Melinda French Gates’ Divorce from Bill Unfolded in Secret for a Year amid Nightmares and Panic Attacks (Exclusive)

• Melinda French Gates is opening up to PEOPLE — and in the pages of her new book — about some of the biggest changes in her life, including her divorce from Bill Gates
• Melinda and Bill’s split announcement in May 2021 came as a surprise to many but by then, their separation had been secretly playing out behind closed doors for more than a year
• “It was important for me to be real,” Melinda says, adding that she hopes what she has to share “might be helpful to someone else”

Melinda French Gates has a quick but considered answer for almost everything during a recent sit-down interview for this week’s issue of PEOPLE — and then it’s time to discuss her divorce from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Asked about responding to “betrayals” in her marriage, a word she uses in her new book The Next Day (out April 15) — which chronicles some of the biggest life changes she’s faced, and what she learned from them — the philanthropist takes a long pause.

Then she replies: “You have to stay true to yourself always, right?”

That’s one of the many lessons she’s sharing in The Next Day, a blend of memoir and insight, although Melinda notes she’s “not trying to give advice to anybody,”

The end of her marriage, which she and Bill jointly announced nearly four years ago, remains painful to discuss. Still, as Melinda tells PEOPLE, “It was important for me to be real.”

“Hopefully,” she adds, “it might be helpful to someone else.” 

Although there had been “difficult periods” with Bill before, Melinda writes in her book that by the end of 2019 she was having nightmares about a beautiful house collapsing all around her — and then waking up in a panic night after night. (Her subconscious was being “a bit obvious,” she writes.)

“Bill has publicly acknowledged that he wasn’t always faithful to me,” she writes, going on to mention a “deeply disturbing” article published that fall, when reports continued to grow about Bill’s past meetings with sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.

(Bill has called those meetings a mistake and recently said he was “foolish to spend any time” with Epstein, maintaining he was seeking charitable support.) 

Melinda writes that, eventually, her dreams transformed into a vision of her and Bill and their three children on the edge of a cliff as she “plummeted” into the void.

“As dramatic as it sounds,” she wrote. “I knew, in that moment, that I was going to have to make a decision—and that I was going to have to make it by myself.”

• For more on Melinda French Gates’ life after divorce, what she’s learned and what’s next for her and her philanthropy, subscribe to PEOPLE or pick up this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday.

She initially tried to push away her concerns, but when that didn’t work, she invited Bill along for a February 2020 trip to New Mexico, which she initially planned to spend alone.

When they arrived at their rental house, Melinda had a realization: the property was available because the couple who lived there had split.

Although Melinda and Bill tried to treat it “like any other vacation,” on the last night, she told him she wanted to start living separately — and that she would stay in their home with their youngest daughter, Phoebe, who was a senior in high school.

“It was one of the scariest conversations I’d have had,” she writes, recalling that Bill was “sad and upset” but also “understanding and respectful.” 

Back home in Seattle, they continued to work together on their global Gates Foundation — even making joint appearances, which could be a bit awkward, especially since, with the exception of a few people, nobody knew what was really going on.

Eventually, she decided it was time to walk away.

That summer, she told Bill she wanted a divorce and they shared a long, even occasionally “tender” conversation.

Still, Melinda knew the months ahead were going to be tough. “Bill has a reputation for being one of the toughest negotiators in the world,” she writes, adding that she “started having panic attacks.”

She mentions other panic attacks in her book: in 2006, when she thought their son, Rory, now 25, was about to go over the edge of a hot air balloon; and again, around New Year’s Day 2014, while she was celebrating her 20th wedding anniversary with Bill in Mexico.

At lunch that day, the conversation turned to a “toxic” person at work, Melinda writes. When Bill proposed giving him a “lavish” exit package, she “felt like the walls were closing in.” (That also prompted her to seek out a new psychologist, and Melinda still works with her 10 years later.)

Ultimately, Melinda — who describes in The Next Day how her inner voice had faded “in the decade or so before my marriage fell apart” — writes that therapy “made it possible for me to respond to the betrayals in my marriage without betraying myself in return.”

The process of finalizing their split was “grueling” and suprisingly lengthy, she writes, but once the agreement was reached, things moved quickly.

They took the weekend to tell some people close to their foundation, and the following day, May 3, 2021, they put out their joint statement.

As word spread, Melinda was at home with Phoebe, then 18. At one point, Phoebe even showed her mom some memes about the news.

“We laughed a little, but I wasn’t really in a celebratory mood,” Melinda writes. 

As for what, exactly, prompted her decision to leave, her answer has remained the same: that is for Bill, alone, to tell the world.

“It takes courage forging a different life,” Melinda tells PEOPLE of her next chapter, including giving away billions through Pivotal Ventures. “When you change paths, you realize, oh, it’s a big opening.”