Listen Now: Happily Never After: Dan & Nancy

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Dan and Nancy reside in the peaceful
suburbs just outside of Portland, where they

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are living out their golden years.
And though they met later on in life,

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their marriage spans over two decades and
is seen as a pillar of the

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community. It's a love story pulled
right off the shelf. Nancy is a

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struggling romance novelist. She likes to
write about betrayals, sex, and even

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murder. Dan is a chef and
culinary instructor. He enjoys foraging through the

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woods for fresh mushrooms and growing edible
flowers. But when Dan is shockingly found

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dead in his classroom, Nancy's once
simple life is turned upside down because as

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the investigation unfolds, Nancy finds herself
at the center of a murder case that

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could be ripped from the pages of
her novels. Listen to Happily Never After

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Dan and Nancy, a story about
what happens when the line blurs between fix

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and reality. Early and ad Frey
on Wondery Plus. I'm about to play

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a clip from Happily Ever After Dan
and Nancy. Nicole Herman was lounging on

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a beach in Croatia with a perfect
view of the ocean. It looks a

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lot like Oregon, with the exception
that the water is like turquoise. It

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was nice and sunny, exactly how
Nicole pictured her honeymoon. Nicole's new husband

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got up to take a swim,
but she didn't join him. She was

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in the middle of a novel.
The man on the book cover had a

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square jaw and a come hitherstare.
All day, Nicole had just been waiting

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to get back to him. He
sat on the floor and gestured for her

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to sit between his legs. He
showed her how every gun worked, then

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loaded and unloaded each of them.
Are you showing me this so I can

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kill my husband? Travis spoke slowly, choosing each word with care. Maybe

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in the beginning you meant something to
him, but now you're just another loose

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end. You will know a hundred
ways to kill you and make it look

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like an accident. She pressed her
forehead against his and closed your eyes.

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Don't like you. I'd rather you
were a knuckle dragging me under thor unless

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I'm dead and this is over meeting, But I do plan to use your

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body until I leave scandalous. I
was probably reading anywhere from one hundred and

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fifty to three hundred pages. Nicole
had been laid out on the beach for

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hours reading. She was already on
book number two in the Wrong Never Felt

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So Right series, and she was
determined to get through all five books by

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the end of her trip. Every
book was more or less the same burly

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former navy seal comes to the rescue
a beautiful young woman on the run from

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her dangerous husband. It was an
odd choice of reading for a honeymoon,

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but away from the beaches of Croatia. Back home in Portland, Oregon,

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Nicole was a deputy district attorney.
Those are things as a prosecutor that you

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sometimes want to get ahead of and
in front of. And for months she

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and her team had been trying to
solve a murder, but progress had been

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slow. Direct evidence kept eluding them. As the pressure mounted, Nicole and

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her team had turned to an unlikely
lead, a series of romance novels written

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by the dead man's wife. It
was a little bit meta in terms of

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what we were dealing with. Her
books were packed with details borrowed from their

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own lives as a local Portland chef
and a romance novelist. Details that the

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das had no other way to get
their hands on. So now Nicole was

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doing homework on her honeymoon. I
wasn't so sure there would truly be anything,

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but it was sort of in the
back of my mind. What if

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something similar to this has played out
in one of her novels, and it's

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all written right there for us to
find. More shirts were going to be

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unbuttoned, more dresses were going to
get unzipped, and every new chapter,

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every new scene, could potentially be
the one to crack the murder case that

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was waiting for her back home.
Follow Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy

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on The Wondery app or wherever you
get your podcasts,