1. Who the （Bleep） Did I Marry?
who the (bleep) did i marry?
alyssa
five years ago
Dinner was ready. I’d made Malik’s favorite: jerk chicken, rice and peas. Micah sat in his booster chair eating apple slices, while I reminded myself that marriages took effort. That maybe if I stopped waiting for Malik to show up and showed up myself, something might shift.
Men need to feel wanted, my mother told me. You can’t sit back and expect them to come to you.
So I cooked. Packed it into containers, loaded Micah into his car seat with his stuffed tiger, and drove twenty minutes to Malik’s office.
This was me trying. That's what I told myself on the Garden State Parkway with the smell of jerk filling the car.
But I knew it was a lie. I wasn't bringing him dinner.
I was bringing myself a reason. A wife with a warm plate on the seat isn't checking up on her husband…
she's being sweet. The dinner was the alibi.
I'd cooked two hours of cover so I could show up at his office and see for myself, and still get to call it an act of love if I was wrong.
I’d known for a while that I wouldn’t like what I found.
Two weeks earlier I realized his location had gone dark on the app we’d shared for years.
I didn’t know how long that was the case; I didn't normally check it. Then I noticed the little dot that lived at his office in the afternoons just wasn’t there anymore. Turned off.
I'd spent the time since trying to convince myself there was a reasonable explanation, and hating myself a little more each day for the woman I'd become.
The night prior, Malik was asleep, dead to the world, and I took his phone off the nightstand and turned his location sharing back on.
There I was, a lawyer reduced to gathering evidence on her own husband for a case she didn't want to win.
It was beneath me. I knew it was beneath me.
I did it anyway, because I needed to know.
I'd checked it once, while cooking. His dot sat right where he'd texted me he was, at his office, working late. I closed the app and didn't check it again.
The receptionist looked up with that careful expression. "Oh… Mrs. Cham—" She caught herself. "Mrs. Carter. Mr. Chambers left maybe an hour ago. I think he had a dinner meeting?"
Six years and people still reached for Chambers first, like a woman keeping her own name was a typo they were being polite about. I'd stopped correcting most of them.
“Of course.” I smiled. I don’t know why I smiled. “Thank you.”
I sat in my car with the dinner going cold on the seat. He'd been at his desk an hour ago. I'd watched him be there. I opened the app again and his dot wasn't headed home. It wasn't at any restaurant either. It sat three buildings over, and it hadn't moved.
The Meridian Hotel.
In the backseat, Micah held up his stuffed tiger to me like an offering. "Thank you, baby," I said, took it, and gave it a squeeze, as if the thing could give me the nerve for what I was about to go do.
The Meridian lobby was quiet. I set Micah up in two chairs by a column with sightlines to the elevators, his trucks and his crackers and my tablet playing cartoons, headphones on. He didn’t ask why we were there. He was two and a half. Shiny floors, a new place. He was content.
I sat beside him and waited twenty-three minutes. Then the elevator opened and Malik stepped out looking like a man who’d just exhaled. Relaxed. He was looking at his phone and didn’t see me.
I stood. “Malik.”
His head came up, and for one unguarded second I saw it, the flash of panic before he swapped it for something that looked almost like irritation.
“Alyssa.” He glanced around the lobby. “What are you doing here?”
“I brought dinner to your office. You weren’t there.”
“I had a meeting—”
“In a hotel room?”
He ran a hand down his face and took a deep breath. “It’s a… a client—”
Then the elevator chimed again, and I knew who she was before she cleared the doors. Danielle Reeves. One of his coworkers. She stepped into the lobby, stopped dead in her tracks, then turned back to the elevator, desperately jabbing the button.
“Danielle. I can see you.”
Her hand stilled, but she didn’t turn around.
“Alyssa.” Malik’s voice tried to be stern. “Stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Don’t embarrass yourself.” He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “Not here. Go home.”
“No.”
He exhaled hard, almost a laugh. “I don't know what you think this is, but you're overreacting. You showing up here… did you track my phone?”
He pulled it out, looked at it, and his eyes went cold. He turned the sharing off right there in front of me, thumbing the setting while he looked at me like I was the problem. “When did you… how long have you been— What is wrong with you?”
I didn't take the bait. I wasn't going to stand there and defend turning it back on. “What is wrong with you, Malik. Don’t try to twist this around on me.”
“Lower your voice,” he said.
“I haven't raised it.”
