On our eighth anniversary, my husband insisted that only I prepare a feast for thirty-eight guests, while he was tucked away at a hotel with the woman from his office. I smiled and said, “Of course,” and a few hours later I was at the airport, leaving thirty-eight covered plates lined up like a perfectly behaved secret. When those covers were lifted, the room finally learned who had been doing the smiling.

I wanted to ask, And what about me? Who keeps me?

But I stayed silent.

When I stepped into the backyard for air, Mrs. Marleene—our seventy-year-old neighbor who lived alone in the mid-century house next door—was watering her lavender. She saw me holding a notebook, my face a little dazed, and smirked.

“Another party, huh?” she said. “God, they must think you’re the head chef at the Ritz. I made some lemon sauce. Take it. At least every dish will taste a little more like you.”

I chuckled, took it, and walked back inside, but my heart sank as I crossed the threshold.

No one sees me as someone who needs love. Only as someone who must carry weight.

Hours later, while I was checking prices on Italian grilled cheese sandwiches, my phone flashed a message from Emily, my best friend, a travel guide who always seemed to be somewhere bright and far away.

“Is Carter home?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “He’s at a coworker’s birthday.”

Seconds later, she sent a photo.

Carter, kissing a blonde woman at the front desk of the Hyatt Place Hotel in downtown Lansing.

That woman was no stranger.

She was Sierra—his secretary. Or, as I later learned her full name in black-and-white, Sierra Avery Lane.

My vision blurred. My hand dropped the phone onto the tile floor. I didn’t cry. I only felt my heart being squeezed tight, like someone had wrapped a cord around it and pulled.

I looked back at the menu list on my laptop. Italian salad. Honey-roasted chicken. Cheesecake. All of it to serve the man who had deceived me, and the family who always treated me like a silent accessory to Carter.

Quietly, I pulled out the trash bin, tore up every note, every handwritten menu line, and burned them in the backyard oven. In the crackle of burning paper, I clearly heard my own voice inside my head.

If you want a party, I’ll give you the last party of your life.

Monday morning, the Lansing sky was gray and still, as if it, too, knew something was about to change. I sat in my old moss-green Subaru parked outside the city library, clutching my phone, my finger sliding to Samuel Martinez in my contacts—a former client of mine, and also a private investigator whom I’d helped through financial trouble last year.