Wendell helped in the early days, because he had charm that made strangers trust him in five minutes. He became the public face while Paige ran everything behind the scenes—recipes, payroll, contracts, permits, taxes, vendor calls, the kind of work nobody claps for.
For a while it worked. The company grew from home kitchen to commercial space to a second location to real contracts: weddings, fundraisers, corporate events. Money arrived, and with it, the truth of who people are when they think they’re winning.
Wendell began changing in small ways, then in bold ones. “My company,” he’d say, not “ours.” He came home later with explanations that didn’t hold together. Receipts from restaurants Paige had never visited appeared in his coat pocket. A second phone showed up in his gym bag under a towel, and when Paige asked about it, he shrugged. “Business contacts,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Paige didn’t argue. She filed the moment away and kept watching.
But the most deliberate thing Wendell did wasn’t the lying. It was the isolation.
Paige’s mother, Geneva Carter, was a retired family court judge—thirty-two years on the bench. She’d spent her career watching people lie under oath and learning exactly what deception looks like when it wears a good suit and says the right words.
Geneva never warmed to Wendell. She said it once, quietly, during a Sunday dinner when Wendell left the table to take a call. “Something about that man doesn’t settle right,” she told Paige. No yelling. No drama. Just one sentence, placed carefully like a marker.
Wendell overheard.
From that night forward, he ran a campaign that took two years. He said Geneva was toxic. Controlling. Disrespectful to their marriage. At first he said it casually—over breakfast, in the car, during commercial breaks. Then he said it with heat. He questioned every phone call Paige had with her mother. He rolled his eyes when Geneva’s name came up. He framed concern as manipulation and advice as interference. And because Paige wanted to protect her marriage, because Paige wanted to believe, she started answering her mother less and less until she told herself silence was maturity.
Geneva didn’t disappear.
Every month, a cream-colored envelope arrived in Paige’s mailbox with the same careful handwriting. Paige stacked them in a bedroom drawer without opening them. Month after month. Year after year. She told herself she’d read them someday.
