PROLOGUE
Thirty-Five Years

Austin, Texas

Grant still reached for her in his sleep.

Even after thirty-five years of marriage, his hand found her in the dark as if trained by instinct—resting against her waist, her hip, sometimes tangling in the soft cotton of her nightgown. It was a small thing, but it always made Kate smile. Many nights she lay still, savoring the quiet evidence that some parts of love only grew more certain with time.

Their bedroom in their Austin home held the life they had built together. A worn leather chair sat in the corner where Grant read every morning with his coffee. Framed photos lined the dresser—three grown children captured at graduations and weddings, and one chaotic Christmas when everyone wore matching pajamas and Grant insisted on taking a selfie like he was twenty-five.

Jesse, their oldest, now thirty-one, stood tall in one photo beside his bride, California sunshine stretching behind them while their two-year-old son twisted in someone’s arms, already trying to escape. Emma, twenty-eight, beamed in another frame, her engagement ring catching the light, the Dallas skyline faintly visible through the restaurant window where her fiancé had proposed. Nathan, twenty-four and forever thoughtful, leaned against a brick building on the East Coast, graduate schoolbooks tucked under his arm, looking more like a professor than the youngest child who once refused to sleep without the hallway light on. The house had once been noisy – backpacks dropped by the door, cleats kicked off, piano practice drifting down the hall. Now it echoed differently. Quieter. But not lonely. Not yet.

Kate was sixty-two now, her long, thick auburn hair had very little gray thanks to her faithful stylist every six weeks. She looked—and felt—a decade younger than her driver’s license claimed, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes earned more from laughter than sorrow.

She stayed active, lifting weights a few times a week, walking briskly through her Austin neighborhood most mornings, occasionally adding Pilates when she felt ambitious. Years as a labor-and-delivery nurse had trained her to move with purpose—to steady young mothers through crisis and joy, through loss and miracle. That same resilience had steadied her own children through teenage rebellion and early heartbreak.

She often joked she had to stay in shape to keep up with Grant, who still went to the gym three times a week. Grant had aged well – handsome in the grounded way men become when they’ve been loved for a long time. His hair had gone mostly gray at the temples, but his hazel eyes were unchanged—the same eyes that had undone her decades earlier. If anything, his face looked better now than it had in their thirties. Less restless. More settled. He complained about a few new aches with dramatic flair, as if she had never spent twelve-hour shifts on her feet delivering other women’s babies.

Grant and Kate Bennett were the kind of couple who still held hands in parking lots. The kind who shared dessert. The kind who had weathered raising three children across two decades of soccer games, college move-ins, wedding rehearsals, and tearful airport goodbyes—and had come out laughing on the other side.

They had built something real. Not a showpiece marriage. Not flawless. But anchored.

On warm Austin evenings, they often sat on the back patio with glasses of wine and talked about growing old together. The patio itself was nothing fancy—stone pavers Grant had installed one summer, convinced he could do it without watching a single tutorial. Kate had teased him while he sweated and swore and refused help. Now the pavers were uneven in places. They laughed about it.

“That’s our patio,” Kate would say, tapping her glass against his. “Not perfect, but solid.”

“We’ll be that couple,” Grant had said just a few months ago, bumping her knee with his. “The ones still flirting at eighty.”

She laughed. “Eighty? And you’ll still be chasing me around the kitchen?”

“I am and I will be!”

And he had been.

Theirs had never been a passionless marriage. Even now, in their early sixties, there was heat between them—familiar and easy, like a well-tended fire. Some nights, when the world quieted and they were back in the place where all their days began and ended, Grant would look at her with the same boyish admiration that had once made her blush.

“You know,” he had told her, tracing the inside of her wrist as they lay in bed, “I still can’t believe I get to be married to you.”

She rolled her eyes, because she didn’t trust tenderness without teasing. “Stop it. You sound like you’re trying to get out of taking the trash.”

He laughed and kissed her shoulder. “I’ll take the trash. I’ll take all the trash. Just don’t leave me.”

She smacked his arm lightly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She believed that. Because thirty-five years makes you believe certain things are unshakable. Because she believed covenant meant something—not just the word spoken in vows, but the life practiced afterward. The staying. The forgiving. The choosing each other again and again.

There had been seasons when she didn’t like Grant very much—years when he worked too much and she felt like a single mother even with a husband in the house, juggling hospital shifts, homework, orthodontist bills, and three wildly different personalities under one roof.

But even then, they came back to each other. They always came back.

That was long before Italy.

Before the fracture.

Before the line that would divide their life into two parts Kate would never forget.

Before Italy.

And after.

Beyond Betrayal, my first fiction novel is due release in late June 2026.
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