Chapter 2: 4:47 P.M.
I don’t know a T.
That’s what I told myself for about ten minutes, sitting on the kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and the cat in my lap. I don’t know a T. It’s a typo. It’s a client’s wife. It’s anything at all except what it is.
Then I got up, washed my face at the kitchen sink, and called Gloria Reyes.
Gloria rode patrol with my dad for nineteen years. When he died, she was the one who taught me to drive his truck so we could sell it. She retired from the Raleigh PD at fifty-five and opened a private investigation business out of a strip mall next to a nail salon, and she has caught, by her own count, two hundred and twelve cheating spouses.
She picked up on the first ring. “Rachel. What’s wrong.”
I told her. All of it. The laptop, the card, the champagne, the note.
She didn’t say oh honey. Gloria doesn’t say oh honey. She said, “Okay. Do not call him and ask about it.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it. Everybody thinks about it. You call him, he says it’s for a client, he cancels the room from the parking lot, and by tomorrow you’re the paranoid wife who snoops through his email. You have a confirmation number and a feeling. That’s not enough.”
“So what do I do?”
“You give him a chance to lie to you,” Gloria said, “on the record.”
North Carolina is a one-party consent state. That means I can record any phone call I’m part of without telling the other person. Gloria walked me through the app. My hands were shaking so badly I had to try three times to hit the red button.
Then I called my husband back.
“Hey,” I said, bright as a morning nurse. “So I’ve got a crazy idea. Since I’m off early. What if I drive over to Durham and take you to dinner after your thing? Or, you know what, skip the Pruitts. Let me take you out. Sushi. Seven o’clock. My treat.”
The pause was so short most people wouldn’t have heard it. I heard it. I’ve spent twelve years listening for the half-second before a patient says they don’t drink.
“Babe, that’s so sweet,” Ben said. “But I’m already here. I’m literally parking at the restaurant right now. Raincheck? Saturday?”
“You’re in Durham already?”
“Already in Durham. Pruitt’s waving at me through the window. I gotta go. Love you.”
He hung up. I stopped the recording. Four minutes and nine seconds.
Behind me, on the windowsill, my phone’s location app showed the little blue dot of Ben’s car. We’ve shared locations since a snowstorm three winters ago. I’d forgotten he could turn it off. He’d forgotten I could look.
The dot wasn’t in Durham. It was sitting in the parking lot of a Target on Glenwood Avenue, four blocks from The Hartwell.
I thought of all the things I’d let slide. The Thursdays. The new cologne he said was a gift from a client. The way he’d stopped asking about my shifts after the second round of IVF failed in March. And my grandmother’s sapphire ring, the one thing of hers I had, which went missing from my jewelry dish in April. Ben helped me search the whole house for it. He took the drain apart under the bathroom sink.
Gloria texted at 5:21.
Called in a favor at the front desk. Reservation has 2 guests. Second name: Victoria Lang.
Victoria Lang.
Nobody calls her Victoria. She hates it. We’ve called her Tori since the first week of nursing school, when we shared a cadaver and a bottle of cheap wine and swore we’d be each other’s maid of honor.
She was mine.
