Chapter 3
I walked back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. The framed photo on the nightstand was from Myrtle Beach, two summers earlier. Her arms around my neck. My face completely open in the way your face is open when you believe you are in a life that is what it appears to be. I looked at it like looking at a photograph of someone else's marriage.
The bathroom door opened. She came out with the soft expression she always assembled when she wanted to communicate that everything was fine and I should not have any reason to think otherwise. She said sorry, honey, work is a mess, and she put her phone face down on the dresser with the practiced casualness of someone who has been putting their phone face down for months and has stopped noticing that they do it.
I said everything okay.
She gave a small laugh and pulled back the blanket. You worry too much. Come sleep.
I lay beside her. She turned her back to me. Her phone buzzed once, then again, under the blanket where she had moved it without turning the light on, and I lay in the dark and watched the faint screen glow against her fingers and said nothing.
At two-thirteen she was asleep.
At two-twenty-seven I got out of bed.
I carried her phone into the laundry room, the room at the back of the house where the fan above the dryer covered sound. I locked the door. My hands were shaking enough that I dropped the phone once on the dryer before I caught it, and I stood there for a moment with both hands on the machine and made myself breathe at the right pace, the deliberate pace, before I picked it up again.
The passcode was her mother's birthday, which I had known for years, which she had never changed, which told me she had never imagined I would be in this room at two-thirty in the morning with her phone in my hands.
May you like
I was looking for proof of the affair. That was what I thought I was looking for.
The affair was the third thing I found.
