Then he is in the doorway of the kitchen.
“Hey,” he says. He’s been asleep. I can tell from the way his hair stands up on one side and from his deep breaths and heavy eyes.
“I was just coming up,” I lie.
He looks at the coffee maker, which is gurgling to a finish, the fresh pot taking in the last drops. “Is this what you did before?”
He walks to the counter and pours the coffee into a mug. Next, he goes to the fridge where he grabs thehalf-and-half, adds some to the coffee, and returns it. He carries the mug to me and places it carefully on the table. And while he does this, while he delivers me coffee the exact way I like it because that’s the sort of thing he knows after fifteen years, I contemplate my answer.
“Yes.”
There’s no use pretending I don’t know what he’s talking about. Or that I didn’t do what he knows I must have done four years ago when I got a tip that he was having an affair. When I was also solving my own case. He’s had time to think since we stood together at his worksite and I confronted him about the recording Wade sent.
He sits at the other end of the table—as far from me as he can get—and he places his elbows down and looks at me in a way I’ve never seen before. Then he waits for my defense, but instead I deliver the brutal truth.
“I would feed Franny, rock her back to sleep. Then I’d go through the house and cars, yours and mine because sometimes you took my car when you had the girls. I didn’t expect to find hotel receipts because you had her empty house all day. I didn’t look for messages on your phone or emails on your computer. I knew you’d be more careful than that. It was easier knowing who it was. I guess I got lucky. Small town. Everybody knows everybody else.”
His face changes now as he pictures me having these thoughts about him. Analyzing him like one of my suspects. A fish in my barrel.
“I used a lint roller on your coat and the clothes you tossed in the hamper and the seats of the car. Hair sticks to things. People don’t realize it, but it can even be in the air, if there’s enough physical activity, and it lands on a shirt that’s on a chair, or maybe the hair was on the chair already, before the shirt. Mine is dark. She’s blonde. It just took one. One long blonde hair. I also used a blue light in the truck because sometimes her house was full of workers—so, you know, there was that possibility. That you were with her in the truck.”
Another shift on his face. Another expression I don’t recognize as my words roll right off my tongue like a robot. I should feel things now—remorse or anguish at what his affair led me to do—but instead I feel detached from him, separated by the anger I’d felt years before, which has now become a scar. No longer painful but dull to the touch where the nerves have been severed.
“From there, I gathered evidence. Two afternoons I had the sitter come, so I could run errands.”
“The pictures,” Mitch says, almost as a question even though he knows the answer.
“I just said—I ran errands.”
He drops his head so his eyes can escape mine. So he can not look at me—this woman who is suddenly a stranger to him the way he had become a stranger to me four years ago and again just this week. I have spoken to him not as his wife, but as a cop relaying facts—distant and cold—and he knows I couldn’t help it. That the scar is still there. And that all this time he thought it was gone.
How easy it is to make this shift, from thinking we know someone completely, to thinking we don’t know them at all. When, really, it’s always somewhere in between. Until the day comes when we can read another person’s thoughts, this will be true. Of friends and enemies. Of family and foe. Of lovers and haters, spouses and exes. We never truly reveal ourselves, and we never get to see the true reveal of others.Never.
I wonder if we are all destined, then, to the kind of loneliness Dr. Landyn described during our sessions.
“Why didn’t you just ask me?” Mitch says as I sip the coffee.
The question has an air of absurdity to it, but I give it an honest reply. “Because I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me it wasn’t happening. And then you would have either ended it or been more careful and I never would have known.”
“So you did surveillance? After you used the lint roller and the blue light—you watched her house and got close enough to take those pictures? My God.” His mind reels now with the implications. “You were at the window.”
“Yes,” I say. “I couldn’t get a shot from the street.”
“And how long did you stay there? Watching us?”
“Well,” I tell him, “I stayed until I couldn’t see you anymore. You started in the kitchen and then moved from sight. Where did you go?” I can hardly believe I ask this, but I do and then I don’t stop. “I’ve always wondered. Did you go upstairs to a bedroom? Her bedroom—the one she slept in with her husband? Or the living room sofa? Or a guest room?”
He is stunned, and when I come to my senses, I am as well. Stunned at how easily I have slipped into this role of the curious investigator. Out of the role of the betrayed wife. The heartbroken woman. I am all of those things, all at once, but they don’t know how to coexist. They have never had to before.
“I’m sorry,” I say now and reach out for his hand, which he pulls away. “I had to know the truth. I would have gone crazy. You know that about me. The uncertainty, every time we were together as a family, and again as husband and wife. How could I have been that woman without knowing if it was a lie?”
This shift from the facts of my investigation to my desperate hope to save our marriage brings a swell of emotion I can’t hold back. I love this man, in spite of everything. The scar is there, and yes, it is dead to the touch, but it is not all of me. It is not everything.
For the first time since Fran was born, I see tears well in the corners of his eyes. “You put those photos in her mailbox.”
“Yes.”
“All this time, I never knew. How is that possible? It’s your fucking job, and I never even suspected. We thought her husband hired a PI. That’s why I told you and why she told him. And it ruined her life, Elise. You ruined that woman’s life.”
