Page 61 of Cowboy Falling Hard

Somehow the phone was clicked off, and they all sat in silence.

Katie didn’t need to talk to her friends to know that what Sadie had seen was almost assuredly true. After all, if her husband was taking a vacation, surely she, as his wife, should have known about it.

Should have been with him. Their kids and her.

He told her he only had two weeks of vacation. He complained that he had to work weekends and said it should be illegal for a company to make him take business trips over the weekend. She had agreed, of course, but had never suspected that he wasn’t actually taking business trips. And when he said he didn’t get paid any extra for them, she believed that too.

And when he said he only had two weeks of vacation, despite the fact that he’d worked there for ten years, since they’d been married, she hadn’t argued about that either. She agreed that he should have more, but also agreed that the benefits were excellent and pay good, so they wouldn’t complain about the lack of vacation or the lack of overtime pay for weekend business trips.

How foolish she’d been.

“Maybe, just to double check, we should call him.” Orchid spoke softly. The sadness in her voice making it sound wobbly and depressing. Her face looked just as shellshocked as Katie’s felt.

No wonder. Katie would have been the last person any of them would have expected to have this happen to her.

She hadn’t even thought about her family. She had six older siblings, all happily married. None of them divorced, her parents were still married, and all of their siblings had stable marriages, if not loving ones.

She wasn’t the first person in her family to go to college, but she would be the first one to get divorced.

The D word. She didn’t even want to think it. Had never considered it for herself, but, if Russell was truly cheating, she couldn’t stay with him.

She just couldn’t.

There would be no way she could trust him again. After all, she’d given him blind trust and blind loyalty and even though she still couldn’t believe it, was still having trouble accepting it, she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, if this were true, there was no way she would want to have anything to do with him.

How could he do this to her?

“I think it would make me feel better. I’m having some really terrible thoughts. I... I don’t want to destroy my marriage if what we’re suspecting is not true.”

“Do you think he would be more likely to pick up if you called? Or do you think he’d be more likely to pick up if a number he didn’t know showed up?”

“Let me try first.”

She was getting her legs back underneath her. Maybe the future wasn’t exactly clicking in place, but the first thing she wanted to do was to figure out whether or not this was true.

It seemed like calling and asking would make the most sense.

She took her phone out and pressed his contact. They had children, he had a job, and she worked part-time, in order to be home when the children were, so, they didn’t call or text each other much.

He was further down her list of contacts than her husband probably should be.

She pressed the green button and put it on speakerphone. Why, she didn’t know, other than if she couldn’t get words to come out, maybe one of her friends could.

But she didn’t need to worry about that because the call went to voicemail.

One of her friends clicked off as she closed her eyes.

God? Where are you? Why is this happening to me?

She wanted it to be a dream. She wanted to wake up now. It was time for life to go back to the way it was before she found out that her husband was living a life she didn’t even know about.

Vaguely she realized Lavender was dialing his number, her phone on speaker as well, sitting on the table in front of them.

“Hello?” He answered on the second ring.

“Hello, is this Russell Lessing?”

“It is. Who’s calling?”

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