Chapter 2: Six Days
I didn’t call Brian back that night.
I went to Rosie first, because that’s what you do. I sat on the edge of her bed in the green glow of her turtle night-light, held the cool cloth to her forehead and hummed the song I’ve hummed to all three of them. I didn’t cry. She would have felt it.
When her breathing evened out, I went back to the kitchen and picked up the family iPad.
We bought it two Christmases ago for the kids’ homework. It lives on the charger next to the toaster. Brian set it up with his account because I was busy wrapping presents, and he never changed it, because Brian never changes anything once it works.
His messages came through to it. I’d known that the way you know where the fuse box is. I’d never once looked.
It was 12:40 a.m. I sat down at the kitchen table, opened the messages, and there she was, near the top.
Tess. No last name. A little motorcycle emoji after it.
The thread went back to March.
At first it was nothing. Routes. Photos of overlooks. A link to a tire sale. You’d love this road. They’d met in the Sunday riding group Brian joined after his dad died, the one that meets at the gas station on Highway 321 and rides to Townsend for pancakes. I’d met some of them. I’d waved from the car.
Then it changed. Not all at once. The way a mountain road climbs so slowly you don’t notice until your ears pop.
Sunday is the best part of my week, she wrote in April.
Mine too, he wrote back. Don’t tell anybody.
In May, they started planning. A map with a route traced in red. A motel in Robbinsville with rocking chairs on the porch. Six days, she wrote. Think you can get six days?
I’ll get six days, he wrote.
And then, in June, the one I read so many times that the words stopped looking like English.
Tess: What are you telling Dana?
Brian: Boys’ trip. Mike and Dale. She’ll never check. She’s got her hands full with the kids.
She’s got her hands full with the kids.
I looked up. On the fridge hung the calendar I keep, color-coded by child. Blue for Jack, green for Ava, pink for Rosie. Soccer. Orthodontist. Science fair. Picture day. Flu shots. My own appointments were in pencil, squeezed into the corners, because they were always the first to get erased.
He’d looked at all of it. Every carpool, every fever, every night I’d fallen asleep in Rosie’s bed with my shoes on. And he’d seen cover.
I kept reading. I couldn’t stop.
There was nothing in that thread a lawyer would call proof. I want to be clear about that, because it matters later. No pictures of bodies. No I love you. What there was felt worse in a way I didn’t have a word for yet. It was planning. Four months of it. Gas stops, weather apps, who’d bring the speaker. He’d put more thought into six days with her than into our last three anniversaries combined.
At 2:15, I reached the photos from the trip itself.
The first was a view, blue ridges stacked one behind another, fog in the low places. The second was a plate of brisket. The third was his black touring bike, parked on gravel at an overlook, and a woman sitting sideways on the passenger seat, laughing at whoever held the phone.
Long dark-red hair in a braid over one shoulder. A turquoise bandana. Both hands up, like ta-da.
And on her head, a white helmet with a lavender stripe down the middle.
I knew that helmet.
Brian bought it for our tenth anniversary. He put a bow on it. For when the kids are bigger, he’d said. You and me. The Dragon. I’d tried it on in the living room, and he’d knocked on the top of it and laughed, and it had hung on a hook in our garage ever since, waiting for the kids to be bigger.
I walked out to the garage in my socks and pulled the chain on the bare bulb.
The hook was empty.
She was wearing my helmet.
