She Faked Everything to Trap Me

On his wife Jacqueline Henson's birthday, Ethan Matthews finds the dinner table ringed with guests and no seat for him. When he protests, she tells him to get lost, and the room laughs that a live-in husband has nowhere to go. He walks the neon streets of a city that isn't his, then returns to change his crying son's diaper while her assistant Nelson Dickerson and the others mock him.

Jacqueline leaves to drive Nelson home and orders Ethan to clean up. When she returns and finds the house untouched, she erupts. He answers with four words: he wants a divorce. She laughs it off, calling marriage no game and pointing to their infant son, but he repeats it, certain.

Eight years, four of them college years in Bayport where she followed him everywhere, ended in a town where he has no circle of his own.