I run like hell, nearly breaking my neck on New York’s unsalted sidewalks, sliding and skidding like a drunk figure skater.
I don't stop panicking until I'm on the train back to my grandma’s home in Connecticut.
Chapter 2: Alessia
Grandma's asleep when I get there, which is the only mercy the universe has shown me tonight. She doesn’t know about my PI gigs and would probably lose it on me if she did.“Mija! That isn’t safe!”
That means it’s just me and the quiet hum of my racing thoughts to process this chaotic night.
I toss my coat on the chair and collapse onto the couch in the darkness, listening to the quiet hum of the house. Then I reach up and disconnect both cameras. The one in my zipper, the one in my hem. I press stop on the recording and sit there holding my phone outright in my palm just…thinking.
One palm rubs at my eyes, like I can scrub the night off my face if I try hard enough.
I tell myself not to look yet. I need to give myself some space between whatever that was to process before I fire off this footage to Kacey.
I don’t listen to myself and instead look immediately.
I rewind to the seconds right before the kiss and let it playon a slower sped. The way that Roman’s gaze dropped to my lips. The way his hands moved like he had every right to my body. The moment he practically whimpered when his tongue slipped into my mouth.
I press the volume button on my phone, turning it up just a notch. I hear myself for the first time. The soft sounds that slipped out of me. The way my breathing changed. The way I melted into him without thinking.Like he wasn’t a stranger or a cheater.
I do not remember making those noises. I don’t recognize myself and it only makes me panic harder.
Heat floods my body all over again. Right behind it is a very real sense of shame. I was not supposed to feel that. My plan was not to do any of that. That's not how this job works. He was a target, and I was working and somewhere in that dim hallway I completely lost the plot.
What is wrong with me? How did I let this happen?
I sit there in the dark for a while, running back through the evening in my head. The construction site first, climbing ten flights of unfinished stairs in thigh-high boots while recording two men debating design details. Then the bar, the martini, the conversation, the knee against mine. The way he called me sweetheart. A nickname I’ve never had before.
The way he told me he hadn't had a girlfriend in a very,very,long time.
And just like that, the shame gets a little easier to carry, because I remember why I was there in the first place. That man has a girlfriend waiting for him at home. Kacey hired me because she already suspects he was unfaithful, because she's probably lying in bed right now wondering why she feels so unsure in a relationship with someone who looks at her the way Roman Carpenter looks at women he doesn't know in bars who are just passing by.
Women deserve to know the truth about what their partners are off doing when they are away. That's the whole reason I do this.That’sthe plot.
I started this job in college when I needed money and couldn't survive on canned soup and a teacher's salary. Then I left it when Brian asked me to before our wedding, because I respected his input back then. I only came back to it after the divorce, after the IVF bills, and the infertility and the cheating where he got his mistress pregnant, and the whole ugly unraveling of five years of my life that I can't recover.
Private investigation was the one thing that was always mine. The thing I gave up for a man who didn't deserve the sacrifice looking back. What did Brian give up for me? Not weekends golfing with his friends. Not porn even though I begged him to and certainly not his mistress.
Now this job pays my divorce debt, puts gas in my car and lets me live in my grandmother's house in Brookhaven, Connecticut, two hours from the city that still has my ex-husband in it because I needed to get away and had nowhere else to go.
Brookhaven’s a small-town, somewhere I thought I’d never live. But small towns don't lose their charm the way New York does in February. Winter in New York is a special kind of misery and January and February are the worst. It’s when the holiday lights are gone, the magic of the season has faded, and all that’s left is gray slush, subzero wind chills, and a city full of people who’ve lost whatever patience they had left.
Everyone is meaner. Everyone is shorter.
But Brookhaven has charm to spare, the kind of place where time moves slower and second chances feel possible. Where my grandmother makes coffee in the mornings and tells me stories about her life growing up in Cuba, and where I've started to feel, slowly and cautiously, like I might eventually be okay.
I press stop on the video and rewind it to the beginning. I don’t watch it anymore. I don’t care. A woman’s heart is going to be broken tonight, and I don’t delight in that.
I press send on the footage and fire it off to the client. The money hits my account a few minutes later.
I stare at the transfer into my account and feel none of the things I usually feel. No satisfaction, no righteous relief, no sense of justice served. Just the ghost of a kiss I shouldn't have initiated with a man whose name I'm going to work very hard to forget.
I reach into my coat pocket for the little trinket I carry everywhere, a tiny Havanese dog charm, smooth and warm from being carried around by me for years. It was my grandmother's, given to me in the middle of the worst of the IVF cycle, when I was doing shots and estrogen patches and willing my body to do one thing it couldn’t do.
Havanese are the only dog breed native to Cuba. She had one as a girl. She pressed it into my palm and told me it was good luck for my future family. Notourfuture family. I always suspected she didn’t like Brian. I wonder if she was relieved when our marriage fell apart.
Little pup.That's what I'd always planned to call a baby if I ever had one. Brian hated the nickname. I doubled down on it out of spite. He didn’t take this from me like he took everything else. Someday, I’ll have my little pup.
