I Took My Wife To A Party. She Left With Another Man Because He’s Rich. He Threw A Dollar Bill On…

“So,” he finally said, popping open his Coke with that satisfying hiss. “Mom called me.”

“I bet she did.”

I took a sip of my now-warm beer and grimaced.

“Let me guess. I’m being unreasonable, dramatic, refusing to communicate like an adult?”

“She said, ‘You’re overreacting.'”

Noah said it flat, no inflection, just reporting the facts like a journalist who didn’t want to editorialize.

“That you changed the locks without warning and embarrassed her in front of the neighbors. That you’re making a big deal out of nothing.”

“Nothing?” I repeated, feeling my blood pressure start to climb again. “Did she mention the ‘nothing’ she was doing in a hotel room at 2 in the morning? The ‘nothing’ that left a mark on her neck? The ‘nothing’ that involved wearing another man’s jacket home?”

Noah held up his hand like he was stopping traffic.

“Dad, I’m just telling you what she said. I’m not saying I believe her.”

He took a long drink of his Coke, buying time to figure out how to navigate this conversation.

“She wants me to talk to you. Convince you to let her back in so you guys can work through this like mature adults.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I told her I’d talk to you,” Noah said, and then grinned in a way that reminded me exactly of myself at his age. “I didn’t say I’d try very hard.”

I laughed; I couldn’t help it.

“You’re a good kid, Noah. Too good for this mess.”

“Dad, I’m 18. I’m not a kid anymore, and I’m definitely old enough to know when someone’s bullsh**ting me.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, getting serious in that way young men do when they’re trying to have important conversations.

“I’ve seen how she’s been treating you the last couple years. Like you’re an accessory she’s embarrassed to wear in public. Like building smokers isn’t a real job. Like you’re not successful enough for her image. It’s been gross to watch.”

That hit me harder than I expected. I thought I’d been hiding it better, thought the kids hadn’t noticed the slow erosion of respect in our marriage. Apparently, I was wrong, or at least not as good an actor as I thought.

“You noticed that, huh?”

“Dad, we all noticed. Even Hazel asked me last year why Mom never wants to talk about what you do when her friends are around.”

Noah finished his Coke and crushed the can, which was technically littering in my living room, but I wasn’t about to start enforcing rules right now.

“Marcus and Maya have a whole theory that she’s been having an affair for, like, six months. I told them they watched too many reality shows, but—” he gestured vaguely at the locked door, at the empty driveway, at the whole situation. “Guess they were on to something.”

Six months. The twins thought she’d been cheating for six months. I tried to do the math backward, figure out when things had shifted from distant to suspicious, but honestly, it all blurred together.

The late nights at the office, the business trips that seemed longer than necessary, the way she’d started dressing nicer for work than she did for date nights we’d stopped having. All the clichés, all the warning signs I’d ignored because acknowledging them meant admitting my marriage was dying.

The Forensic Audit of a Marriage

“So what now?” Noah asked. “You kicking her out permanently, or is this just to make a point?”

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted, which felt weird to say out loud. “I’m angry enough to want her gone forever, but we’ve been married 23 years. We’ve got four kids, a house, a whole life. I can’t just pretend none of that matters.”

“But Dad,” Noah said carefully, “does it matter if she doesn’t respect you? If she’s out there doing whatever—whoever—she wants?”

Before I could answer, my phone buzzed, then buzzed again, then started ringing with a number I didn’t recognize. I let it go to voicemail, watched the notification pop up, and felt my stomach drop. The voicemail was from Whitmore and Associates, a law firm downtown that advertised on benches and late-night TV.

Miranda had already lawyered up, and it hadn’t even been 24 hours.

“That was fast,” I muttered, putting the phone down like it might explode.

Noah raised his eyebrows.

“Lawyer, probably.”

“Well, at least you hit him,” Noah said, and then caught himself. “Wait, no. You didn’t hit Gavin. You just threatened him verbally. That’s personal growth, Dad. I’m proud of you.”

We both laughed at that—the kind of slightly unhinged laughter that happens when your life is imploding but you’ve still got enough sense of humor to see the absurdity.

“I didn’t hit him. Gold star for emotional maturity, Darren. Really setting the bar high there.”

But inside I was boiling like a smoker on overheat, like someone had cranked all my internal dials to maximum and forgot where the off switch was. I wanted to break things, hit things, scream until my voice gave out. Instead, I sat on my couch drinking warm beer with my son and pretending I had any idea what I was doing.

The next morning came too early and brought gifts I didn’t want. The mail arrived at 10:00, and mixed in with the credit card offers and grocery store flyers was a thick manila envelope with a law firm’s return address. My hands were shaking slightly as I opened it, which pissed me off because I didn’t want to give Miranda the satisfaction of making me nervous, even though she wasn’t there to see it.

The letter was three pages of legal jargon that basically boiled down to: Miranda wanted money, wanted it now, and wanted a lot of it. She was demanding spousal support because, apparently, 23 years of marriage entitled her to a percentage of my income for the rest of eternity—or at least until she remarried, which, given recent events, might be sooner than later. She wanted equitable asset division, which I’m pretty sure is lawyer-speak for “half of everything you’ve worked for.”

But the part that really made my blood boil, the part that had me gripping the letter so hard I nearly tore it, was that she wanted half of my business. Half of Hold Custom Smokers. The company I’d built from nothing, started in a garage with borrowed tools and a dream that everyone said was stupid.

The business she’d spent years calling “too blue-collar” for her image, not sophisticated enough for her social circle. It was just “welding” whenever her fancy friends asked what her husband did. That business—she wanted half of it.

I read the letter three times, each time getting angrier, before I finally grabbed my phone and called Jack Freeman. Jack had been my attorney for years, handled my business contracts and LLC paperwork, and had once gotten me out of a zoning dispute with the city that nearly shut down my workshop. He was expensive, but he was good, and more importantly, he enjoyed a good fight the way some people enjoy golf.

“Darren,” Jack answered on the second ring, his voice doing that thing lawyers do where they sound professional but friendly. “How’s business?”

“Business is fine. Marriage is dead. Need your help killing it officially and making sure I don’t get murdered in the process.”

There was a pause, and then I heard Jack’s chair creak as he leaned back.

“Finally, huh? I was wondering when you’d call. Melody saw Miranda at a restaurant two weeks ago with some guy who definitely wasn’t you. We figured it was only a matter of time.”