6. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
The rain starts just as I make the decision.
I tell myself it’s not about distrust. It’s about closure.
About putting my suspicions to rest so I can stop feeling like a stranger in my own marriage.
If I just see where she goes - if I can confirm that it’s innocent, that Cole really is just a friend going through something private - then I can let all of this go.
I almost believe it.
Nina leaves with that distracted look she’s been wearing for weeks, the one that means she’s already somewhere else even before her car pulls out of the drive.
She kisses me on her way out - quick, distracted - then stops in the doorway and comes back and kisses me again, slower, her hand flat against my chest like she’s memorizing my heartbeat.
“I love you,” she says, and it isn’t automatic at all.
Then she says something about errands, and there’s a sentence behind her eyes she keeps almost saying and doesn’t.
Her coffee sits untouched on the counter. Tea again. Always tea now.
I watch her taillights disappear down the drive, and I count to sixty. Then I grab my keys.
***
The rain makes it easy to stay back.
Her taillights blur through my windshield, red smears against gray sky, as she takes the familiar route into town. Broadway first - the main artery, crowded even in the rain. Then Thames Street, where the tourists cluster around overpriced restaurants and shops selling things no one needs.
She drives past all of it. Doesn’t even slow down.
Where are you going? I think, gripping the wheel tighter. Where do you go when you’re not with me?
She turns left at the old cannery building, heading toward the harbor district. I know this area vaguely - working-class neighborhood, small businesses, nothing like the gilded streets we’re supposed to inhabit. Nothing that explains why my wife would come here.
I almost lose her at a yellow light.
She makes it through; I don’t. I sit there with my heart hammering while the light takes forever to change, scanning the street ahead for any sign of silver.
Turn around, the reasonable part of my brain insists. Go home. This is insane.
But I don’t turn around. The light changes, and I accelerate, scanning side streets, looking for-
There.
Her car, parked on a narrow street I’ve never noticed before. She’s already out, already walking toward a small pharmacy on the corner - the kind of place that’s been there for decades, family-owned, hand-painted sign weathering in the salt air.
I find a spot half a block back, tucked behind a delivery truck with a broken taillight, and I cut the engine.
And I wait.
***
The rain drums on my roof.
Fifteen minutes pass. Then twenty. The windows fog with my breath, and I have to keep wiping them clear, which makes me feel even more pathetic - a middle-aged man in an expensive car, spying on his wife through a rain-streaked windshield like something out of a bad detective novel.
What the fuck are you doing? I ask myself.
I don’t have an answer.
The pharmacy door opens.
Nina emerges first, and even from here, even through the rain, I can see the tension in her shoulders.
She’s wearing the blue coat I bought her - the anniversary coat, the expensive one she said was too much - and her hair is starting to curl in the humidity, the way it does when she’s been somewhere warm and steps into the cold.
She’s not alone.
Cole follows her out, and the sight of him hits me like a physical blow to the chest.
He looks wrong. That’s the only word for it.
Wrong in a way that goes beyond the weight loss I noticed at dinner, beyond the careful movements I attributed to travel fatigue.
His face has a grayish pallor that reminds me of my grandfather in his final months - the color of someone whose body is fighting a war it’s losing.
His clothes hang on him like they belong to someone else. Someone bigger. Someone who existed a few months ago and doesn’t anymore.
They stop on the sidewalk, and I watch Nina reach into her purse and pull out an envelope. Even from here, I can see how thick it is - stuffed with something, cash probably, the way it bulges against the paper.
She presses it into his hands.
He shakes his head. His mouth moves - no, I can’t, this is too much - and he tries to give it back.
She refuses. Her hands close over his, pushing the envelope back toward his chest. I can see her face now, caught in profile, and she’s insisting. Pleading. Her whole body leaning toward him with an intensity that makes my stomach clench.
What are you paying for? I think. What does he need that I can’t know about?
Then Cole breaks.
***
I watch it happen in slow motion.
His face crumples first - that’s the only word for it. Like a building losing its supports, everything collapsing inward at once. His mouth twists. His eyes squeeze shut. His shoulders hunch forward like he’s trying to make himself smaller, trying to disappear.
