“A daughter, but thankfully older and already on her own.”
“Ours aren’t quite there yet, but they’re close. Harper is about to graduate college and Nolan from high school.” He sighed. “We were supposed to be staying together for them, but Emily changed her mind about that.”
“Why? If you don’t mind me asking.”
He shrugged, toying with the edge of his menu. “I wish I knew. All she tells me is that she’s fallen out of love with me. I get that I work a lot of hours, but she knew what kind of life she was signing up for when she married me. I was in med school. My future was no surprise.”
Cece opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. Her own thoughts had no place in his interview.
“What?” he said. “You were about to say something.”
She shook her head.
“Go on. I haven’t really been able to talk to anyone about this except for one friend, so please, if you have some insight, I’m here for it.”
“It’s just that… Look, I don’t want to upset you?—”
“That ship has sailed. And not because of you.” Another quick, polite smile.
“My husband left me because of something I did.” She took a breath. “That’s what he said anyway. That it was because he couldn’t take the scandal of it all.” She gave Oliver a brief explanation of what had happened. “But that didn’t wash with me and being who I was, I couldn’t let it lie. I dug into things and quickly found out he was already involved with someone.”
Oliver’s brows lifted.
“In my experience, people don’t generally leave a comfortable relationship without good reason. Even a less-than-ideal relationship is preferable to being alone, for most people.”
“You think my wife was cheating on me?”
“I have no idea. But if you have a gut instinct about this, you might not be wrong.”
“I don’t know. Emily has never seemed like the kind…” He stopped talking, took a sip of his coffee, then leaned forward. “I never thought she’d divorce me but she did that, so I guess anything else I believed about her could be wrong, too.”
Again, Cece felt bad for him, but there were two sides to every story. “Didyouever…”
“No,” came his quick reply. “And for sure, the opportunities have been there. But that’s not something I wouldeverentertain.”
“I believe you.” She had no reason not to, and she wasn’t investigating him, just interviewing. “In the year or so before your separation, did your wife pick up any new habits that took her out of the house?”
His eyes narrowed. “She joined the gym and started taking a yoga class in the evenings.”
Cece nodded. “Did she go regularly?”
“She never missed a class.”
“Did you see any results of the class? Did she lose weight? Get more flexible? Anything like that?”
He hesitated. “Nothing I can recall.”
The server returned and took their orders. Cece opted for the thing she thought her stomach could handle the best, a simple bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon and brown sugar.
Oliver ordered eggs, bacon, hashbrowns, and toast.
When the server left, he leaned in again. “This investigating you did on your husband… Any chance you do that for hire?”
She gave a little snort. “Not really.” Then she thought of Maude. “But I have just the person you should talk to.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Essie sat alone on the porch with her coffee, feeling a kind of dread she hadn’t felt since Carlos had passed. Frank had gone to bed mad last night. Not at her, thank God, but at Sophie.
