Chapter 8 I Left the Ring
Raina picks me up at seven-fifteen on Tuesday morning. Blake left for work at six-thirty. His truck pulled out of the parking lot and turned left toward the highway and I stood at the bedroom window and watched until his taillights disappeared.
I texted Raina the all-clear two minutes later.
She shows up with empty boxes in the back seat and two large duffel bags and the kind of focused energy that Raina brings to everything she decides matters. She's wearing old jeans and a T-shirt and her hair is tied back and she looks like she's going to war, which in a way she is.
"How much time do we have?" she asks as she walks through the apartment door.
"He won't be home before five. Maybe later."
"Then we take our time. We do this right."
She puts the duffel bags on the bed and looks around the room.
She hasn't been inside this apartment in a few months.
She takes it in slowly. The photos on the dresser.
Blake's clothes draped over the chair in the corner.
The book on my nightstand. The ring dish on the dresser where I put my engagement ring every night before bed.
"Okay," she says. "Start with clothes. Everything that's yours goes into these bags."
We work through the apartment room by room.
The bedroom first. I empty my side of the closet.
Every shirt, every pair of jeans, every dress, every jacket.
My shoes go into a separate bag. My toiletries from the bathroom go into a plastic bin that Raina brought.
Shampoo, conditioner, the good flat iron, my makeup bag, the skincare products that Blake always complained took up too much counter space.
The bathroom is strange. Pulling my toothbrush out of the holder next to Blake's feels final in a way that packing clothes didn't. Two toothbrushes side by side is such a small domestic detail but removing one of them changes the whole picture.
Now it's just his toothbrush standing alone in a holder built for two.
I look at the counter. My face wash is gone.
My moisturizer is gone. The shelf where I kept my hair products has a rectangular dust outline where the bottles used to sit.
Blake's stuff sprawls across both sides of the sink now, filling the empty space I left behind, which it will continue to do after I leave because Blake's stuff has always expanded to fill whatever territory is available.
We move to the kitchen. My KitchenAid mixer is already at Raina's. The remaining items that are specifically mine are few. A set of knives that were a gift from my mother. A coffee mug collection that predates the relationship. The blender, which I bought and which Blake has used maybe three times.
"What about the shared stuff?" Raina asks, holding up a set of plates we bought together at Target during our first month in the apartment.
"Leave them. I'll get new ones."
"Lara, those are nice plates."
"I know. But I don't want to fight over plates. He can have them."
She puts them back. We move through the living room. A blanket that's mine. Two framed prints that I bought and hung. Books from the bookshelf that belong to me. I leave anything that's his or shared. I'm not here to clean the place out. I'm here to take what's mine and go.
By ten-thirty the apartment looks mostly the same but slightly emptied.
If Blake were observant he'd notice the gaps.
The missing prints on the wall. The lighter closet.
The absent coffee mugs. But Blake isn't observant about domestic spaces.
He might notice in a few days, or a week, or he might not notice until I tell him.
Raina makes two trips to her car. She loads the duffel bags and the boxes into the trunk and the back seat and comes back for the last few items. We do a final walk-through together.
"Anything else?" she asks.
I stand in the middle of the living room and I look around.
This apartment has been my home for two years.
I know every crack in the ceiling and every stubborn stain in the carpet.
I know which kitchen cabinet sticks and which window doesn't lock all the way and where the floor creaks near the bathroom door.
I've cooked hundreds of meals in this kitchen.
I've watched hundreds of hours of TV on this couch.
I've slept in that bedroom next to a man I thought I'd spend my life with for more than seven hundred nights.
"No," I say. "That's everything."
We drive to Raina's apartment and we unload everything into the guest room. The pile that started as a folder of documents three weeks ago is now half a room's worth of belongings. My life, boxed up and stacked against my sister's wall.
"What time are you going back?" Raina asks.
"Four. I want to be there when he gets home."
"You're sure you want to do this today?"
"If I wait another day I'll lose my nerve."
She nods. She doesn't argue. She's learned over the past month that I've thought this through more carefully than she initially gave me credit for.
