Not about Jenna yet.
Just about the phone call I’d overheard in the garage.
The text I’d seen on Todd’s watch.
What Caleb had noticed about the closed restaurant.
My dad went quiet in a way I’d never heard from him before.
Keith Mitchell is never quiet.
The man has an opinion about everything from tax policy to the correct way to grill a burger.
But right then, on that phone call, he was silent for so long I checked to make sure the call was still connected.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” he finally asked.
“When, Dad? Before or after you laughed when he called me a loser? Before or after Mom told me to leave?”
He didn’t answer that.
He just said, “What do we do?”
And that was the moment I realized that my dad, for all his bluster, for all his favoritism, for all his years of making me feel like I wasn’t enough, was scared.
Not for himself.
For Paige.
And as angry as I was at him, as hurt as I still was, I couldn’t weaponize that fear because I was scared for Paige, too.
I told him to sit tight and let me figure some things out.
Then I called Jenna.
We met for coffee at a quiet spot in downtown Rowanoke.
Jenna was in her mid-30s, professional, clearly nervous.
She ordered a chamomile tea and held the cup with both hands like she was bracing herself.
“I don’t want to get in the middle of anything,” she started.
“Then why did you reach out?”
She sighed.
“Because I’ve been watching this happen for over a year, and it’s eating me alive. I work in Todd’s department. Everyone there knows.”
She told me what everyone knew.
Todd had been having an affair with a woman named Meredith who worked in their company’s Charlotte office.
Not a casual thing.
A sustained, ongoing relationship that had been happening for at least 14 months.
They’d meet at conferences, at hotel rooms in cities where Todd claimed to have client dinners, and occasionally right in Rowanoke when Paige was visiting her friend in Charlottesville.
Todd’s manager didn’t care as long as Todd hid his numbers.
She showed me text screenshots that a mutual coworker had shared with her.
I won’t get into the details because they made me sick.
But they were explicit enough that there was zero room for misinterpretation.
This wasn’t flirting.
This was a full-blown affair, and Todd wasn’t even trying to hide it from his coworkers.
He was only hiding it from Paige.
I thanked Jenna.
I told her I’d keep her out of it as much as possible.
And then I drove home and sat on my couch for 2 hours thinking about what to do next.
Here’s where I could have gone wrong.
I could have gone straight to Paige.
I could have forwarded her the screenshots.
I could have blown the whole thing up right then and there and let the chips fall.
But I’d already learned that dropping bombs without a plan leads to me being the bad guy.
So, I decided to be strategic about it.
Not for revenge.
For Paige.
But I’d be lying if I said a small part of me didn’t want Todd to experience even a fraction of the humiliation he’d been dishing out at every family dinner for the past 4 years.
I called Drew.
I called Caleb.
And I called my dad.
Four people who, for different reasons, all wanted the same thing.
The truth delivered in a way that couldn’t be denied, dismissed, or spun by Todd’s silver tongue.
Drew was the strategist.
“You can’t just hand Paige a bunch of screenshots from some coworker she’s never met,” he said. “Todd will say it’s fabricated. He’ll turn it around on you. You need something she can’t argue with.”
Caleb was the recon.
He was still going to family dinners, still maintaining his position as the neutral party.
He started paying closer attention to Todd’s movements, his excuses, his schedule.
Within two weeks, Caleb had documented four separate instances where Todd claimed to be somewhere he wasn’t.
Client meeting that didn’t exist.
Gym visit when the gym was closed for maintenance.
A Saturday morning golf game when it was pouring rain.
My dad was the hardest piece of this puzzle.
Working with Keith Mitchell requires patience I didn’t know I had.
He wanted to confront Todd immediately.
Like physically show up at his office and demand answers.
I had to talk him down twice.