He pointed toward Micah, headphones on, one fist in the goldfish bag, oblivious. “You brought our son here? He should be home, in bed.” He shook his head, performing disgust. “Look at him. Sitting in a lobby at nine o'clock because his mother can’t keep it together.”
That deflection got in. Straight past everything, right to the place marked, bad mother and I felt mom guilt begin to rise. Then I looked at my son, calm and content because I had made him calm and content, while this man built a second life in between conference calls.
“Don't you dare,” I seethed. “You want to talk about where Micah should be? He should be home with his father. He's in a hotel lobby because his father is upstairs in a bed that isn't his, with a woman who’s not his wife.”
I looked over at Danielle, who was still frozen in place by the elevators. I felt nothing. Not even curiosity. “Leave.” I glared at her.
She nodded rapidly and ran out of the lobby.
I turned back to Malik. “Don't you stand there and hide behind my child like you've ever once been in the room. You're a terrible husband, Malik. And I let myself not see it, but you're a worse father. Don’t pretend you care when that baby sleeps."
“Go home, Alyssa,” he said, already moving on. “We’ll talk when I get there.”
“This is your home.” I nodded at the elevators. “They don't rent these rooms by the hour, so get your money's worth. Stay the night. Stay the week, while you're at it. You're not setting a foot back in my house.”
“The hell I'm not!”
"Come home if you want to." I stepped in, hot breath all in his face. "Just know I can't be held responsible for what might happen to you in your sleep. I'd stay here, if I were you."
His mouth fell open, then he glared at me. "You threatening me, Alyssa?"
I tried to laugh. "Baby, you don’t know what a threat is yet. But don’t worry, by the time I'm through with your ass, you'll look back at tonight and think of it as the good part."
I gathered Micah up in my arms, walked us out into the night, and I didn't look back. That, out of everything, is the part I'd take back if I could. That I didn't turn around and see his face one more time, when he was still only my cheating husband and not a dead man attached to a headline.
Two days later Malik came home, and we spent the next two weeks in a cold war of not speaking. He was in and out, timing it so he'd only turn his key once he was sure I'd be asleep, then crash in the guest room, gone again before I woke.
Every cell in me wanted to pack Micah and go to one of my sisters'. But I knew you don't walk out of the marital home when you're the one with the case. Leaving looks like abandonment, staying looks like standing your ground. So I stayed, and I hated every day of it.
One night I sat at the kitchen table working on my exit. A list of divorce attorneys to call for consults, a list of known assets, reasons why full custody was non-negotiable. Then came the knock.
It was 10:07 on a Tuesday. Two officers, a man and a woman, stood under my porch light, and my stomach was on the floor before I got the door open.
"Mrs. Alyssa Chambers?"
“Carter,” I corrected, my mouth suddenly dry. “What's this about?”
“Ma'am, we need to speak with you about your husband, Malik Chambers. Can we come in?”
I stepped back and opened the door all the way. My heart began racing. “Is he hurt? Was there an accident?”
They stepped inside and walked to my living room, positioning themselves on either side of the coffee table.
“Mrs. Carter,” the male officer said gently. “Please, sit down.”
“Just tell me,” I snapped, as panic began to crawl up my body. “Is he hurt?”
“Ma'am, we’re very sorry to have to tell you this,” he said. “Your husband was killed this evening.”
“Killed?” It came out as a whisper. “What do you mean? This has to be a mistake.”
“He was shot, ma'am. In a home in Brookside.”
My brain couldn’t compute what I was being told. “I-I don't understand. He's a banker. He doesn't have enemies. This has to be a mistake.”
The officers exchanged looks, then the female officer spoke gently, gesturing for me to sit down. I wouldn’t.
“There's no mistake, ma'am. The shooting was carried out by the homeowner. He returned home and discovered your husband…” She cleared her throat. “…with his wife, and—”
“With his wife?” I cut her off, stupefied.
“Yes, ma'am. The incident happened around five in the evening. The residence belongs to Ryan and Rebecca Marsh,” she said. “Mr. Marsh opened fire on both of them. Mrs. Marsh is in stable condition. Your husband died at the scene. We’re very sorry for your loss.”
Rebecca Marsh?
My legs gave out and I sank onto my couch.
My head ringing, the room was spinning. My hands were shaking so violently I had to clasp them together.
Somewhere far under the ringing, one clear thought surfaced and would not go back down.
That’s not her name. The woman at the hotel wasn’t named Rebecca.