Chapter 3: Separate Rooms
At 7:30 Sunday morning, Jack came down in his soccer uniform with his shin guards on backward and asked why I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes.
“Long night,” I said. “Rosie was sick.”
That was true. Everything I said that day was true. I just didn’t say most of it.
I made pancakes. I signed Ava’s science fair form. I got Rosie a ten-fifteen slot at urgent care, then called Lori Ruiz, who didn’t ask a single question. She just said, “I’ll take Jack to soccer. I’ll keep him for lunch.”
That’s how I knew Mike had told her. Women like Lori don’t skip questions unless they already know the answers.
Brian called at 8:52.
I took it in the laundry room with the door shut and the dryer running for noise. He was on video, sitting on a motel bed, a purple bruise along his cheekbone, his hair still wet.
“Dana. Hey. Did Mike call you?”
“I called Mike,” I said. “You’re not with Mike.”
He looked away from the camera. Somewhere behind him, a door opened and closed.
“No,” he said.
“You’re with Tessa Moreland.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Then tell me what I think, Brian.”
“She’s a friend from the group. She went through a terrible divorce last year. She wanted to ride the Dragon and didn’t have anybody to go with, and I knew how it would look, so I just…”
“So you lied for four months.”
“Nothing happened.” He leaned close to the phone. “I swear on the kids. Separate rooms. Every night. Look at the card.”
I had already looked at the card. At five a.m., while the coffee dripped. Two rooms a night: Robbinsville, Bryson City, Tellico Plains. He’d paid for both. With our card, the one I pay off every month from the account my paycheck goes into.
“You paid for her room,” I said.
“She was going to pay me back.”
“Why did she have my helmet?”
He shut his eyes. “Hers cracked last month. I didn’t think you’d… Dana, you never even used it.”
“I never used it,” I said, “because you never took me.”
The dryer buzzed. Neither of us moved.
“I’m coming home tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll drop her off in Knoxville and come straight home. We’ll talk. Please. Just don’t tell the kids yet.”
Don’t tell the kids. As if they were his to protect from this. As if he hadn’t been the one to drag it into the house.
“Drive safe,” I said, and hung up, and stood there with my forehead against the warm dryer until the shaking stopped.
Urgent care said Rosie had an ear infection. Pink medicine this time, twice a day for ten days. She fell asleep in the car with her cheek on her stuffed rabbit, and I sat in the driveway with the engine off and let her sleep, because it was the only quiet I was going to get.
The trouble with a secret this size is that it doesn’t stay in the room you put it in.
When I carried Rosie inside, Ava was at the kitchen table with the family iPad, a half-built cardboard volcano next to her. I’d left it on the counter. I’d closed the messages. I hadn’t closed the photos.
She was looking at the overlook. The bike. The braid.
“Mom?” she said. “Why does Dad have a picture of Tess?”
I stopped in the doorway with Rosie’s weight on my shoulder.
“You know her?”
“That’s Tess.” Ava said it the way you’d say the name of a teacher. “She came to my birthday. At the trampoline park. She gave me the purple headphones.” She frowned up at me. “Dad said she was Mike’s cousin.”
And I remembered.
July. The trampoline park on Lamar Alexander Parkway, twenty screaming twelve-year-olds, Rosie wandering toward the foam pit. A woman with a red braid had stepped up beside me at the party table and said, Go, I’ve got the cake.
I had thanked her.
I had handed her the knife.
