Chapter 2
Claire’s husband, Marcus, stood in the entryway with his car keys still in one hand. Nobody had heard him arrive. Claire turned so fast her chair scraped across the hardwood. “Marcus? Why are you here?”
He looked at me first, then at Ethan. “Because Natalie called me.”
Ethan’s head snapped toward me. “You did what?” I took my phone from my purse and placed it on the table. For the first time all night, I felt calm.
Marcus walked closer. He looked exhausted rather than angry, which somehow made the room feel more dangerous. “Natalie said there was something about money and secret meetings.” Claire immediately started crying again. “She’s twisting everything.”
I had expected that.
Three days of quietly collecting screenshots had taught me more about my marriage than seven years of trusting it. When I first questioned Ethan about money, he reluctantly admitted he had loaned Claire eight thousand dollars. That alone bothered me because we had always discussed large expenses. But when I checked our statements, I found almost twenty thousand dollars had moved into an account I didn’t recognize over several months.
The account wasn’t Claire’s. It was connected to Marcus’s small construction business.
Marcus stared at Ethan. “You invested in my company?”
Ethan rubbed his jaw. “I thought I was helping.”
“With whose permission?”
Claire stepped between them. “It was supposed to be temporary.”
Marcus’s face tightened. “You told me that money came from savings.”
Silence.
That was the moment Claire’s mother finally stopped glaring at me.
I unlocked my phone. “I also received an email from Claire by mistake.” Claire’s expression changed immediately. Attached to that email had been a screenshot of a conversation between Claire and Marcus. In it, Claire described Ethan as miserable, trapped, controlled, and desperate to escape our marriage.
One line had stayed with me: If Natalie leaves him, Ethan will finally understand who has always been there for him.
Marcus read it twice before looking at his wife. “Why were you trying to break up their marriage?”
“I wasn’t.”
“You literally wrote it.”
Claire’s mother interrupted. “Maybe it was taken out of context.”
I turned toward her. “For years, that sentence has protected Claire from everything.”
Ethan reached for my phone, but I pulled it away. “No. You don’t get to control the evidence now.”
“Natalie, we should talk privately.”
I looked around the table. Five minutes earlier, he had humiliated me publicly. Now he wanted privacy.
“That option disappeared when you told me to leave my own home.”
Marcus kept scrolling through the screenshots. Suddenly, he stopped. His eyes narrowed at something I hadn’t noticed before.
“There’s another person in these messages.”
Claire went completely still.
Marcus looked at Ethan, then at me.
“Who is ‘D’?”
May you like
Ethan’s face turned white.
And suddenly, I realized I might not have uncovered the whole secret after all.
