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Belle Burden has seemingly led a charmed life. She was born into a prominent, wealthy New York family, became a corporate lawyer and went on to marry and have three children.
But in 2020, behind the scenes, her life fell apart when her husband of 21 years, hedge fund executive Henry Davis, told her he wanted a divorce after she learned he was having an affair.
In her new memoir, “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” Burden goes into intimate detail about how she discovered the affair and the messy aftermath and how she survived it all.
NEW YORK HEIRESS BELLE BURDEN RECOUNTS THE VOICEMAIL THAT TORCHED HER HUSBAND’S DOUBLE LIFE: MEMOIR
The voicemail
In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began shutting down New York City, Burden and her husband, who she refers to as James in her book, made the decision to leave their family home and stay in their house on Martha’s Vineyard.
With their two youngest children, daughters Evie, 15, and Carrie, 12 (their oldest child, son Finn, 17, stayed on Long Island with friends), they began their lockdown like many others, watching the news regularly and trying to navigate the unique situation.
On the evening of March 21, she got a phone call but let it go to voicemail since she didn’t recognize the number. When she listened to it, she heard a man who she described as sounding nervous, who said, “I’m trying to reach Belle. I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.”
She recalled being frozen for a moment, then went to find James, assuming there was some misunderstanding. He had been looking for her at the same time, and when they found each other, she wrote that he took her into the guest bedroom, sat her down, and said, “I promise you, this meant nothing. It’s over. I love you and only you. I’m so sorry. I’m so embarrassed.”
He told her the affair had only been going on a few weeks, and that the woman was a banker he’d met through work. The conversation was interrupted by her younger daughter, and, later, Burden sent a text to the man who’d left the voicemail, asking him how long the affair had been going on.
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She wrote that he texted back with, “I think a month. But I can’t text because my wife has tried to kill herself. She’s in an ambulance.”
When she found James again, she said he was on the phone with the woman, and he told her that she’d taken “a few sleeping pills” and would be fine. Burden went through the rest of the night in a bit of a daze, struggling to process everything, and at 6 a.m. the next morning, James came into their bedroom in the same clothes he’d been wearing the night before and told her he decided he wanted a divorce.
Telling the children
After telling her he wanted a divorce, Burden wrote that James left the Martha’s Vineyard home and became distant and cold despite her attempts to communicate with him. He didn’t tell their children goodbye before leaving, he refused therapy and he allegedly texted her, “I’ll answer what I want, when I want. I’ll speak when I want. I’ll decide when I want.”
Despite his reluctance to talk through everything, she wrote that he did tell her that he wanted to tell people that their decision to divorce was amicable. She refused, and in late April, weeks after he left, she told him that they needed to tell their children the news.
He initially suggested she tell them alone, and she agreed. Later, his boss contacted her, suggesting it was important for James to be there for the conversation. He lent James his private plane so he could return to Martha’s Vineyard from where he was staying in Connecticut.
They told their son first over the phone, and she said he hung up at some point during the conversation without either she or James realizing. When he arrived at the house, he told her he only had 90 minutes before he needed to get back on the plane. They gathered in the living room with their daughters, and he told them, “Mom and I are separated, and we’re going to divorce. I haven’t been happy.”
Their 12-year-old ran out of the room crying, while their 15-year-old remained silent on the couch. Burden wrote that James then turned to her and said, “I’m starving, can you make me a sandwich?”
She recalled being shocked by the question but agreed, asking him to go find Carrie. When she was done making the sandwich, she found each of her daughters alone in separate rooms, and James in the basement, going through boxes. When she asked him what he was doing, she said he responded, “I’m looking for our prenup. If you have it, you have to give it to me.”
“I stood there, at the top of the basement stairs, holding the plate, watching him. I told him to stop, to be with the girls during his remaining minutes in the house, but he continued, pulling box after box off the shelves,” she wrote. “His duffel sat open on the floor beside the boxes, ready to receive what he found.”
The prenup had gone missing in the 21 years since they’d first signed it. He gave up the hunt when he had to leave for the airport, and she took her daughters to get takeout after he left.
Later that evening, she got a text from him that said, “That was a great visit!”
Giving up custody
Throughout the book, Burden described the change in James after he told her he wanted a divorce. At times, she wrote, she struggled to recognize him as the man she’d known for decades.
When their children were young, she devoted all her time and energy to raising them while James focused on his career, often joking, “I don’t do bath, bed or homework.” While he didn’t deal with the daily work of parenting, he did pay attention to them, she wrote, taking them on special outings and trips regularly.
But in one of the conversations they had shortly after he left her, Burden wrote that he told her, “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”
Initially, she and the children stayed in the Martha’s Vineyard house while he stayed in their apartment in the city, but in May 2020, he told her that he’d purchased a new two-bedroom apartment.
