The cat-shaped pot had a chip in one ear. That’s what I saw first, before the frame, before anything. I remember thinking someone loved that cactus enough to keep it after it broke.
It was Monday, March 9, the day I started as Communications Director, ten years of wanting that title. Chase had made me eggs at 7:20, edges brown, and pressed a kiss to my crown.
At 9:05 I looked through the glass wall of my new office, past the chipped cat. There was my husband in a silver frame. He was on the Lake Cumberland dock, his eyes narrowed, wearing the gray fishing shirt I’d gotten monogrammed for our fourth anniversary.
I took that picture. It hung in our hallway at home.
So he’d printed a second one.
Ximena, my coordinator, twenty-seven and the nicest person in the building, told me who he was before I’d finished asking. “That’s my fiancé, Chase. Two years in April.” She held up an oval diamond. I had a $340 white-gold band from a mall. My husband calls diamonds money you wear on your finger.
They’d met in Nashville, April 2024, at the “work thing.” He’d told her he’d been single for years. The wedding was October 17th, at a winery outside Asheville. “He’s paying for all of it.”
At 4:40 he texted: “Investor dinner, don’t wait up.” At 4:52 she told me he was taking her somewhere special.
I said nothing to him. Not that night, and not for three weeks. My cousin Adrienne, nineteen years of divorces, told me over cold toast that he’d move money the minute he smelled it.
Then Ximena showed me venue pictures and I asked when he’d paid the deposit.
“January 22nd. The day it snowed so bad.”
On March 31, locked in my bathroom on the edge of the tub, I opened our lake-house fund. Forty-one thousand had become $28,500.
January 22 · −$12,500.
I let the screen go dark, woke it, and looked again.
The brokerage on Polaris
I took screenshots until my thumb hurt. Every page, back to the wedding. Then I sat on the bath mat and read them like a novel I’d been in without knowing.
Something was wrong with the deposits, and it wasn’t the snow day.
Every two weeks since we’d married, two lines came in. Mine, from payroll. His, from Harrow Capital, the brokerage on Polaris Parkway where he’d worked since before I met him.
His stopped in May of 2025.
Mine kept going. Bigger, even, because I’d gotten a raise that summer and been so proud to move the extra straight into the fund. Lake money. I used to say it out loud when I clicked the button. “Lake money.”
I went to bed at two. He was snoring on his back with one sock on.
Wednesday morning I called Harrow Capital from the parking garage at work. I asked for Chase Burgess.
The receptionist had a nice voice. “Oh, hon. Chase hasn’t been with us since last spring.”
“Since when, exactly?”
“I’m not supposed to say. May.” She paused. “Are you a client? Because Lamar can take his accounts.”
I said no and thanked her. I sat in my car with the engine off for twenty minutes and missed the start of a meeting about trade-show banners. Nobody minded. I was a natural.
So there it was. No firm. Not even a job. Ten months of him leaving the house in a tie, and the tie had been going to a coffee shop, or to her, or to a winery website with my money.
The “investor dinners” were paid for by the investor. Me.
That night I was at Adrienne’s office with a box of statements I’d printed at a FedEx because I didn’t trust our home printer not to tell on me. She spread them across her conference table like a bad hand of cards.
She ran her finger down the column. “Every dollar since last May is yours.”
“Most of the dollars before that were mine too,” I said. “He always said his commissions were lumpy.”
“Lumpy.” She wrote it down. I don’t know why. “Here’s what happens. Tomorrow at nine, we file, and I get the fund frozen. Both names, so neither of you touches it. He’ll find out when his card bounces at a florist.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow. And Jordana.” She looked at me over her readers. “The twelve-five comes back to you. Wedding for another woman isn’t a marital expense. Not in this county, not in front of Judge Pruitt.”
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to throw up. I did a little of both into one of her tissues.
“What about Ximena?”
Adrienne capped her pen. “What about her?”
“She’s going to find out from a court filing that her fiancé has a wife. Who is her boss. Who has been drinking her oat milk lattes for three weeks.”
“That’s not your job.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m going to do it anyway.”
Thursday at 9:14 a.m., Adrienne texted me one word: Frozen.
At 9:20 I asked Ximena to come into my office and close the door.