And then the sound comes - I can’t hear it through the rain and the glass, but I can see it. A sob that wracks his whole body, that makes him stagger like someone’s punched him in the gut.
Nina catches him.
She wraps her arms around him and pulls him close, absorbing his weight, holding him up when his legs don’t seem capable of doing it themselves.
His face buries in her neck - right there, in the curve of her shoulder where I’ve buried my own face a thousand times - and his hands clutch at her coat like a drowning man grabbing for anything that floats.
They stand there in the rain.
Her hands move to his hair - stroking, soothing, the way she strokes my hair when I’m falling apart. Her lips move near his ear - it’s okay, I’m here, you’re not alone - and I watch him shudder against her, watch his whole body shake with the force of whatever he’s feeling.
My chest is so tight I can barely breathe.
This is what she looks like when she loves someone, I think. This is the tenderness she has, the infinite capacity for holding broken people together.
She holds me like this, I think.
She holds him like this too.
Then she pulls back - just enough to cup his face in her hands. Just enough to look into his eyes. Her thumbs brush his cheekbones, wiping away tears or rain or both, and she says something I can’t hear but can somehow feel.
And then she presses her forehead to his.
***
The world narrows to that single point of contact.
Her forehead against his. Her eyes closed. Her hands still cradling his face like he’s something precious, something fragile, something she can’t bear to let go.
They breathe together. I can see it - the rise and fall of their shoulders, synchronized, intimate. The rain streams down around them, soaking through their coats, and neither of them moves. Neither of them pulls away.
I catalog every detail with the obsessive precision of a man building a case against his own happiness:
The way her body curves toward his, drawn like gravity.
The way his hands have settled on her waist - not grasping anymore, just resting there, like they belong.
The way their breath mingles in the cold air, a single cloud rising between them.
The way she looks peaceful. Like holding him is the most natural thing in the world. Like she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.
That’s not comfort, something whispers in my brain. That’s intimacy. That’s the way people stand when they’re in love.
That’s the way she used to stand with you.
I watch for ninety-three seconds. I count every one.
Then I put the car in reverse and I drive away, and I don’t look back.
***
The drive home is a blur.
I don’t remember the route I take. I don’t remember the traffic lights or the turns or the rain that keeps falling and falling like it’s never going to stop. My body navigates on autopilot while my mind replays the same images on an endless, torturous loop:
Her forehead against his.
Her hands in his hair.
The peaceful expression on her face, like she’d finally found something she’d been missing.
Stop, I tell myself. You’re jumping to conclusions. There could be an explanation.
But what explanation? What innocent reason could there possibly be for my wife to hold another man like that? To press her forehead to his like they’re the only two people in the world?
He’s sick, some rational part of me offers. Look at him - he’s obviously sick. She’s comforting him.
But I’ve comforted people. I’ve held friends through grief and loss and fear. And I’ve never - not once - held any of them the way Nina was holding Cole.
I’ve never touched anyone like that except her.
***
The house is cold when I walk in.
Not literally - the heat’s on, same as always - but it feels cold. Empty. Like the walls have already absorbed what’s about to happen and are bracing for impact.
I stand in the foyer, dripping rain onto marble that cost more than most people’s cars, and I think about everything I’ve collected over the past few weeks:
The transfers. Thousands of dollars to medical suppliers and pharmacies and a clinic I’ve never heard of.
The absences. Hours she can’t account for, explanations that don’t add up.
The deleted text. Tonight meant everything. I couldn’t do this without you.
The new laugh. The one I’ve never heard before. The one she only uses with him.
And now this. The embrace in the rain. The forehead pressed to his. The look on her face like she was finally, finally home.
It all fits, I think. It all makes sense if you arrange it the way you don’t want to arrange it.
I go upstairs.
I open the closet.
I pull down the leather suitcase Nina bought me for our fifth anniversary - the one we used for our trip to Italy, the one that still has the airline tags from our last vacation - and I start to pack.
***
The suitcase is standing in the foyer when she walks through the door.