Chapter 1
My name is Daniel Mercer, and the suitcase was the first thing that lied to me.
Not Laura's mouth. Not yet. Not the soft "love you" she tossed over her shoulder that morning like fifteen years of marriage could be folded neatly beside a white sundress and a pair of sandals she had never once worn to any office. It was the suitcase itself, open on our bed in the pale early light, swallowing clothes that had no business being in a conference room. Silk. Linen. A swimsuit tucked beneath a blazer like a secret trying to look professional.
I stood in the doorway with a coffee mug warming my hand and watched Laura move around our bedroom too quickly. She was smiling at nothing, checking her phone, keeping her eyes anywhere but on mine. After fifteen years of marriage I had learned every small weather change in my wife's face. I knew her nervous and I knew her excited and I knew the particular version of both at once that she wore when something was happening that she did not want me to examine too closely. That morning she looked like a woman leaving for something she could not wait to start and had been counting down to for weeks.
"Two weeks seems long for a work retreat," I said.
She folded a sundress without looking up. "It's leadership training. Team building. Thompson wants senior staff to bond properly."
"Everyone's going?"
"Most of us."
Her phone buzzed on the dresser. The smile came before she could stop it, quick and involuntary, the kind that belongs to something you have been anticipating all morning.
"Ryan going too?" I asked.
May you like
For the first time she looked at me. Not fully. Just enough. "Of course he is. He's senior staff."
Ryan Holt. Her work husband. The man who understood her deadlines and her stress and her jokes and the long evenings that had been running later and later over the past eight months. The man whose name had begun appearing on her phone with the casual frequency of someone who had already been invited too far inside our marriage and had stopped bothering to knock.
