Chapter 10
She chose Fremont because it belonged to neither of them.
Not Capitol Hill, where Iris had been rebuilding a life among people who didn't look at her with careful sympathy.
Not downtown, where Gavin's name was etched into the glass of three buildings and stitched into the fabric of every foundation gala.
Fremont was bookstores and vintage shops and a sixteen-foot Lenin statue that tourists photographed ironically.
Nobody in Fremont cared about the Rogerss.
Iris found the coffee shop on a Tuesday morning walk — Groundline Coffee, a narrow storefront wedged between a used record store and a yoga studio.
Concrete floors, mismatched chairs, a chalkboard menu that listed oat milk as the default.
She ordered a black coffee, sat in the corner booth with her back to the wall, and sent the text before she could talk herself out of it.
She had gotten Piper's number from the documents Elena had pulled during the initial filing — call records, itemized.
Fourteen months of texts and calls reduced to a spreadsheet of timestamps.
Iris had stared at that spreadsheet for two hours on the houseboat floor, tracing the frequency with her finger.
Three calls in October, the first month.
Eleven in November. By March they'd stopped calling and started texting exclusively, which was either intimacy or efficiency, and Iris no longer cared which.
Piper's reply came forty minutes later. No preamble.
I'll be there.
#
Thursday morning Iris woke at five-thirty, which was unusual.
She lay on Constance's daybed in the upper studio and watched the sky lighten through the north-facing window, the water of Lake Union shifting from black to pewter to a dull, flat silver.
She had not slept well. Not because of nerves, exactly — more a low-grade alertness, like the night before a flight. Her body knew something was coming.
She showered in the narrow stall, dressed in jeans and a gray linen shirt she'd bought at a vintage store on Pike Street three weeks ago. Flat boots. No jewelry. She caught herself reaching for earrings and stopped. This was not a performance. She didn't need armor for this.
She drove the eight miles to Fremont with the windows down, the morning air cool and damp against her forearms. July in Seattle was unpredictable — the city could swing from sixty degrees and overcast to eighty and blazing in the span of a lunch hour.
Today was gray. She parked on a side street two blocks from Groundline and sat in the car for three minutes, hands on the steering wheel at ten and two.
Her phone sat in the passenger seat. She could cancel.
She could text Piper right now — Something came up — and drive back to the houseboat and never know any more than she already knew.
She already knew enough. She knew the hotel, the duration, the frequency.
She knew what Kelsey Brandt's sources had confirmed.
She knew Gavin had started the affair at a Suncadia retreat while Iris was visiting Constance in hospice. She knew all of this.
But she didn't know how.
Not the mechanics — she wasn't interested in positions or pet names or whatever diminished choreography they'd performed in Suite 1412.
She needed to know the texture of it. The ordinary, daily texture.
How it had started, how it had sustained itself, how her husband had walked through their front door after and poured himself a scotch and talked to her about his day as though nothing had rearranged itself inside him.
She needed to know if it had rearranged anything inside him at all.
Iris got out of the car.
#
Groundline was half-full at ten on a Thursday — laptop workers in headphones, a couple sharing a scone, a woman reading a paperback with a cracked spine. Iris ordered her coffee and took the same corner booth. She sat facing the door.
Piper Hollis arrived at 10:04. Iris saw her through the glass before she came in — a tall woman in a navy blazer and white t-shirt, dark hair pulled back, sunglasses pushed up on her head.
She paused outside the door for half a second, something Iris recognized as the same thing she'd done in the car.
The recalibration. The decision to walk forward.
The door opened. Piper scanned the room, found Iris, and crossed to the booth without hesitation. She didn't smile. She didn't extend her hand.
"Thank you for agreeing to this," Iris said.
Piper sat down across from her. Up close she was younger than Iris had imagined — early thirties, smooth skin, minimal makeup.
She had dark eyes and the kind of bone structure that photographed well, which Iris had already known from LinkedIn.
