Chapter 2
“Nine,” Trevor answered, and something in his voice changed the second the word left his mouth.
“What’s Monday?” I asked, once she’d walked away.
“Work.”
“Obviously. What kind of work makes you look like that?”
“Later,” he said.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I mean it. Not here.”
I let it go. For now.
We left through separate doors — Julian and Courtney through the front, Trevor and I through the east exit — into the same cool spring night, carrying marriages that looked nothing like they had four hours earlier.
In the car, neither of us spoke for almost ten minutes.
“How long have you known?” he finally asked.
“Three weeks.”
His hands tightened on his knees. “Three weeks. You’ve known for three weeks and you didn’t say anything?”
“You don’t get to sound betrayed about that.”
“I’m not. I just—” He stopped himself.
“You just what?”
“I don’t know how you did it. Sat across from me every night for three weeks and said nothing.”
“I had a lot of practice pretending things were fine,” I said. “I learned it from you.”
He didn’t answer that.
When we pulled into the driveway, he sat there a second before opening the door.
“What’s Monday?” I asked again.
He looked at the porch light, not at me.
“Later,” he said, one more time — and this time his voice cracked in a way I’d never once heard from him in eight years of marriage.
The porch light was still on when we pulled into the driveway. I’d left it on myself before the party, some small unconscious hope that the house would still look like ours when we got back.
It did. White siding. Two chairs. The planter Trevor had promised all spring to repaint. Nothing outside announced that the two people walking up that path had quietly become strangers somewhere between the champagne and the confession.
Upstairs, I started packing an overnight bag.
“I’ll sleep in the guest room,” Trevor said, standing at the foot of our bed like a man waiting for a verdict.
“You will,” I said. “But first you’re going to tell me the truth. All of it.”
He sat on the edge of the bed. I sat in the armchair across from him, putting distance between us on purpose.
“It started last summer,” he said. “The Prescott account. Long nights. A lot of dinners with the project team. Courtney and I started talking.”
“About me?”
“Sometimes.”
My chest tightened around that word like a fist.
“I told her things had gotten… routine, between us.”
“Routine,” I repeated.
“I know how it sounds.”
“You know how it sounds *now*.”
He didn’t argue with that.
“I was frustrated,” he said. “Instead of telling you, I told her. It was easier.”
“Easier,” I said. “That’s it? That’s the whole reason?”
“I wish I had a better one.”
“So do I.”
“Did you love her?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. Then, before I could push: “I thought I did, sometimes. Other times I think I used the word because it made what we were doing sound like it meant something more than it did.”
“Did you plan to leave me?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does *not exactly* mean, Trevor?”
“We talked about what would happen if our marriages ended. Both of us. Separately, together, I don’t even know anymore. It was never a real plan. It was more like — permission to keep doing it.”
“That’s worse,” I said. “Do you understand that? A plan I could almost respect. This was just cowardice with a countdown.”
He didn’t argue with that either.
Then I remembered Monday morning, and Priya’s question at the party, and I asked him what it meant.
His face changed — a shift I recognized instantly, because I had spent eight years learning every version of it.
He went downstairs and came back with his laptop and a sealed cream envelope, my name written across the front in his handwriting.
“When did you write this?”
“Nine days ago,” he said. “Before you contacted Julian. Courtney ended it eleven days ago. She told me she was starting to feel angry at Julian for things she’d never actually told him bothered her, and it wasn’t fair to keep doing that to him in silence.”
I stared at the envelope like it might rearrange itself into something less complicated.
May you like
“And you were relieved,” I said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
