Chapter Four
Winona
She found the photograph by accident. She had not been looking for evidence.
She wanted to be clear about that, in retrospect—she had not been in the mode of a suspicious wife conducting a search.
She had been looking for the insurance paperwork she needed for a contractor bid, and the insurance file was in Townes's office, and while she was looking for the right folder her hand caught the edge of a manila envelope she did not recognize and pulled it halfway out before she saw what was in it.
Photographs. Printed photographs, which was unusual enough in the digital age to be notable, and she would have set them aside if the top one had not been of Townes.
Townes, and Madrigal Merrill.
She knew who Madrigal was—she had met her at Brycen Henley's dinner party in October, assessed her in thirty seconds as someone who moved through social space with the specific intentionality of a woman who always knew who in the room was attached and to what, and then forgotten her. Or tried to.
In the photograph, they were standing very close.
His head was inclined toward her. Her hand was near his arm—it might have been on his arm; the angle made it unclear.
The quality suggested a candid, not posed, taken with a long lens or a phone at distance.
They were outside somewhere, the light the particular pale gold of late afternoon, and the closeness of them—the inclination, the proximity—
She stood very still with the photograph in her hand.
She went through the rest of them. Six photographs total.
All variations on the same proximity. One showed them in what appeared to be a restaurant window, facing each other across a table.
One showed him walking with her through what she recognized as the lobby of the Merrill Gallery.
One showed her hand—definitely her hand, in this one—resting on his lapel.
There was a Post-it note stuck to the back of the last photograph. Handwritten, neat, anonymous.
You deserve to know what's happening.
Winona sat down on the edge of Townes's desk chair. She sat there for a long time. The room was very quiet. The house was very quiet.
She thought, I could be wrong. Photographs taken out of context proved nothing.
The closeness could be professional, the restaurant could be a client meeting, the hand on the lapel could be a moment of someone else's presumption rather than his.
She knew this. She was a precise woman and she knew that evidence required interpretation.
She also thought, Why don't I know about any of this?
He had not mentioned Madrigal Merrill since the dinner party.
Not once. Not I have a new client, not ran into so-and-so, not the small ambient information that people shared with their partners as a matter of course.
The silence around it was not neutral. Silence in the place where ordinary disclosure should have been was its own kind of signal.
She put the photographs back in the envelope. She put the envelope back in the cabinet. She found the insurance paperwork and took it to her office and sat down and did not open it for an hour.
She did not cry. She was the kind of woman who did not cry immediately, who processed hurt first through stillness and anger and only later through grief. Right now she was in the stillness phase, and it was very, very cold.
She picked up her phone and called her best friend, Danaka.
"I need to talk," she shrieked, when Danaka picked up.
"Come over now," Danaka said, and didn't ask questions.