Chapter 2
I called her name from the bottom of the stairs.
Not angry. Not suspicious. Just her name, the way I had said it ten thousand times in fourteen years of marriage: a sound as ordinary and repeated as the creak of the front door hinges.
Her voice came back wrong. Too quick. Too high. The exact pitch of someone whose whole body had just recalibrated.
I climbed the stairs.
I had made a decision somewhere between the first step and the landing, not a conscious one, the kind of decision the body makes when the information is already assembled and the mind is the last to arrive. I reached into my jacket pocket and unlocked my phone, opened the voice memo application, and pressed record. I had no specific plan. I did not know what I was about to find. I only knew that whatever was on the other side of the bedroom door was not going to be what I was supposed to find when I came home at noon on a Tuesday to pick up a folder.
He was in my bedroom.
He was a man I had seen once, at a company function seven months earlier, standing near the bar with the particular self-possession of someone who had decided the room was his. Brittany had introduced us for forty-five seconds and I had shaken his hand and forgotten his name before I found my drink. Andrew, she had said. A colleague.
He was standing now with his shirt sleeve halfway up his arm, frozen mid-motion, and his face had gone through three different expressions in the second between the door opening and my eyes landing on him, and all three of them told me everything I needed to know about how long this had been going on.
Brittany grabbed her robe off the chair at the foot of the bed and tied it with hands that were not steady. She looked at me the way she had always looked at me when she was getting ahead of something, constructing the structure of a sentence before she had decided what to put inside it.
I looked at Andrew first.
May you like
"You need to leave," I said. "Right now."
He put both hands up, the gesture of a man trying to make himself small without getting down on the floor. "Look," he said, "I didn't know she was married."
