“It looks like you have a second house, a second woman, and a second life, Denise,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “It looks like you took our children to play house with a stranger while I was working to pay our mortgage.” The silence on the other end was my answer.
He started to cry—loud, ugly sobs that might have moved me a week ago. Now, they just sounded like the desperate noise of a man who had been caught. He confessed that Natalie was an old flame from before we met, and they had “reconnected” two years ago.
Two years. For seven hundred days, he had been split between two worlds. He had bought that house with a “consulting bonus” that I now realized was actually a hidden inheritance he never told me about. He had built a parallel universe right under my nose.
“I’m coming home to get my things,” I told him. “If you are there, I’m calling the police. If Natalie is there, I’m calling a lawyer.” I hung up before he could beg again. The man I loved was a fiction, and the fiction was over.
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