Chapter 3: 5:36 P.M.
I texted Tori before I could stop myself.
Hey, rough day. Want to come over tonight? Wine and bad TV?
She answered in under a minute, which was normal. Tori always answers in under a minute.
Ugh babe I wish!! Can’t tonight, I’ve got a thing. Rain check?? Love you!!!
Three exclamation points. A heart. She’d been sending me hearts for fourteen years.
I scrolled up through our thread. In April, the week my grandmother’s ring disappeared, she’d sent me a photo of a puppy in a teacup to cheer me up. In March, after the second transfer failed, she’d sat with me on my bathroom floor for three hours and said nothing at all, which was exactly right. I’d thought that was what love looked like. Maybe it had been, once.
I put the phone face down on the counter and went upstairs to pack my husband’s suitcase.
This was Gloria’s idea, too. “If you’re going to see it with your own eyes,” she said, “then you don’t go empty-handed. You go so he understands it’s over before he opens his mouth. Pack what he needs for a week. Toothbrush. Work clothes. Phone charger. Make it neat. Neat scares them more than screaming.”
So I made it neat.
His navy suit, the one he wore to his promotion dinner. Six dress shirts on hangers, folded the way he taught me when we were first married, sleeves back, collar up. His running shoes. His beard trimmer. The Duke mug he drinks his coffee from every morning, wrapped in a T-shirt so it wouldn’t break. I don’t know why I packed the mug. My hands just did it.
At 5:52 Gloria called back.
“I’m going to be in that lobby by six forty-five with a camera,” she said. “You’re going to arrive at seven, not before. Sit in the lounge chairs by the window. Don’t go to the desk, don’t go up to the room, don’t touch anybody. Let them check in. Let them walk past you.”
“Why does it matter if they check in?”
“Because this is North Carolina,” she said. “We’re one of a handful of states where you can sue the other woman.”
I actually laughed. “That’s not real.”
“It’s very real. Alienation of affection. Criminal conversation. Juries here have awarded wives hundreds of thousands of dollars. But you need proof of the relationship and proof of the opportunity. A man and a woman checking into one king room together, on camera, in front of a witness? That’s opportunity, Rachel. That’s a lawyer’s favorite photograph.”
I sat down on the edge of our bed. Tori and I had picked out this duvet together at a Bed Bath & Beyond the week before my wedding. She’d said the gray one looked like a hospital, and we’d laughed until a clerk asked if we needed help.
“I don’t want her money,” I said.
“Then don’t take it. But get the photo. Choices are only choices when you’ve got leverage.”
I zipped the suitcase. It was heavy. Eleven years is heavy.
I was rolling it toward the bedroom door when I heard it. A low mechanical grinding under the floor, the sound our house makes twice a day, every day, so familiar I never notice it.
The garage door was going up.
I went to the window. Headlights swept across the front lawn and turned into the driveway. Ben’s silver Highlander. The man who was, according to the recording on my phone, sitting in a restaurant in Durham waving at a client through the window.
He was home.
And his suitcase was standing in the middle of our bedroom.