She came in holding her coffee, oat milk, two pumps of vanilla. I knew because Chase had texted me a picture of the same order once, by accident, last fall. “Wrong person, lol.” I’d thought it was a client.
“Is this about the vendor thing?” she said. “I fixed the invoice.”
“Sit down.”
I turned my laptop toward her. On the screen was the fund. Our names at the top. Jordana Wieland and Chase Burgess. Joint.
Under it, the line. January 22 · −$12,500.
She read it once. Then she looked at the names. Then she looked at my left hand, which I had put flat on the desk next to the laptop so she would.
“No,” she said.
“I took the picture,” I said. “On your desk. He was squinting because I told him to stop, and he wouldn’t.”
She stood up so fast her chair rolled into the glass. On the other side, through it, her cactus sat in its chipped cat. Next to it, Chase, happy.
“He said he was single for years.”
“He’s been married to me for almost six.”
She covered her mouth. Then she sat back down, because her knees told her to, and I knew exactly how that felt.
Thursday, 9:31
I’d planned a speech. I’d practiced it in the shower. I said none of it.
What I said was, “He doesn’t have a firm. He got let go from Harrow last May. That deposit is my paycheck.”
She made a sound like a laugh with the bottom kicked out. “He said he was building something.”
“He was. Out of me.”
She put her face in her hands, and her ring hit her forehead and she said “ow,” and that was the moment I stopped being able to hate her even a little.
Her phone buzzed on my desk. She turned it over.
Chase. “Thinking of u. Dinner Fri? Somewhere special 😘”
She stared at it. I stared at her.
“Can I do it here?” she said.
“Do what?”
“End it. I can’t go back out there and sit in front of that picture. Can I do it here?”
I slid my box of tissues across the desk and said, “Take your time.”
She typed. Deleted. Typed. Her thumbs shook. I didn’t look, and then I did, because I’m a person.
I’m sitting in your wife’s office. She showed me the house fund. Don’t call me. Don’t come to my apartment. I’m keeping nothing of yours.
She held it out to me. “Is that okay?”
“It’s better than what I would’ve sent.”
She pressed send. Then she took off the ring, an oval diamond that had cost exactly as much as a snow day, and set it on my desk next to my legal pad. It rolled in a small circle and lay down.
Her phone rang within a minute. Chase. She declined. He called again. Declined.
Then my phone rang.
Chase.
I let it ring all the way out. Then I picked up my legal pad and walked out to the hallway to start my 10 a.m. meeting, because I was going to give him nothing, not even my voice.
He texted me eleven times before lunch. The first one said, “Jordy what is going on, the account is locked.” The fifth said, “She’s unstable, she’s obsessed with me, I can explain.” The ninth said, “Call me or I’m calling your mother.”
My mother was in Florida and hated him. I let him try.
The eleventh said, “I’m coming home tonight and we’re going to talk like adults.”
Adrienne, when I forwarded them, wrote back: “Good. Let him. I’ll be there. So will his mom.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Nadine Burgess. Sunday dinners in Westerville, a framed photo of Chase’s high school graduation on her piano, and a speech at our wedding about how her son “never cut a corner in his life.”
Chase had kept the firing from her, too. Of course he had. Nadine had told her whole church that her boy was starting his own company. She’d bought him a briefcase.
“You want his mother there?” I said.
“I want him to have to say it out loud,” Adrienne said, “to the one person whose face he cares about.”
That afternoon, Ximena boxed the frame and the cactus. She asked if she could take the rest of the day. I said take the week.
At the door she stopped.
“The lake,” she said. “He told me he was going to buy us a place on the lake.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
The hallway
Chase came home at 6:40 Thursday night. He walked in talking.
“Okay. Okay. Before you say anything, Jordy, you need to understand that girl is…”
Then he saw his mother at the kitchen table.
Nadine had her coat still on. Adrienne sat across from her with a folder. I stood by the counter, where I’d eaten cereal on that first Monday.
“Mom,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Your wife called me,” Nadine said. “She said you’d want to tell me about your firm.”
He laughed. It came out high. “This is insane. Jordy, this is a family thing, you don’t drag my mother…”
“Sit down, Chase,” Adrienne said.
“You don’t get to tell me to sit in my own house.”
“It’s half your house,” Adrienne said. “For now.”
