Heiress Mom of 3 Learned of Husband’s Affair Through Strange Phone Call, She Says. Then He Walked Away from Their Kids, Too

A mother of three from one of New York’s most prominent family lines says her life unraveled in the span of a day: first, her husband of 20 years admitted to an affair — and by the next morning, she says, he told her he wanted a divorce and didn’t want custody of their children.

“This was not just an affair. This was not just a rejection of me,” Belle Burden, 56, writes in her memoir, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, published by The Dial Press on Jan. 13. “He was abandoning all of it, and all of us.”

Burden, who has ties to the Vanderbilt family and counts famed editor and socialite Babe Paley as her grandmother, married hedge-fund executive Henry Patterson Davis in June 1999. A Harvard-educated lawyer, she writes that they built a life raising their three children — two daughters and a son — between New York and their home on Martha’s Vineyard.

Davis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the memoir — which began as a New York Times Modern Love essay — Burden writes about falling in love with her husband, whom she identifies as James. In an author’s note, she explains that while the book reflects events as she remembers them, she changed names beyond herself and certain close family members, and in some cases adjusted identifying details.

Alongside the breakup of her marriage, Burden also describes the years she devoted to raising their children while her husband managed the family’s finances. But she writes that the marriage she believed was solid came to an abrupt end at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

After dinner one night, she says she received a voicemail from an unfamiliar number. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife,” the caller told her, according to the book.

That same evening, Burden writes, her husband admitted he’d been having an affair with a banker that had begun a few weeks earlier. She says he attempted to minimize it, assuring her: “But, I swear, it didn’t mean anything.”

Later that night, she writes, the couple learned the banker had tried to die by suicide but survived.

Overwhelmed, Burden says she collapsed on the bathroom floor. She recalls imagining the coming weeks of lockdown — therapy over Zoom, and the strain of being stuck together on an island. “I could not imagine forgiving him,” she writes, “but I also could not imagine a life without him; I loved him so completely.”

By the next morning, she writes, her husband’s position had hardened: he wanted a divorce.

“You’ll be fine. You’re still young,” Burden recalls him saying before leaving to check on the woman he’d been seeing. Once he reached New York, Burden writes, he became even more definitive.

“I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t,” she says he told her. “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids.”

He added, she writes: “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”

Burden says she initially believed he would rethink his decision about the children — but writes that he later bought a two-bedroom apartment with no space set aside for them. She also describes the moment he returned to Martha’s Vineyard for a brief visit to tell two of their children about the separation while the third was out with a friend. She says he asked her to make him a sandwich.

Despite her shock, she writes, she did — wrestling with the idea of what a “good” mother and a “civil” divorce were supposed to look like in front of the kids.

After a painful legal fight, Burden writes, they reached a settlement. But she says she never received the answers she wanted about when the affair truly began — or why he chose to detach from their family the way he did.

She writes that her ex has been “kind and loving” when he is with their children, but that he has not shifted his stance on co-parenting. According to Burden, the children have not had an overnight stay, vacation, or holiday with him since he left Martha’s Vineyard in March 2020.

Burden says she does not know whether he remained with the banker or whether it was his only affair. What she does know, she writes, is that the questions still haunt her.

“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,” she writes. “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.”

She adds: “I don’t know why he left. I don’t think I ever will.”

Still, Burden writes that life on the other side of the marriage has brought a freedom she never expected. Speaking to The New York Times earlier this month, she said, “I don’t think I was a fully realized person when I was married. And I never would have left.” She added that, even if it once felt unthinkable: “I’m glad it happened.”