I'm not acting on impulse. I've had thirty days to plan and prepare and rehearse this conversation in my head until every possible response has a counter.
"Call me after," she says. "No matter how late."
"I will."
I spend the afternoon at Raina's. I eat lunch but I don't taste it.
I try to watch TV and I can't follow the plot.
I sit on Raina's couch and I rehearse what I'm going to say.
Not word for word. I'm not writing a speech.
I just need to know the beats. What I know.
How I know it. What I've done about it. What happens next.
At three-thirty I drive back to the apartment. I let myself in and I sit on the couch and I wait.
The apartment feels different now. Emptier.
Quieter. Like it already knows what's about to happen.
My coffee mugs are gone and my prints are gone and my side of the closet is bare and the ring dish on the dresser is empty because I took off my engagement ring this morning and left it sitting on the dresser next to Blake's watch.
I left the ring.
That thought hits me harder than I expected.
I've been wearing that ring for over a year.
Blake proposed at a restaurant on our five-year anniversary.
He got down on one knee and the whole restaurant clapped and I cried and said yes and he slid the ring onto my finger and for about forty-five seconds I was the happiest I'd ever been.
The ring is a half-carat diamond on a thin gold band.
It's not expensive by most standards but Blake spent three months saving for it, or at least that's what he told me.
Looking back I'm not sure if that's true either.
I took it off this morning and I put it on the dresser and I looked at my bare finger. The skin underneath is slightly lighter than the rest of my hand. A pale stripe where the ring sat for fourteen months. A ghost of the commitment it was supposed to represent.
Blake gets home at five-fifteen. I hear his truck in the parking lot. I hear his boots on the stairs. I hear the key in the lock.
He opens the door and sees me sitting on the couch. He smiles.
"Hey. You're home early."
"Yeah."
He drops his keys on the counter. He goes to the fridge and grabs a beer. He twists off the cap and takes a drink and leans against the kitchen counter.
"How was your day?" he asks.
"Blake, sit down."
Something in my voice makes him pause. He looks at me more carefully.
He notices, maybe for the first time today, that I'm not smiling.
That my posture is rigid. That the TV is off and the apartment is quiet and I'm sitting on the couch with my hands in my lap and I'm looking at him in a way that I've never looked at him before.
"What's wrong?" he says.
"Sit down. Please."
He sits in the armchair across from the couch. He puts his beer on the side table. He's watching me now with the careful attention of someone who can feel something coming but doesn't know what it is yet.
"I know about Hailey," I say.
The silence lasts about four seconds. Four seconds during which I watch Blake's face go through everything I expected.
Confusion first. Then recognition. Then fear.
Then calculation. I can see him trying to figure out how much I know and how to respond and what version of this conversation gives him the best chance of survival.
"What do you mean?" he says.
"I mean I know you've been sleeping with Hailey Simpson. I've known for weeks."
"Lara, I don't know what you think you know, but that's insane. Hailey is your friend. I would never do that."
His voice is calm and reasonable and slightly concerned, the way you'd talk to someone who was being paranoid about something that had a simple explanation.
I've heard this voice before. He used it when I asked about the money.
He used it when I asked about O'Shea's. He used it every time I got close to the truth and he needed to make me doubt myself.
"Blake, I read the messages."
His face changes. Not a lot. Just enough. The confidence falters for a fraction of a second before he rebuilds it.
"What messages?"
"On your phone. You left it unlocked. I read months of texts between you and Hailey. The motel rooms. The alibis with Chase. The night she told you she felt weird about seeing me at the salon and you told her not to think about it. I read all of it."
"You went through my phone?"
"Yes."
"That's a violation of my privacy, Lara."
I almost laugh. I don't, but I almost do. The audacity of a man who has been sleeping with my friend for months telling me that I've violated his privacy by reading the evidence on his own phone is so perfectly, painfully Blake that I could have predicted it word for word.
"I went through your phone," I say. "And I found proof that you've been having an affair. Those are the two facts we're dealing with right now. One of them is worse than the other."