That irritated me more than anything else.

Seventeen years of marriage. Three miscarriages. Two office expansions. One near-bankruptcy during the 2008 freight collapse that I carried us through by working eighteen-hour days while Graham delivered speeches at charity luncheons about resilience. And now he looked inconvenienced.

I folded my arms. “Let’s do this efficiently. Savannah, how long?”

She glanced at Graham. Wrong move.

I answered for her. “If you need to check his face before answering, it’s already too long.”

“Six months,” she said quietly.

Graham muttered, “It wasn’t supposed to—”

I cut him off. “Nothing about betrayal is ever ‘supposed to.’ It’s simply chosen.”

Savannah’s composure began to crack. “He told me you were basically separated.”

Of course he did.

I laughed softly. “Did he also tell you the company car you arrived in is leased through my business? Or that the lake house you visited on Labor Day belongs to an LLC I control? Or that the AmEx he used for your Miami hotel still routes through our shared financial office?”

This time, Graham looked genuinely sick.

Savannah turned fully toward him. “What?”

He said nothing.

That told her everything.

I stepped aside, not to invite them in, but to gesture toward the stone bench near the azaleas. “Neither of you is entering my house. You can stand out here and unravel each other’s stories in the cold.”

Savannah stared at Graham. “You said she didn’t work.”

That almost made me smile again.

“I don’t,” I said. “Not in the way you mean. I built Calder Freight from six trucks and a leased warehouse when I was twenty-nine. Graham joined the marriage after year three.”

The porch fell silent except for distant traffic from West Paces Ferry. Inside, the tart remained in the oven. Somewhere down the hallway, the grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour as if nothing unusual were happening.