My wife’s best friend got a little too buzzed at our backyard BBQ and pointed at me, asking, “So when are you finally leaving her?”—the whole party went dead quiet… then she froze and whispered, “Wait… he doesn’t know?”
My wife’s best friend got a little too buzzed at our backyard barbecue and asked me when I was finally going to leave her. I still remember the tiny American flag magnet stuck to the lid of our cooler—Victoria’s souvenir from some beach town she loved—and the way Sinatra drifted from a Bluetooth speaker like we were all pretending to be carefree adults on a postcard. The late-June sun sat warm on the custom stone patio I’d designed myself, the one I’d poured weekends into until my hands were raw.
Thirty people moved through our yard with the easy confidence of guests who felt at home: Victoria’s friends from her marketing agency, their partners, my business partner Drew and his wife Cassidy, a few neighbors who’d wandered over when they smelled the grill. Everything looked like the life I thought I had. Then Amber Hayes pointed at me with a sloshing glass in her hand, and the laughter didn’t just fade.
It snapped. “Wait… he doesn’t know?” she whispered. My name is Carter Jameson.
I’m thirty-seven years old, and until that Saturday afternoon in June, I thought I had a pretty good handle on my life. I ran a successful construction management firm, had a nice house in a decent suburb of Portland, and was married to Victoria—my wife of nine years. We didn’t have kids yet, which Victoria always said was because she wanted to focus on her marketing career first.
I believed her, because why wouldn’t I? The barbecue had been Victoria’s idea. She loved hosting these things, showing off our renovated backyard—the outdoor kitchen, the fire pit I’d built with my own hands, the patio that made people say “wow” like I’d bought it instead of bled for it.
She loved the way our friends looked at us, like we were a finished story. That day, I’d promised myself something small and simple: no work calls, no emails, no half-listening while I thought about deadlines. Just one afternoon where I was present.
I didn’t know the price of that promise would be the truth. Amber arrived around two in the afternoon already loud enough to be heard from the driveway. Amber was one of those women who thought being brutally honest was a personality trait.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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