While I Watched Their Kids, He Lived a Secret Life novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: Neil's Last Move
The letter ran three pages, and I read it sitting on my porch step with the pearls in my pocket.
It said I had abandoned the marital home.
It said I had carried on a relationship with a man named Ian Maddox before the marriage ended.
It said the house should be sold and the money split down the middle, and my mother's insurance should count as a gift to the marriage.
Ian read it over my shoulder.
His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.
"He's going after my mother's money," I said.
"Can he?"
"My lawyer says no. Pennsylvania doesn't care who cheated, and his own album is the best evidence in the file."
I folded the pages.
"He knows that. He's not trying to win. He's trying to hurt me where it shows."
By Wednesday I saw where.
My phone began to ping at breakfast, a text from the neighbor across the street, and then one from the school mother who had always waved.
Have you seen the Havertown Neighbors page?
I opened it.
Neil had posted at six that morning, in capital letters.
My wife of eight years had an affair with a paramedic and threw me out of my own home. She humiliated my mother in front of forty people. Please keep my family in your thoughts.
Under it were two hundred comments.
Some were kind to him.
Some were questions I could not answer from my kitchen.
A woman I'd never spoken to wrote: I always thought she was cold.
I put the phone face down on the counter.
I had spent eight years building a quiet, helpful, useful face for this street.
It had taken him one post to turn that against me.
"Come to the block meeting," Ian said that night, over the grilled cheese I had burned.
"No."
"Maggie."
"I don't want to stand in a church hall and defend myself to people who've eaten my casseroles."
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