Chapter 3 - The House on the Gravel RoadFor the next two weeks, I kissed Julian goodbye every single morning like nothing was wrong, then spent every evening with Delia, tracing the trail of his transfers.
"Don't confront him until you actually know what this is," she warned me more than once, watching me practically vibrate with the need to just ask him outright.
The payments led to the LLC. The LLC led to a property about forty minutes outside town.
By then the question in my head had stopped being whether Julian was hiding something. It had become what, exactly, he'd spent all that money on.
That Saturday, I followed his truck. He stopped at a coffee shop and picked up a woman close to his own age — elegant, composed, clearly entirely comfortable in his passenger seat. I reminded myself, hands white-knuckled on my own steering wheel, that comfort wasn't proof of an affair.
They drove out to the property together and went inside. I parked nearby and sat there for nearly four hours, inventing every innocent explanation I could think of. A business deal. An investment property. A client project. Maybe even — desperately — a room being built for Millie.
Then they finally came back outside. Julian said something I couldn't hear from where I sat. Delaney smiled and wrapped both arms around him.
He hugged her back.
Every gentle explanation I'd spent four hours constructing collapsed in about two seconds flat.
That Monday, Millie climbed up into my lap while I folded laundry on the couch.
"Wren, do I get to bring my toys to the pretty house?"
My hands went still over one of her tiny shirts. "What do you mean, sweetheart?"
"Daddy said there's gonna be a room just for me there." She beamed. "The yellow lady showed me which one already."
A room for Millie.
My chest went tight. Why would my husband's daughter already have a bedroom picked out inside a house I hadn't even known existed until two weeks ago?
"Did Daddy say who else is going to live there with you?"
Millie shook her head, entirely unbothered. "He said it's a secret."
That evening I passed our bedroom closet and noticed my old Farm Fund folder poking out from the bottom drawer, my mother's handwriting still visible on the label. My savings had gone into saving Julian's company. Now that same company's money was apparently funding a secret house where his daughter already had her own bedroom picked out.
I shoved the drawer shut and called Delia. "I can't wait anymore. I need to know exactly who that house is for."
"Wren, don't—"
"Millie has a bedroom there, Delia."
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If I'd misread all of this, I was about to cross a line I couldn't uncross. If I hadn't misread it, the marriage was already over — it just didn't know it yet.
Delia sighed hard into the phone. "Fine. I'm coming with you."
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