There have been moments of weakness these past four years. Moments that caused me to check our credit card bills and bank statements for anything that might be a second phone or a token gift. I have fought them off like enemies, insurgents. I’ve been winning this battle over the voices that rise from the darker places inside me because there was always light to shine on them.
Thousands of moments of light over fifteen years. Small moments—a soft kiss as we stood side by side doing dishes, one that lingered and grew longer until we stopped with the dishes and found our way upstairs. Not a word spoken. And large moments—taking over the reading of the eulogy when I broke down at my mother’s funeral. Reading my words when I couldn’t get them out. Knowing I needed them to be said to honor her memory. Holding our babies the moment they were born. Holding me when a case got too hard. There was so much light.
But then there is Wade and the piece of the conversation by his truck that lingers in my mind, about Mitch and Briana. He’d been fascinated by my efforts to uncover the truth after a woman I hardly knew told me what she’d seen and what she suspected after seeing it.
I’d rented a car. I’d parked it along the road half a mile from her driveway. Mitch and his crew were renovating her house, so the driveway was littered with vehicles and building materials. But then five o’clock would roll around, and they would thin out until all that was left was Mitch’s truck.
Briana’s husband was a corporate litigator. He worked long hours and had a commute on top of it. They had one child who was away at boarding school and now college. Briana was alone in the house, day and night, lonely and bored and approaching fifty. A midlife crisis waiting to happen. And then, there he was. A strong, handsome, younger man in need of comfort. The kind of comfort women know how to give. With their words and their compassion and their bodies.
I’d thought of it like a case. Rowan and I had gotten into some situations by then. Things we would laugh about because at the time they’d felt absurd. Dumpster diving in Vermont. Sneaking into a block party in the city on the Fourth of July. We got a soda can from one, a wine glass from the other. Neither of the DNA had matched our samples from the case, but we were able to rule out two suspects. One by one. We ruled out suspects like shooting fish in a barrel.
I had a camera with a professional zoom. I knew where they’d be, my husband and his client. All I had to do was wait.
The photos caught a kiss through the kitchen window. They moved out of sight after that, but that had been enough. I left them in her mailbox for her to find. No note. It was just a warning. And it scared them both enough to make it stop and for Mitch to tell me before someone else could. I pretended to be shocked. I couldn’t manage tears because I’m not good at lying, although I’m beginning to wonder. We all see ourselves a certain way. Then we catch a glimpse in a new mirror or a photo we haven’t posed for. We hear our voice on a recording and are stunned at how we look and sound. And then a situation happens. A cheating spouse. A shooter in a department store. A man who threatens our family.
And we’re shocked at the things we do.
I pull into the jobsite and find Mitch standing outside with some of his guys. He rushes over to meet me as I get out of my car, his face flushed with fear about our girls because I never visit him on a job.
“What’s happened?” he demands the moment he reaches me, and I blurt out that the girls are fine and I’m fine.
“Then what is it?”
I open my mouth to find the words. To ask the question. “I couldn’t do this at home,” I tell him.
“Do what?” He pulls me aside where no one can hear us. He spins me away from the crew, who begin to disperse, so no one can see my face.
“I know you saw her again.”
“How?” he asks. He doesn’t deny it.
“It doesn’t matter.” I don’t tell him about the burner phone or the video. I don’t have to.
“So you know.”
My heart breaks. This can’t be happening again. I thought I was prepared, but now I realize that I’ve been clinging to every other scenario but the most likely one. “Mitch... no, please tell me something else.”
“I didn’t want you to find out. He’s caused enough trouble in our lives.”
“Who?”
“That fucking psycho.”
“Wait...”
We go around in circles until I tell him to start from the beginning. To put this discrete piece of evidence into the puzzle where it belongs.
He doesn’t use her name. He’s careful about that. “Someone slashed her tires—in her own driveway. She was upstairs in the shower when it happened. She’d just come back from the gym.”
He lets me process this for a moment. The details. It’s not just the vandalism, but the fact that it happened while she was alone, naked, trapped inside.
I stare at him in silence as my heart catches up to my mind. Mitch is not cheating again. Our life together is not coming to an end.
“She asked me—” he begins to say, but then stops himself.
So I finish his thought because more pieces are finding their places, the picture coming together. “She asked you if I did it.”
Mitch hangs his head. Sighs hard. “There were marks, scratches, a word engraved in the paint just above the driver’s side handle.”
