She smiled sleepily and said, "Told you it wasn't a big deal." He didn't answer. He had already made the call to a private investigator named Jules Morales, because Nathan had a plan and it started with watching her burn herself down. For the next few weeks, Nathan didn't raise his voice, didn't storm out, didn't throw plates or demand answers. Instead, he started waking up an hour earlier.
He made breakfast for Mila and Ezra before the sun rose. He started walking the kids to school instead of driving. He picked up extra tutoring hours. To Delilah, it probably looked like a man retreating into routine. But in truth, Nathan was sharpening every tool he had, quietly collecting evidence, rearranging finances, preparing.
Meanwhile, Delilah grew bolder. She became a phantom of her former self, yet louder in all the wrong ways. She spent more time at the gallery, which Nathan quickly confirmed wasn't true. Jules, his investigator, sent him grainy photos of her entering a loft on Hawthorne Street around 9:40 p.m. every Thursday. A loft that belonged to a man named Leo Carmichael.
Leo, Nathan would later find out, was no stranger. He was Delilah's gallery supplier, a charming, rugged carpenter who made custom art frames. Divorced, two kids, a man who once shook Nathan's hand at their Christmas party. In one photo, Delilah was laughing with Leo at a food truck while wearing the scarf Nathan bought her in Florence, Italy. In another, her hand rested lightly on Leo's knee at a rooftop bar.
But it wasn't the physical proof that wrecked Nathan. It was the voice memo Jules uncovered, sent by Leo to a friend. Delilah said, "She hasn't been touched right in years." She called her husband a walking dead man, said she only stays for the house and the kids. "I mean, damn, she practically begged me to record last night.
Said it turns her on knowing he might see it one day." Nathan played it once, then never again. He sat in his car afterward, gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white. Not because she cheated, not even because she lied, but because somewhere along the way, she had stopped seeing him as human. And that's when he made a decision.
He wouldn't just leave her. He would erase her. Strategically, legally, emotionally. So he called Jules back and said, "I need full surveillance. Everything.
I want receipts, voice logs, recordings. I want to know where she is every hour of the day." By the end of the month, he had everything. Proof of six separate meetings with Leo, two audio recordings of explicit conversations between them, photos, enough to fill a courtroom wall, and a printed log of Delilah withdrawing $3,000 in cash every Friday from their joint savings account. Always labeled art expenses.