One Affair, One Divorce, No Way Back novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Under the Coffee Cup
Leigh slides signed divorce papers under Miles's coffee cup and takes nothing, and when his mistress texts she says the mistress's name, which he never told her.
Leigh hadn't asked me where I was going in three years, and I took that as a good marriage.
She never touched my phone.
She left the hallway light on when I came home late.
The men at my club called her the most understanding wife in the county.
I agreed with them.
I had been seeing Kendra Lowe twice a week and on every work trip, and Leigh knew it.
I knew she knew.
Neither of us had ever said a word, and I thought that made us two sensible adults.
Kendra was married too, to a man who traveled more than he was home.
She called her marriage finished on paper.
That suited me fine.
On a Tuesday morning in October, Leigh slid a stack of papers under my coffee cup.
"Keep the house," she said.
"Our son stays in his room and his school until June, and I'll take weekends and Wednesdays."
"I don't want anything else."
I heard my own voice go sour.
"Is this about her?"
"She has nothing to do with it."
Leigh shook her head.
"I met someone I really like."
I put the cup down.
I couldn't have swallowed another mouthful.
What I felt first wasn't anger.
It was relief, plain and quick.
For three years she had served me soup and never argued, and half the time I ate it so I wouldn't feel like a bastard.
Now we were even.
We could stop pretending.
I pulled the papers out from under the cup and smiled without reading a word.
"You should have told me sooner."
"When did you start this?" I asked.
"A while ago," she said.
"I'm moving out next Monday, and we'll tell Jamie together tonight so he hears it from both of us."
She said it the way she read out his school menu.
There was no heat in it, and no pause where I could have argued.
Leigh was peeling the curled label off Jamie's water bottle and pressing on a new one.
"What do you want to talk about?" she asked.
Her calm put me at ease.
She wasn't crying, and she wasn't listing everything I had done.
I moved closer.
"We've been married eleven years, Leigh."
"We understand each other, and we don't have to blow up the family over this."
"You have someone, I have someone, we come home and eat dinner and raise our son."
"Isn't that fairer?"
She slid the bottle into the side pocket of Jamie's backpack and zipped it.
"Read the last page," she said.
"What's the point? I'm not mad. I'm saying if we're both..."
"I know what you're saying."
"I don't want to live like this anymore."
I turned to the last page.
Her signature was already there, with today's date.
A pen lay beside the stack, uncapped, pointed at my side of the table.
She hadn't decided this on a whim.
She had known when I sat down that by the time my coffee was gone, my life would be different.
That should have bothered me more than it did.
What bothered me was the phone on the counter by her elbow.
It lit up with a message from a contact saved as a single letter, E.
Leigh looked at it for a moment and left it where it was.
My own phone buzzed against the table.
I picked it up to tell my assistant to push back my morning meetings.
A message from Kendra sat on top.
"Are you up, Miles? I left breakfast at your office. Don't drink coffee on an empty stomach again."
I turned the phone face down without thinking, and Leigh watched me do it.
My face went hot.
I had just spent five minutes explaining how well we understood each other, and I couldn't let her see one text.
Leigh picked up the pen and set it by my hand.
"Kendra's right about the coffee," she said.
I looked up.
"I never told you her name."
"No," Leigh said.
"You didn't."
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