Chapter 4: Seventy-Eight
I didn’t go outside.
Every part of me wanted to. I could feel the shape of it: the front door banging open, my bare feet on the cold driveway, my fist on the window of that truck. Chris would have done it. My dad would have done it.
But I’m the guy who reads the warranty. And standing in the dark living room with that iPad still warm in my hands, I knew one thing for certain. If I walked out there, Jenna would get the story she wanted. He lost it. He scared me. I had to protect Lily.
So I sat back down on the couch, in the dark, where she couldn’t see me from the stairs.
Two minutes later I heard her. The soft creak of the third step, the one I keep meaning to fix. The kitchen door. The click of the storm door, eased shut so it wouldn’t slap.
Through the gap in the curtain, I watched my wife walk down our driveway in her robe and get into another man’s truck.
She was out there for twenty-two minutes. I timed it on my watch. I didn’t look away once.
When she came back in, she stopped in the kitchen to drink a glass of water. I could hear her swallowing. She was humming. Then she went upstairs to bed, to our bed, and I sat there until the sky turned gray.
At 5:15, I took screenshots.
All of them. The first message in August. The truck. The park. The Mondays. The green leggings in our hallway. He cried in the car. Over my dead body. I want to be your wife. I just need time. Tonight: Is he asleep?
Seventy-eight screenshots. I emailed them to myself, to my work account, to Chris. Then I put the iPad back in the junk drawer under the takeout menus, exactly how I’d found it, and went to work.
I didn’t fix a single furnace that day. I sat in my van in a Home Depot parking lot and made phone calls.
The first was to a divorce lawyer named Paula Kim, whom a guy on my crew swore by. She listened for ten minutes without interrupting. Then she said, “Don’t confront her yet. Don’t move money. Don’t do anything angry. Ohio is a no-fault state, but custody isn’t, and a parent who stays calm looks like a parent who can be trusted. Can you get a place nearby?”
The second call was to a property manager about a townhouse ten minutes from Lily’s school.
The third was to Chris.
“Saturday,” I said. “She’s got her long class Saturday morning. Eight to noon, plus brunch with the gym people after. I want to be out by eleven.”
“I’ll bring the truck,” Chris said. Then, quieter: “Danny. You okay?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m clear.”
The strangest part of the next three days was how normal I could make my face. Jenna made tacos Thursday night and asked me about a job in Dublin and I answered. Friday she kissed me goodbye at the door, and I let her. At our counseling session Friday afternoon, she told Dr. Ruiz that she felt like we were “really turning a corner.” I nodded.
Dr. Ruiz looked at me a beat too long. I think she knew. Good counselors usually do.
Friday night I printed the screenshots at the office, alone, after everyone had gone. I put them in a plain blue folder in order, first message to last. Then I sat at my desk and wrote Jenna a letter by hand, because I wanted her to see that my handwriting didn’t shake.
It took me four drafts. I’ll tell you what it said later.
When I got home, the house was dark, except for a light on in Lily’s room.
She was sitting up in bed with her knees pulled to her chest. Twelve years old. She has my eyes, everybody says, and right then they were red.
“Dad,” she said. “Are you leaving?”
I sat down on the edge of her bed. I hadn’t told her anything. I hadn’t told anyone but Chris and a lawyer.
“Why would you ask that, bug?”
She looked at the door, like her mom might be standing in it. Then she whispered.
“Because I know about Tyler. I saw them at the gym café in the summer. Mom made me promise not to tell you. She said if I told you, you’d leave us.”
