Chapter 2: $29.99
“Lauren?” Her voice was younger than I expected, and hoarse, like she’d been crying or hadn’t slept. Probably both. “Oh my God. You picked up. I didn’t think you’d pick up.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“I know. I’m so sorry. I know how this sounds.” She took a long breath. “I’m going to tell you everything, and then you can hang up on me and block me and hate me. That’s fine. I just couldn’t not tell you.”
So she told me.
Her name was Maya Torres. She was thirty-three, an ER nurse at a hospital in Aurora. She’d met Ethan seven months earlier at a brewery near the airport, where he’d been “killing time on a layover.” He was funny. He was easy to talk to. He told her he was divorced, no kids, renting an apartment in Sacramento because of his base. He came through Denver almost every week.
“He met my dog,” she said. “He met my sister. He came to my cousin’s wedding. He told me he was thinking about transferring to the Denver base so we could actually live together.”
“What made you check?”
“Little things.” She laughed, not happily. “He never let me post him on Instagram. He said pilots get weird about privacy. He never once invited me to Sacramento. He always had a reason. And three weeks ago, I saw a kid’s drawing fall out of his flight bag. A dinosaur. It said I love you Daddy in crayon.”
My throat closed. Caleb drew that dinosaur for Ethan in September. I’d watched him tuck it in the bag.
“He said it was his nephew’s,” Maya said. “And I believed him. For about a week. Then one night I couldn’t sleep, and I paid $29.99 for one of those background-check websites. I typed in his full name and his birthday.” Her voice cracked. “It took eleven seconds. Marriage record, Sacramento County. Your name. An address. A kid’s school district. Lauren, I sat on my kitchen floor until four in the morning.”
“Why didn’t you just confront him?”
“Because I knew what he’d say. And because I kept thinking about you.” A pause. “Somebody at home was getting the same lies I was. Except you had his kid. You had way more to lose. I figured you’d want to know, even if you hated me for it. I would want to know.”
I didn’t hate her. That surprised me most of all. I’d always imagined the other woman, if there ever was one, as someone I could hate cleanly. Someone who knew. Maya didn’t know. She’d been lied to by the same mouth, about the same things, in a different time zone.
“He told me he was allergic to dogs,” I said.
There was a stunned silence on the line. Then Maya laughed so hard she started crying again, and I started laughing too, sitting on a milk crate in a bakery at 5:40 in the morning, two strangers laughing at the same man, and it was the strangest moment of kindness I’ve ever had.
“Okay,” she said finally, wiping her nose. “There’s one more thing. And I need you to sit down if you’re not sitting.”
“I’m on a milk crate.”
“Okay. When I searched his name, I found something else. There’s a Facebook group. One of those ‘Are We Dating the Same Guy?’ groups, for women to warn each other. The Seattle one.”
My stomach went cold.
“Someone posted his photo there three months ago,” Maya said quietly. “Same smile. Same pilot wings. The caption says, Does anyone know this man? He told me he’s a widower.“
