Chapter 2: The Facade of Fine
I married Dermot Castner in 2015. I was thirty; he was thirty-five.
Dermot was big, warm, and boisterously funny at neighborhood parties. He was the kind of man who remembered everyone’s name, slapped other men heartily on the shoulder, and somehow made a room feel ten times larger just by walking into it. He owned a landscaping and hardscaping company, specializing in building elaborate flagstone patios and massive outdoor kitchens for the sort of sprawling Asheville estates that required outdoor kitchens.
When we first met, the business appeared to be thriving. Or, at the very least, it expertly wore the expensive costume of a business that was thriving. He drove a pristine, heavy-duty truck. He snatched up every dinner check before I could even reach for my purse. I mistook his loud confidence for quiet stability—a disastrous mistake I think many of us make, though usually only once.
For the first several years, we were fine. Not spectacular, not out of a romance novel, but fine. And at thirty-two, “fine” can feel like plenty.
Then, sometime around the spring of 2022, the business began a slow, sickening slide.
I didn’t see it clearly at first because Dermot, much like his mother, was a master performer, and the performance never once cracked in public. But the signs were there for anyone who knew how to read the flinch. And reading the flinch is what I do for a living.
The pristine work truck got older, started making a grinding noise in second gear, and quietly did not get replaced. Dermot started taking business calls in the garage, aggressively yanking the metal door down behind him. He would trudge into the kitchen at night with his jaw set like an iron clamp. I’d ask how the day went, and he’d force a smile and say, “Great. Slammed with work,” in a clipped tone that meant neither of those things was true.
There was a frigid night that winter I have thought about obsessively ever since. I padded downstairs around 11:00 PM for a glass of water and found Dermot hunched over the kitchen island, surrounded by a chaotic spread of invoices and a calculator. When I walked in, he flipped the top document face down with a frantic, jerky motion—the exact way a teenager hides contraband when a parent walks in.
“Just quarterly tax stuff,” he muttered, not looking up. “Boring. Go back to bed, Odie.”
And I did. I went back to bed because I was a woman who went back to bed to avoid conflict. But I had seen enough of the bold red lettering on that page to know it was a final past-due notice from a major equipment supplier, and the number printed at the bottom had a terrifying amount of digits.
Twice that following spring, I found aggressive vendor collection notices buried deep in the recycling bin, torn cleanly in half. Both times I confronted him, he waved me off, claiming it was a stupid billing mix-up on their end that he had already handled.
I let it be handled. Because letting Dermot “handle” things was vastly easier than initiating the screaming fight that would follow if I pushed. I told myself that blindly trusting your husband and refusing to look too closely were the exact same thing.
They are not the same thing.
It took me a very long time, and a dead man’s voice, to finally learn the bloody difference between the two.
There was a massive job that summer—a full terrace retaining wall and outdoor pavilion for a sprawling modern mansion up in the historic Montford district—that went wrong in a way even I couldn’t willfully ignore.
Dermot had severely underbid the project just to win the contract. When they broke ground, the soil grade turned out to be far worse than his hasty measurements had predicted. The wall required heavy structural engineering that hadn’t been priced into the initial quote. Dermot ate the difference—tens of thousands of dollars of it—because the alternative was admitting to a wealthy client that he was incompetent.
He came home from that job site looking gray in the face, smelling of cold sweat and panic.
I heard him on his cell phone in the garage late that night, his voice low, tight, and begging. “I just need thirty days, man. I’m good for it. You know I’m good for it.”
I stood shivering in the dark hallway, listening to my husband grovel. I did not open the door. Going in would have meant asking the hard questions, and asking would have meant knowing the terrifying truth.
The truth, which I would only piece together much later when I finally forced myself to stare straight into the wreckage, was that my husband had been financially drowning for the better part of two years. He had taken jobs he underbid to maintain cash flow, borrowed from predatory lenders to make payroll, borrowed again to service the exorbitant interest on the first loans, put heavy machinery on maxed-out credit cards, and then personally guaranteed a massive line of credit he could no longer feed.
By the time my father received his terminal diagnosis, Dermot and his mother owed somewhere well north of two hundred and forty thousand dollars. The walls were closing in fast, and from every conceivable side.
And then, there was Billy.
Wilhelmina Castner had been a ruthless residential real estate agent in Asheville for thirty years. That detail matters significantly more than you might assume. Billy had spent three decades aggressively selling people houses that were just slightly beyond their financial reach. She had developed a salesperson’s dark genius for making a luxury want sound like a desperate need, and a greedy grab sound like an act of profound generosity.
She adored her son in that specific, highly dangerous way certain mothers do. It was a suffocating love that quietly believed the world owed Dermot something grand, and she had appointed herself his chief debt collector.
Billy never much liked me. I was too quiet, too practical. But she very much liked what she imagined my existence represented: comfortable people, a father with deep pockets, a plush financial cushion tucked under the family for when the ground inevitably gave way.
Billy had loud opinions about everything I did. My four-year-old Honda was “too modest” for a woman whose father was clearly doing so well. Our three-bedroom starter home was “fine for now,” but certainly not where we should raise children.
More than once in the years before my father died, she would corner me in the kitchen, sip her wine, and ask how Silas’s health was holding up. She used a tone she probably believed sounded tender, but every time she asked, something under my ribs went ice cold, and I quickly changed the subject.
At a Fourth of July cookout the summer before he passed, she stood at my elbow, watching my father laugh with his old engineering buddies across the yard.
She stared at him, her eyes narrowed like a hawk calculating a dive, and said softly, almost to herself, “He’s a sharp one, your dad. Careful with a dollar. I just hope he’s thought it all through. You know, estate planning. For your sake. For the family’s sake.”
She deployed the word “family” the way a venture capitalist says “investment.”
I smiled, a tight, practiced grimace, and offered her another scoop of potato salad. Because that is what I did. I fed the discomfort until it finally went quiet.
I want to be brutally fair here, because the honest version of a story is always more useful for survival than the flattering one. For years, I let all of it slide. When Billy made her little toxic comments, I smoothed them over with polite deflections. When Dermot got tight, defensive, and secretive about the bank accounts, I told myself that a good marriage meant giving a man room to carry his own weight without nagging. When his mother dropped her heavy hints about the future and “when things change”—meaning when my father died, though neither of us would dare say it—I pretended I didn’t hear.
Because hearing it would have forced me to name the parasite I was married to.
I was a peacekeeper. I had been raised by the gentlest, most accommodating man alive. Somewhere along the way, I had fatally confused keeping everyone calm with being a good person.
My father, it turned out, understood far better than I did what that fatal confusion was costing me. He had been watching. He had been measuring twice. And he had said absolutely nothing to me about it.
Because he knew his daughter. He knew that if he openly accused my husband of being a grifter, I would have reflexively defended him.
My father got sick in the fall. The pancreatic cancer moved faster and more viciously than any of us wanted to believe possible. By December, we knew exactly where it was going. By late January, he was gone. He died at home, in his own bed, holding my hand, using his very last ragged breaths to tell me not to be afraid.
I won’t linger on the grief, because it is still a raw, open nerve and likely always will be. But I need you to understand the agonizing shape of that week, so that you truly grasp what my husband did against the backdrop of my devastation.
I was entirely hollowed out. I was numbly planning a funeral, calling distant relatives, choosing a mahogany casket, and deciding which of my father’s suits to bury him in. The gray one. He hated ties, so I told the mortician absolutely no tie.
And in the middle of all of that profound, shattering loss, my husband and his mother were quietly running an entirely different set of frantic calculations in the next room.
