Chapter Two
It took me nine days to get into his phone, and the hardest part wasn't the phone. It was the nine days.
I'd like to tell you I glided through them like some cool marble version of myself, but the truth is I spent that week and a half performing my own life like an actress who'd been given the part at short notice.
I made his coffee and confirmed our dinner reservations.
I sat across from him at Le Fanion on Thursday while he told a long story about a client's boat, and I laughed in the right places while a voice in my head said, clear as a bell, look at his mouth, that mouth has been on your best friend, and I picked up my wine and drank and kept laughing.
Twice I nearly broke. Once when he came up behind me at the bathroom sink and kissed the back of my neck, and my whole body went rigid before I could stop it.
He didn't notice. He'd stopped noticing me in any detail a long time ago, which I was beginning to understand had been true for years and was only now becoming useful.
The second time was when Penny texted me a link to a dress with the message this is SO you, and I sat in my parked car outside the dry cleaner and shook for a full minute, because she was still doing it.
Still being my best friend in the gaps between whatever she was doing with my husband.
I didn't cry either time. I put it all somewhere low and cold in my chest and I shut the lid, and every time the lid rattled I made another entry in the private list I was keeping.
Because once you know, you see everything.
That's the terrible gift of it. The weekend in Miami.
That gala. The way Mark had started taking his phone into the bathroom eighteen months ago, which I'd read at the time as work stress.
The new gym habit that produced no visible change in him.
Penny asking about babies in that gentle voice, twice, which I'd taken for love and now understood was reconnaissance.
She'd been checking how permanent I was.
Each one went on the list. The list kept me sane. When the hurt came up my throat at two in the morning, and it did, I lay still next to my sleeping husband and recited it to myself like a rosary until the hurt turned back into information.
The phone was the easy part.
Mark's passcode was his birthday, month and day doubled, and I'd known it for three years the way you know things about a person you live with, without ever needing it.
He was careless like that, my husband. Not because he was stupid but because he had never once in his life faced a consequence, and a man with no history of consequences doesn't build defenses.
His father had defenses. I'd watched Chris lock a car door in his own gated driveway.
Mark left his whole life lying around unlocked, and it had simply never cost him anything.
On the ninth night, a Saturday, we had the Hallorans over for dinner and Mark got into the good Burgundy with Jim Halloran and was asleep on top of the covers by eleven forty, still in his shirt, breathing wine fumes at the ceiling. His phone sat charging on the nightstand.
I stood in the doorway of our bedroom for a moment and gave him one last chance. That sounds strange, but it's what I was doing. Some part of me was offering the universe a final exit, a version where I opened the phone and found nothing and got to feel ashamed of myself, and paranoid, and lucky.
I picked it up. His birthday, doubled. It opened.
The universe declined the exit.
There was no thread under her name. I checked that first and felt one dizzy second of relief before the cold part of me said, it’s never that easy, and made me keep going.
The thread was under Pete Callahan, a name I half recognized as a guy from his Dartmouth crew who'd moved to Singapore.
Smart. A name I'd never call, saved with a man's photo from an actual reunion.
Careless Mark had been careful about exactly one thing in his life, and it was this. He thought this was enough.
Fourteen months.
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub with the door mostly shut and the fan on, and I read my husband's other life with my thumb moving on the glass, steady as a metronome.
I'm not going to write out what the messages said.
Some of it was what you'd expect, logistics and hunger, hotel names, wear the blue thing, and I could hold that at arm's length because it belonged to a stranger.
What I couldn't hold at arm's length was the rest. Penny complaining about Oliver's snoring and Mark replying with jokes I recognized, jokes he'd road-tested on me at dinner parties.
The two of them discussing a couples' trip the four of us had taken to Napa in the spring, while we were all on it, reviewing it like a show.
And in March, fourteen weeks ago, Penny at one in the morning: I hate watching you go home to her.
Mark, four minutes later: it won't be forever.
The bathroom tile was very white. I remember noticing that, the way you notice stupid things when the floor of your life is moving.
My chest hurt like something in it had actually torn, and I pressed my free hand flat against my sternum and breathed through my mouth and kept scrolling, because I could fall apart or I could learn, and I had married a man who was planning a forever that didn't include me, and I wanted to know what it was going to cost him.
The receipts were in his email, sitting in a folder he hadn't even bothered to hide, labeled personal.
Verdura, on Fifth. Three purchases in fourteen months.
Earrings in November, a cocktail ring in February, a gold cuff in April that cost more than my mother's car, and each one landed in me like a small separate insult, because I could line them up against my own calendar.
November, he'd given me a cashmere wrap.
February, dinner and roses. My husband had a budget, apparently, and I was the discount line on it.
Then I found the photo, and everything up to that point became the shallow end.
It was in the Pete Callahan thread, sent by her in May, a mirror photo from what I recognized instantly as the Wexfords' guest bathroom. Penny in a green dress I'd helped her choose, chin down, smiling at the lens the way you smile for a lover. Around her neck sat my sapphire pendant.
Mine. Not one like it. Mine, the one Mark gave me at Daniel Bistro on our third anniversary, a deep oval stone on a fine chain, the one thing he'd ever chosen that I believed he'd chosen himself. I knew the tiny kink near the clasp where I'd once caught it on a sweater. The kink was in the photo.
Under it she'd written: he has good taste when properly supervised.
And Mark had replied: it looks better on you.
I don't know how long I sat on the edge of the tub.
Long enough for my hands to go cold. There is a specific feeling when hurt goes all the way through and comes out the other side as something harder, and I felt it happen in real time, sitting on cold enamel in my own house, listening to my husband snore through the wall.
He hadn't bought her the same necklace. He'd walked into my closet, opened my jewelry box, lifted it out, and carried it across town to her, and the two of them had laughed about it.
That was the part I couldn't file away. Gifts to a mistress are a cliché.
Robbing your wife to decorate her best friend is a decision, made with clear eyes, about exactly how much I was worth to him.
I stood up, put the phone face down on the nightstand exactly where it had been, angle and all, and walked into my closet.
My jewelry box was leather, left for me by Mark's late mother, and I went through it with steady hands, and it told me the rest. The sapphire pendant, gone, which I now knew.
My first-anniversary diamond studs, gone.
The gold link bracelet he'd brought back from London, gone.
Three pieces, all gifts from him, all things I wore rarely enough that their absence had a cover story built in.
He'd chosen well. He knew my habits after all, just not in any way that helped me.
I closed the box. I straightened it on the shelf.
Then I went into the bathroom, turned the shower on hot, stepped in, and let go of the lid.
I cried the way I hadn't cried since my father's funeral, folded over with the water pounding on my back, both hands over my mouth so the sound stayed inside the steam.
I cried for seven years, and for my thirtieth birthday when Penny threw me the party, and for the version of my life I'd been living in until nine days ago, which was over now whether I liked it or not.
It came out of me in waves and I let every wave finish.
Then the water started going cold, and so did I, and that was better.
I turned off the shower and stood dripping in the dark and made myself say it silently, once, so it would be real. My husband is in love with my best friend, and he has been stealing from me to court her.
Fine. Now I knew the ground I stood on.
By the time I slid into bed beside him, dry-eyed, my mind had already moved on to the only question that still interested me, which was not why, and was not how could they. Those questions were for the woman in the shower, and I'd left her in there.
The question was what it was all going to cost.
I fell asleep working on the invoice.