In her upcoming book, If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing, out June 14, Kathleen Buhle describes how she found out that her then husband, the president’s son Hunter Biden, was having an affair with his late brother Beau’s widow, Hallie. Per an excerpt published by People, Buhle and Biden’s daughter Finnegan called Buhle to the home of the family’s therapist, Debbie, whom Buhle had enlisted to help her children process their uncle’s fight with brain cancer and their father’s drinking.

“‘Debbie,’ Finny said once we had Naomi [their eldest] on speakerphone, ‘can you tell her? We can’t do it,’” she writes. “Debbie looked me in the eye and calmly said, ‘Kathleen, Hunter’s having an affair with Hallie.’”

When Buhle asked how they knew, Finnegan said, “We found his phone,” and Naomi added, “There were text messages between them.” They had already called Biden to let him know that they had seen the texts, the therapist told Buhle, adding, “From now on, Kathleen, no more secrets. I told the girls that from this day forward, you will tell them the whole truth.” 

The 53-year-old D.C. nonprofit executive was married to Biden for 24 years before they divorced in 2017. Her memoir tells the story of their marriage and how it declined under the weight of Biden’s many addictions, the financial difficulties those addictions worsened, and, eventually, the affair with his sister-in-law after his brother passed from brain cancer. She told People, “I have forgiven him, yes. Anger is such a heavy weight to carry and I was in a lot of pain. There was a lot that happened that was very hard for me. And when I made the decision to divorce, I wanted to let go of all of that.” 

In Beautiful Things, his own memoir published last year, Biden wrote about the end of their marriage too. Unlike in his ex-wife’s telling, he wrote that it was Buhle who found the text messages between him and Hallie. The affair began, he said, “as mutually desperate grasping for love we both had lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy.” 

“It seems obvious now,” Biden added, “but then it was this unspoken, unacknowledged dynamic that had begun to impel us both: the idea that we could keep Beau alive by being together—that by loving each other we somehow could love him back into existence.”

His breakup with Hallie was reported in 2019 (and he fathered a child with a woman he met at a strip club, Lunden Roberts, who gave birth in 2018). He remarried that same year, wedding Melissa Cohen, and they had a son in 2020, whom they named after Beau. 

Buhle told People previously, “When my marriage ended, I felt like I’d lost my sense of who I was. Anyone who has seen addiction ruin a relationship, or been through infidelity and divorce, can tell you how devastating it feels. But what I also realized through those crushing experiences is that I needed to find a way to stand on my own.” 

“Writing this book has been incredibly healing for me,” she said, “and my hope is it will be meaningful to those who have been through addiction or divorce, and especially to women who have felt like their entire identity was tied to their spouse. In the end, divorce allowed me to find my strength.”