My husband used my mom’s cabin to cheat with his coworkers, but catching him was just the beginning. Next, I discovered his betrayal and his true nature. I’m Ashley, 33 years old, born and raised in western Massachusetts.
By day, I work as a contracts analyst, buried in spreadsheets and deadlines. When the noise gets too loud, when the traffic, the people, and the petty office gossip close in, I don’t escape to a yoga class or a bar. I go to my mother’s cabin.
Or at least, I used to. My mom passed away three summers ago. I still remember that day just like it was yesterday.
I turned 30 that summer. Cancer took her away from me. It came fast and lingered.
She was 57, stubborn, and soft in all the right places. The cabin had been her hideaway, a little two-bedroom pine shell tucked between a maple grove and a creek that hummed year-round. She called it her “quiet house,” and she meant that with her whole soul.
When she left it to me, it wasn’t about the deed or the keys. It was sacred. The porch sagged like a tired grin; the woodstove coughed more than it heated, and the roof sighed under the weight of too many seasons.
Still, it was the one place in the world where I could hear myself think, or better yet, hear my mother’s voice when I couldn’t bear my own. I kept everything the way she left it. Her quilt stayed folded across the back of the couch.
A faded jar of her dried lemon balm sat in the window like a shrine. The chipped green mug we used during blackberry season was still in the cupboard. It was mine to protect, and I never, not even once, invited Liam to share it.
Liam, my husband, is 34. He’s charming and tall, always warm to the touch. He’s the man who could make a room feel smaller just by walking into it.
But he hated the cabin. “It’s too far,” he said the first time I invited him. “There’s no Wi-Fi.
No food delivery. Babe, you spend more on gas than you’d save in therapy.”
He liked electric fireplaces and sushi apps. I liked the dead silence and the smell of wood smoke in my clothes.
So I kept the cabin to myself until I learned I wasn’t the only one. It was a Tuesday, the kind of soul-numbing day that slinks into your bones. A client yelled at me for nearly an hour about a late contract.
Madison, the project lead, stole my idea and got praised for it in the team meeting. Then, a jackknifed truck blocked the on-ramp for three hours on the drive home. I was so wrung out, I couldn’t think.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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