"What?"
He looked right at me.
"Give me a child."
I laughed.
It came out of me.
"You want a baby? Now? You've had six years, Ellis. You said kids would wreck my career."
"I don't mean a baby."
The rain ran off his chin.
His voice went calm and flat, the voice he uses with insurance adjusters.
"I mean Tilly."
I stopped laughing.
"The adoption petition is in both our names," he said. "You withdraw yours. I adopt her alone. Quietly, before the hearing."
"She's my daughter."
"She's a foster placement," he said. "On paper, she isn't anybody's yet."
"She made me that cake."
"And you can visit," he said. "Weekends. I'm being generous."
I looked at the man I married.
He wasn't ashamed of anything.
"No," I said.
He nodded slowly.
Then he leaned in close enough that I could smell Sadie's perfume on him.
"Then I'll take her anyway," he said. "And you'll never see her again."
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