We bought a townhouse in the East Lake neighborhood, four blocks from Lake Union, close enough to the water that on clear mornings, you could see Mount Rainier from the upstairs bedroom window.
Petra redesigned the interior from scratch. It looked like something out of a magazine, but it felt like a home, which was harder to pull off than it sounded.
For the first two years, everything was exactly what I'd hoped it would be.
Damon Reyes had been Petra's ex-husband for 3 years before she and I got together. And for the first 18 months of our marriage, he was basically a non-factor.
She mentioned him occasionally. They'd see each other at mutual friends' gatherings, exchange texts around the holidays. She was mature about the whole thing, and I respected that.
I want to be clear about this because it matters. I was never the jealous type. Ask anyone who knows me.
Ask my friend Todd Kesler, who I've been close with since graduate school, or my colleague Nadia Park at Meridian, who's known me for seven years. I am not a man who needs to control his wife's friendships.
I understood that Petra had a life before me, and I was never threatened by that.
What I didn't understand, not at first, was how the distance between being mature about her ex and spending every weekend at her ex's house had been crossed without me ever being asked for an opinion.
It happened the way these things often happen, gradually and then all at once.
Damon had bought a place in Fremont about 12 minutes from us. He'd started a landscaping and outdoor design company that was doing well.
And when Petra's firm referred a client to him for a backyard project, they reconnected on a professional level.
She told me about it. "That's a small world," I said.
"We're both in the design world. Not that surprising," she said.
That was the spring of our third year of marriage. By the following fall, she was having lunch with him weekly.
By the winter, she was stopping by his place on Saturdays to see his garden renovations because he wanted her professional eye.
By the next spring, the weekends had become a standing arrangement.
I noticed all of it. I said nothing, not because I was planning something, but because every time I tried to frame a concern, I heard it the way she would hear it: jealous husband, controlling behavior, doesn't trust his wife.
I didn't want to be that man. I'd watched my parents' marriage corrode under the weight of exactly that dynamic, and I'd sworn to myself I'd do things differently.
So, I stayed quiet and watched the gap between us widen one Saturday at a time.
The first conversation I tried to have was in November.
We'd been invited to my colleague Nadia's birthday dinner, a small group, the kind of evening Petra usually enjoyed.
She came home from Damon's at 6:30 and said she was exhausted. Didn't feel up to going.
"We already told her we'd be there," I said.
"Eli, I've been on my feet all day. Can you go without me?"