Chapter 3
I knew the exact time because Dana texted me a screenshot from her own house across town, the two of us running the experiment like a pair of NASA technicians on either side of a launch, her with the controls and me with the actual rocket, and I had to keep my own phone tilted away from Spencer's eyeline while a man on television sanded a hull and explained the difference between teak and mahogany in a voice like a calm storm.
Spencer had his feet up on the ottoman, the good ottoman, the one we weren't supposed to put our feet on, and his phone was on the cushion beside him, face-down, and I watched the back of that phone the way you'd watch a snake you'd been told was probably dead.
It buzzed.
He picked it up. He looked at it. I had spent fifteen years training myself not to read his face and now I read it like it was the last page of a book, and what I saw was: nothing. A small frown. The frown you make at a spam call.
He turned the phone toward me, which I had not expected, which knocked the breath out of me a little, and he said, "Look at this.
Some woman just messaged me out of nowhere.
Larissa." He pronounced it wrong, La-RISS-a, and Dana would have been offended on her own behalf.
"Says she saw my profile. I don't even have a profile.
Do you think someone made me a profile? Is that a scam now? "
"Let me see," I said, and my voice came out level, which I will be proud of until the day I die.
I looked at my own creation in my husband's hand. Larissa, brunette, pharmaceutical, dangerous, smiling her orthodontic smile up at the man I'd built her to catch. And Spencer, my Spencer, made a face at her like she was a coupon for a carpet cleaner he didn't need.
"Block it," I said.
"Should I report it? I feel like I should report it. What if it's, like, the start of something. Identity theft. Marsha's cousin got identity-thefted and they bought a jet ski."
"Just block it, honey."
He blocked her. He blocked Larissa Penn with one thumb without slowing down, and then he put the phone face-down again, except now I understood that the face-down was just a habit he'd picked up, a thing men do now, and not the smoking gun I'd built a whole winter of dread around, and he went back to the boat show, and he reached over without looking and put his hand on my knee, the way he had a thousand times, the soft professional hand, and he said, "You okay?
You seem keyed up," and I said I was fine, just tired, and I went upstairs and locked the bathroom door and sat on the edge of the tub and cried so quietly that the fan didn't even need to be on.
I want to be clear about why I cried. It was relief, mostly. But it was also shame, the specific hot shame of a woman who has spent eight weeks half-believing the worst about a man who, four feet away, was worried that a stranger might steal his identity and buy a jet ski.
I had built a beautiful woman out of pixels and a Portuguese roommate and I had sent her to seduce my husband and my husband had treated her like junk mail. I had been the snake in the grass of my own living room. Dana and I. And he'd passed. He'd passed so hard he'd offered to report the crime.
Dana called before I'd even gotten off the edge of the tub.
"He blocked her," she said, and there was something in her voice I'd never heard, which was Dana being wrong and not enjoying it, Dana eating a thing she did not want to eat. "He blocked her in eleven seconds. I timed it. Kel, I'm. God. I'm sorry. I had myself convinced."
"You had me convinced."
"I know. I know I did. I'm a forensic accountant, I find fraud for a living, and I sat in your driveway and built a woman out of spite and I was wrong, and I want you to know that I will be hand-delivering lasagna to your door every Sunday like a penitent and you can lord this over me at my funeral.
" She blew her nose, which Dana would deny to her grave.
"He's a good one, Kelly. I should've trusted you.
You always could read him better than me. "
That last part is the line I think about most, after. You always could read him better than me.
Because I couldn't. Neither of us could. We'd run a clean experiment with one variable and we'd gotten a clean result and the result was a lie, but I didn't know that yet.
That night all I knew was that my husband had passed and my sister had folded and I had been wrong to doubt and I felt, sitting on the cold lip of the tub at eleven at night, lighter than I'd felt since before the phones went face-down.
The next morning I made Spencer the eggs he likes, the soft scramble with the chives I grow in the window box, and I watched him eat them and read his patient schedule on his phone (face-up now, I noticed, face-up, like the storm had passed), and I felt a tenderness toward him so large it embarrassed me.
I'd wronged him in my heart. He'd never know it, which made it worse and also better. I refilled his coffee. I straightened his collar at the door. I told him to have a good day at the office and I meant the office the way you mean a church.
"What are you up to today?" he asked, keys in hand.
"Nothing exciting. Costco run. Then I told Dana I'd help her with something."
"Tell Dana I said hi." He kissed me, a real one, a fifteen-years one, and he smelled like clove and latex again, like himself, and he went out to the silver Lexus with the sticker on the back window and backed down the driveway with one hand on the wheel and one arm thrown across the passenger seat the way he'd driven since he was seventeen, and I stood on my wraparound porch in my robe and waved, and I was happy.
I want that in the record too, right next to the part where I was happy on the first page, because I need you to understand that I was a happy woman twice. Most people only get to be a fool once.
For three weeks I lived in the after-the-storm.
We had a good run, Spencer and I. We went to dinner at the new place downtown where the menu has no prices, which in Cedar Hollow is the highest form of luxury, the menus that make you ask, and we ordered the branzino and split the chocolate thing and he held my hand across the table and told me about his plan to expand the practice.
A second location out by the new development, his name on a second building, Jacobs Family Dentistry, two locations, and I listened and nodded and thought about how I used to do the books in the strip mall next to the salon and how far we'd come, the two of us, from a man and a woman and one mean fish.
He talked a lot, those three weeks, about the second location. About the future. About a five-year plan.
I took it as romance. A man who plans five years out is a man who plans on you, I thought, because I am the kind of fool who can take a spreadsheet for a love letter, and I had done it before, fifteen years before, with a different man and a different spreadsheet, and you would think a person would learn.
Dana brought lasagna that first penitent Sunday, and the second, and we ate it on my back patio with the good wine and laughed about Larissa Penn, about how she'd moved to Portugal and would never know she'd briefly tried to wreck a marriage, about Marsha and her thermos and the moon landing.
We laughed the easy way you laugh when a fever's broken. Dana said, near the bottom of the second bottle, "I really am happy for you, you know. You did good. You picked the steady one."
And I thought about Bryan Foster for the first time in a long time, the one I hadn't picked, and I felt nothing but a clean nostalgic ache, a closed door I'd long since stopped checking, and I clinked my glass against Dana's and said, "I did, didn't I."
I'd love to tell you the test was the mistake. That if Dana and I had never built Larissa Penn, I'd have caught him some cleaner way, kept some dignity.
But the truth is the test was the most useful thing we ever did, we just didn't know how to read it. We thought a man who blocks a stranger is a faithful man.
We never once considered the other reason a man blocks a stranger.
We never considered that he might actually be loyal.
Just not to me.