Chapter 4: Here
Ethan’s flight landed in Sacramento at 6:20 on Friday evening.
By then, I had a folder. Maya’s texts and photos. The marriage record. Screenshots from the Seattle group. A two-page timeline Jess had typed up for me, with dates and places he’d told her he was “visiting his son’s grave.” And one more thing I’d done on Thursday: I’d had a long, calm meeting with a family lawyer named Diane Ortiz, who listened to the whole thing, put her pen down, and said, “Well. That’s a new one.”
My mother took Caleb for the weekend. I didn’t tell her why.
When Ethan came in, he was still in uniform. Navy jacket with four gold stripes on the sleeve, rolling his black flight bag behind him, loosening his tie with one finger. He looked like every airline ad you’ve ever seen.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said, and leaned in to kiss me.
I was sitting at the kitchen table. I didn’t stand up. My phone was face up on the table in front of me, on a call, on speaker.
“Sit down, Ethan,” I said.
He laughed. “Uh-oh. What’d I do?”
“Hi, Ethan,” said a voice from my phone. “It’s Maya.”
I have been married to this man for nine years. I’ve seen him get bad news. I’ve seen him cry at his father’s funeral. I had never seen his face do what it did then: go completely blank, like a screen that had lost its signal.
He sat down.
I opened the folder and turned it around so he could see. The marriage record on top. The Red Rocks selfie under it. Caleb’s dinosaur drawing, which Maya had mailed back to me in a padded envelope with a note that just said, This belongs to you.
Ethan stared at the drawing for a long time.
“I can explain the Denver thing,” he said finally, carefully, the way he talks to passengers during turbulence. “Maya and I were friends. It got blurry. I should have told you. That’s on me. But Laur, she’s clearly obsessed, she’s been stalking me, she paid some sketchy website to dig up—”
“She paid twenty-nine ninety-nine,” I said. “That’s what nine years of my life cost to find out. Twenty-nine ninety-nine.”
From the phone, Maya made a small sound that might have been a laugh.
“And the widower thing?” I asked. “Was that blurry too?”
The color left his face all at once.
“Jess sends her regards too,” I said. “She’s on a field trip. She couldn’t make it.”
“Laur,” he started. His voice was soft and warm. I could see him reaching for it, the charm, the story. “Okay. Okay. I know how this looks—”
“No,” Maya said from the phone. “You don’t get to do the voice. Not with either of us.”
He looked at the phone. He looked at me. And something in him gave up. I watched it happen. His shoulders dropped. He put his elbows on the table and pressed his hands against his mouth.
“How many?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“Ethan. How many?”
“It’s not, it wasn’t serious with—”
“Denver,” I said. “Seattle. Who else?”
He closed his eyes. “Phoenix,” he said. “There’s a woman in Phoenix. It’s been off and on for, I don’t know. A while.”
I wrote Phoenix on the folder. My handwriting was perfectly neat. I remember being proud of that.
“Is that all of them?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything for a long time. The fridge hummed. On the phone, I could hear Maya breathing.
“Four,” he said finally, into his hands. “Okay? Four. Denver, Seattle, Phoenix.”
“That’s three.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me, and for the first time all night, he looked genuinely afraid.
“And here,” he said.
