In her new memoir, “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” Burden writes in detail about the prenup her lawyer advised against, how her former husband threatened to only give her the bare minimum in child support after giving up custody of their children and how she managed to navigate the painful ordeal while adjusting to her new normal.

As the daughter of Carter Burden, a descendant of the Vanderbilts who built his own broadcasting company, and Amanda Burden, an urban planner who was the daughter of socialite Babe Paley, Belle was independently wealthy when she met Henry Davis, the man she would marry.

Davis, who Burden refers to in her book as “James,” wasn’t in a similar position. He was a lawyer at the time, as was Burden, and his family did have money when he was growing up, but, she wrote, “At some point in the 1970s, his father had a breakdown, was laid off, and stopped working.”

His parents used savings to cover costs, and when he was in law school, they divorced, and he learned there was no money left.  Burden said there was one part of the story she never heard fully about his father abandoning the family for a time, “maybe after an affair,” before coming back for a number of years before his mother filed for divorce.

While she could never figure out the details, she said the matter of his father and the family’s financial struggles stuck with him.

“He told me how much he wanted to be a husband and father,” Burden said. “He told me how much he wanted an honorable life.”

Three months after their first kiss, he proposed, and, during their engagement, they rented an apartment together and split costs equally. A few months before their 1999 wedding, Burden’s mother reminded her she needed to get a prenup written up, something both she and her brother had contractually agreed to in their early 20s.

“All of my assets were in trust, entirely protected in case of divorce, whether we had a prenup or not. I didn’t think I needed it. But I had committed to having one,” she wrote.

In the original draft her family lawyer sent, she and James would each keep the assets they brought into the marriage but would split everything earned during the course of the marriage in case of divorce. She recalled James being “upset” by the idea, telling her it made him feel “like an outsider, a threat,” and she felt guilty for asking him to sign it.

Just weeks before the wedding, the pressure to sign the prenup increased, and James suggested to her that they tweak the agreement so that anything earned during the marriage would not be split if they divorced, but that anything in both of their names would. With him at her side, she called her lawyer, Tom.

“Tom told me it was a bad idea; it was standard to share in what was earned during a marriage, both by James and by me,” she wrote. She insisted on doing it James’ way, and finally Tom agreed. She never told her family about the change to the standard prenuptial agreement, worried they would “intervene.”

In 2001, they bought a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, something that was “much bigger” than she thought they needed, but that James loved. She emptied one of her two trusts to purchase it and listed James as a joint owner, “even though he had not contributed to the purchase.” She said she was happy to do it.

A few years later, she used her second trust to purchase a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard. James had gone to look at it alone, and he’d loved it, so she wired him the funds from the trust, emptying it completely, and, as with the apartment, she made sure James was listed as a joint owner of the property.

In 2001, they bought a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, something that was “much bigger” than she thought they needed, but that James loved. She emptied one of her two trusts to purchase it and listed James as a joint owner, “even though he had not contributed to the purchase.” She said she was happy to do it.

In 2002, they welcomed their first child, with their second and third coming in 2004 and 2007. Burden wrote that James was excited about each and involved with her pregnancies, but after their second child was born, he was promoted to president at his investment firm and began pulling away from daily parenting duties.

“We had made an unspoken bargain: he would work all the time and I would take care of the kids all the time,” she explained. “I resented this sometimes, usually when I was stressed, when one of the kids was sick, or when they were melting down over something. But most of the time, I liked his fervent commitment to his work.”

As her children got older, she began taking on some pro bono immigration cases but never went back to paid work. She did receive a job offer in 2012, but James dismissed it immediately when she brought it up, telling her she needed to be available for the kids. At first, she recalled being upset that he didn’t even discuss it with her, but the feeling passed quickly, believing he was right, that the family “needed to prioritize James’ career.” She turned down the offer.

Burden said, as the years went by, she and James discussed getting rid of their prenup “since it was no longer fair” to her. She’d used her trusts to purchase their homes, and his career had flourished while she gave hers up to raise their children.

In July 2019, they had a meeting scheduled with their lawyer to do just that, but James suggested just before the meeting that they “table” the prenup issue and focus on their wills, telling her that he wanted to leave everything to her directly instead of in trusts for their three children.

Less than a year later, she discovered he was having an affair.

It was in 2020, when the family was spending the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in their Martha’s Vineyard home, that she received a voicemail from a man who claimed his wife was having an affair with James. When she confronted James, he admitted everything, and the next morning, he told her he wanted a divorce.