She wrote, “I looked at the sales website for the building, at the model two-bedroom floor plan and photos. It looked modern and expensive. But a two-bedroom? Would he be able to fit all three kids in one bedroom? I still thought he would want to make a home for them, that he wouldn’t follow through with his decision to have no custody, no overnights. Even if he refused formal custody, I thought the kids would stay with him now and then, that Carrie would go there after school when she chose to, that she would have a room to sleep in, that he would give her a key.”
When he moved into the apartment in February 2021, he turned the second bedroom into a home office. She said that he kept in touch with the kids through texts and occasionally took them to dinner, “but he continued to refuse a daily role in their lives.”
Burden had her lawyer sent James a custody agreement, one that gave them each 50/50 custody, assuming he “would have realized his mistake” in not seeking more time with their children by then. Instead, she wrote, “James returned the document stripped of all his time, including vacations, holidays, weeks during the summer. He included only dinner on Thursday nights.”
She admitted that she believes James genuinely thought he was being “selfless” by not making the official agreement and that he argued their children were old enough to decide for themselves when they wanted to see him. For bigger moments, like when their son had surgery, she said that he showed up, but “for everyday issues, he responded with irritation.”
Eventually, even the Thursday night dinner stopped, and she stopped trying to press him to spend more time with their children, fearing it was “dangerous” to expose her children to “more hurt, more rejection” from their father.
Court battle
Before Burden met James, she’d signed a contract with her mother, promising to get a prenup before she got married. Two months before her wedding, her family lawyer sent a draft of the agreement to her. In that agreement, anything either brought into the marriage would remain their own in case of divorce, but anything earned during the marriage and anything in joint name would be split.
She said James was “upset” by the prenup, and she ignored it for weeks, but eventually he suggested an amendment. Instead of splitting everything earned during the marriage, they’d only split the things that were under both of their names.
Her lawyer advised against it, telling her it was a “bad idea,” but she insisted, and that was the way their prenup was designed.
In July 2019, less than a year before their marriage fell apart, Burden and James had a meeting with their lawyer, and one of the things they’d planned on doing was dissolving the prenup because it was no longer fair to her. James had become incredibly successful in his career while she’d put hers on hold to raise the children, and she’d emptied her trusts, which would have been protected regardless of a prenup, to purchase their homes in New York City and Martha’s Vineyard.
She wrote, “He said, ‘Let’s table the prenup for now. We have too many other things to do. Let’s focus on the wills. I want to leave everything to you. Not in trust for the kids.’”
She recalled being “touched” by the notion, but when they met with their lawyer and conversation about the wills came up, he cut the meeting short, saying he had to get back to work.
They never adjusted their wills, nor did they get rid of the prenup, and when he filed for divorce, he continued paying for the family’s expenses, with her providing annotated credit card bills and him approving any bigger purchases. In January 2021, as part of the divorce proceedings, she received a series of documents detailing his earnings throughout the marriage, and she was shocked to find that he was much more financially successful than she knew — not because he ever hid it, she admitted, but just because she hadn’t looked into it.
She and her lawyer filed a counterclaim in the divorce case, although they knew with the prenup they didn’t have much of a chance at being successful with it. In July of that year, the judge dismissed it, and James, who hadn’t brought up the counterclaim to her directly, was “inflamed” that she’d tried to go against him.
“He said he would give me only the minimum child support required by law,” she wrote. “He said I would have to face the consequences of the prenup, of my failed counterclaim.”
His lawyer sent her a letter, assuming that she’d want to buy James out of his claim on both houses she’d bought with her family trust, which she couldn’t afford to do. At this point, although she’d been struggling greatly with the breakdown of her marriage, things “became very dark,” so much that she began experiencing suicidal ideation.
In October 2021, just an hour before the trial was set to begin, Burden and James reached a settlement. He agreed to give up his interest in both of their homes, and he pays child support and covers medical expenses and school tuition. He did keep the money he accumulated during their marriage.
“I don’t know what finally made him decide to settle,” she wrote. “I have several guesses, but I will never know for sure. Maybe he always planned to resolve it before trial, to give me the house and the apartment. But only after he brought me to my knees.”
The aftermath
Burden admitted she doesn’t know much about James’ life now. She doesn’t know how long he stayed with the other woman or if he’s still with her. She does know he hasn’t remarried, and that while he is “kind and loving” to their children, he hasn’t had an overnight visit or a vacation or holiday with any of them since he left.
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“I don’t know if he cheated throughout our marriage or if she was his first and only affair,” she admitted. “I don’t know if he made the decision to leave suddenly after being caught, or if he’d carefully planned his exit for years. I don’t know what role the pandemic played. I don’t know how much of it was about money. I don’t know how much of it was about me.
“I don’t know why he left. I don’t think I ever will.”
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