After she left I started looking. The bookkeeper in me kicked in. I pulled statements, I pulled records, I looked into that promotion. And I found it.

Gerald sits on the board of the company that promoted Dale. Not just any board seat.

He’s on the compensation committee. He approved the hire. He signed off on the $47,000 signing bonus. He arranged the whole thing.

I don’t know when it started. I don’t know if Dale knows about Bridget. God, I don’t know if Dale knows and STAYED or if Gerald did something to me that I — I’m not gonna finish that sentence. I’ve been going over it with a counselor. Whole separate mess and this post is already long enough.

There’s also a thing with Gerald’s late wife, Dale’s mother. Something Deborah found when she helped me pull the family files. I’m not getting into all that right now because it’s its own thing and I don’t have the energy. But she wasn’t the saint they said she was. Or maybe she was. Maybe she knew too. I don’t know.

I confronted Gerald first. Not Dale. Gerald. I drove to his house on a Monday morning and told him what the test showed. He was making eggs. He stood there holding a spatula and the eggs were burning and the smoke detector started going off and he didn’t move, he just stood there looking at me. And then he said the sentence I’m never gonna forget.

“Maureen, you put the seed money in. That makes you the investor, not the wife.”

I still don’t understand what that means. I’ve repeated it to Deborah and to my counselor and to my lawyer Patricia and none of us understand what he meant. But he said it like it was the truest thing he’d ever said. Flat. Like it was nothing.

I left. The eggs were still burning. The smoke detector was still going. He didn’t follow me out.

Dale and I had the conversation two days later. He came in through the garage and went straight for the fridge, like he always does, and he had the door open and was reaching for the orange juice before he even looked up and saw Deborah sitting at the table. He said “what’s — ” and then didn’t finish. He stood there holding his keys for way too long.