What LinkedIn hadn't conveyed was the tension in her jaw, the way her hands moved to the edge of the table and then folded together as though she'd been coached.
"I wasn't sure you'd actually want to," Piper said. Her voice was lower than Iris expected. Steady, but careful.
"I almost didn't."
"Can I get a coffee first, or —"
"Of course."
Piper stood and went to the counter. Iris watched her order — an oat milk latte, from the sound of it — and noticed her hands were steady.
Not shaking. Not gripping the counter. She was composed in the way that women in corporate environments learned to be composed: surface calm as professional competency.
Iris recognized it because she'd spent eight years in that same world, attending Gavin's events, shaking hands with people whose names she'd memorized from seating charts.
Piper returned with her drink and sat down. She wrapped both hands around the cup.
"I'm not here to yell at you," Iris said.
"Okay."
"I'm not here to ask you to apologize, either."
Piper's eyes flickered. Something in them shifted — not relief, exactly. More like a wall coming down one inch. "Then what are you here for?"
"I need to understand how it worked. The day-to-day of it. Not what happened in the hotel room — I don't care about that. I need to understand the ordinary parts."
Piper was quiet for a moment. She took a sip of her latte and set it down, centering it precisely on the table. "What do you want to know?"
"How did it start?"
"You probably already know that."
"I know the when. October, at the Suncadia retreat. I want to know the how."
Piper exhaled through her nose. "It was late.
The last night of the retreat. Most of the team had gone to bed.
He and I were the last ones at the bar, going over the Q4 projections for a presentation the next morning.
We'd been working together for — I don't know, six months at that point.
He was my boss's boss. We weren't friends.
We barely talked outside of meetings." She paused.
"He ordered another round without asking if I wanted one.
I didn't stop him. We stopped talking about work. And then we didn't stop."
"Just like that."
"Just like that." Piper met her eyes. "I know that sounds — I know how that sounds. Like I'm minimizing it. I'm not. It was a choice. I made it with my eyes open."
Iris felt the old heat rise in her chest — the flare she'd carried since the Fairmont Olympic, since the hotel receipt, since the spreadsheet of call logs — and she let it sit there without acting on it. She took a sip of her coffee. It was lukewarm now.
"After that night," Iris said. "How did it continue?"
"He texted me two weeks later. Something about a file he needed.
It wasn't about the file. I knew it wasn't about the file.
I responded anyway." Piper's voice was flat, clinical.
Like she was recounting a case study. "It became a pattern.
Late nights at the office — genuine work, at first, and then not.
He'd book the hotel. Always the same one. Always Tuesdays."
"Why Tuesdays?"
"Board meetings ran late on Tuesdays. It was the one night he could — " She stopped. "It was the one night the timing worked."
The one night the timing worked. Iris turned the phrase over.
He had optimized the affair the way he optimized everything else — found the inefficiency in his schedule and exploited it.
Tuesday nights. Iris tried to remember what she'd done on Tuesday nights for fourteen months.
Painted, probably. Read. Called Linnet. Sat on the couch with a glass of wine and didn't wonder where her husband was because he always worked late and she had never, in eight years, had a reason to question it.
"Did he talk about me?" Iris asked.
Piper's hands tightened around her cup. "No."
"Not at all?"
"No. Not once."
The word landed like a stone dropped into still water.
Iris had braced herself for many things — for hearing that Gavin had complained about their marriage, or worse, that he'd spoken about Iris with tenderness and guilt that made the whole thing more grotesque. She had not braced herself for absence.
"He never mentioned your name," Piper said, and now there was something in her voice that might have been shame.
"He never mentioned the marriage. Not to complain, not to justify — nothing.
It was like that part of his life didn't exist when he was with me.
I never asked. I should have asked. I didn't want to know. "
Iris sat with this. The coffee shop hummed around them — the espresso machine, a barista calling a name, someone's laptop playing music through tinny speakers. Normal sounds. The world continuing.
"Was it — " She stopped herself. Restarted. "What was it, then? If it wasn't about the marriage. If it wasn't about me."