He didn’t sit. He paced, and he talked, and I let him, because Adrienne had told me the one who’s lying always talks the most. He talked about Ximena being “clingy.” About a “misunderstanding” with the fund. About how the money was “an investment, for us, I was going to double it.” About how I was being “dramatic, which is so typical.”
Nadine watched him. She didn’t say anything.
Adrienne opened the folder and laid three pages on the table in front of his mother. The fund statement. The January 22 line, highlighted yellow. And a page I hadn’t seen yet: a letter, on Harrow Capital letterhead, dated May 2025.
“Terminated,” Nadine read. She read it again. “Chase, what is terminated?”
“It was a restructure.”
“Lamar told me,” Adrienne said, “that you were let go for missing eleven client meetings.”
He looked at me then. Not his mother. Me. Like I’d done this to him.
“You called my office?”
“You don’t have an office,” I said.
Nadine stood up. She is five foot one and she stood up like a building.
“I bought you a briefcase,” she said. “I told Pastor Tony. I told everybody. You sat at my table at Christmas and let me pray for your firm.”
“Mom…”
“And this girl. You gave her a ring? You gave her a ring and Jordana has that?” She pointed at my hand. At the $340. “I told you she deserved better. You said money was tight.”
“It was tight.”
“It was tight because you were spending her money on another woman’s wedding.” Nadine’s voice cracked straight down the middle. “Say it. I want to hear you say it.”
He looked at all of us. Adrienne with her pen. His mother with her coat on. Me by the counter.
“I was going to fix it,” he said.
“Say it, Chase.”
He sat down, finally, hard, in the chair Adrienne had told him to take ten minutes before.
“I used Jordana’s money,” he said. “For the wedding. And everything.”
Nadine took her purse off the table. She walked to me, held my face in both her hands, and said, “I’m so sorry, honey.” Then she walked out our front door and closed it without slamming it, which was worse.
He sat in the kitchen with his head down. I’d watched him win arguments for six years. I’d never seen him lose one.
“Where am I supposed to go?” he said.
Adrienne slid one more page across. “Your mother’s, maybe. Ask her.”
He left at 8:10 with a duffel bag. On the way out, in the hallway, he stopped between the coat hooks and the thermostat, under the picture of himself on the dock.
He reached for it.
“That stays,” I said. “I took it.”
Lake money
The judge saw it Adrienne’s way, and Judge Pruitt is not a woman who smiles.
In August she counted the $12,500 against his half of the fund, to the dollar. Of the $28,500 left, I got $20,500. He got $8,000, minus his half of the lawyer’s fees, which Adrienne told me about with real joy. The winery kept the deposit. Ximena never asked for it. Chase’s mother, I heard, made him sell his car to pay what he owed, and he moved into her basement in Westerville, under the piano, under his own graduation picture.
He sends Nadine flowers every Sunday. She sends them back.
Ximena transferred to the Dayton office in May. On her last day she put the cactus in its chipped cat on my desk.
“I can’t look at it,” she said. “But it’s a good cactus.”
“It’s a great cactus,” I said.
It’s still on my desk. I water it on Mondays.
In September I drove to Lake Cumberland by myself, with $20,500 and a realtor named Sherrie who wore a fishing hat and asked questions so plain they felt rude.
“You want the water or the view of the water?”
“The water.”
“Can you afford the water?”
“Barely.”
She grinned like that was useful. The place was one room and a porch and a dock that leaned a little to the left, like it had been listening to someone for a long time. I put down the deposit on a Tuesday.
The first morning there, I made eggs. Edges brown. Nobody flipped them for me; I’m the one who likes them that way, it turns out, and I’d been doing the liking all along.
Then I walked out on the dock in my socks, with the old picture under my arm, the one from the hallway, the one I took.
I sat down at the end and turned it over and slid it out of the frame.
The sun was right in my face. I squinted. It’s the face he always made, the one I told him to stop making.
I took a new picture: the dock, the water, my own bare hand on the warm boards, no ring at all.
“Stop making that face,” I said to nobody, and made it anyway.
If this one got to you, send it to the woman you know who’s been saving for something that keeps getting farther away.
For more family drama and jaw-dropping betrayals, read the birthday dinner where a husband chose his mother, the $85,000 loan her parents took out against her house, and the lodge owner whose son called her business a scam.
