Chapter 4
Naomi
Maggie Turner's office was above a dry cleaner's, up a narrow flight of stairs that smelled like steam and starch, and I almost didn't go in.
I sat in my car for eleven minutes first. I know it was eleven because I watched the clock.
Never once had I imagine myself as the woman sitting outside a private investigator's office working up the nerve to learn something she already knows.
There's a specific shame in that — in paying a stranger to confirm what your own gut has been screaming for weeks.
I kept thinking about turning the key and driving home and going back to the static, the not-knowing, the version of my life where I could still pretend.
Then I thought about Tia's throat, and the emerald, and I went up the stairs.
The woman behind the desk didn't stand when I came in. She looked me over once — quick, thorough, the way you'd read a page you'd read a hundred times before — and pointed at the chair across from her.
"Sit down before you change your mind," she said. "You've already changed it twice in the parking lot. I watched."
I sat.
She was maybe fifty, sharp-featured, with reading glasses pushed up into gray-streaked hair and the general air of a woman who had run entirely out of patience for nonsense sometime in the last decade and considered it the best thing that ever happened to her.
There was a mug on her desk that said WORLD'S WORST GOLFER. She saw me read it.
"Client gave it to me," she said. "I don't golf. Kept it because it's honest. Most things aren't." She folded her hands. "Maggie Turner. You're Naomi."
"Yes."
She nodded. "Okay, Naomi. Here's how this goes. You tell me what you think is happening, I tell you whether it's worth my time and your money to find out, and neither of us wastes an afternoon lying to each other. That work?"
It was so far from the soft, hand-holding thing I'd braced for that I almost laughed. "That works."
"Good." She pulled a legal pad toward her. "Husband?"
"How did you—"
"It's always the husband. Or the wife, but you don't look like a woman here about a wife." She clicked her pen. "So. Tell me what you already know and don't think you're allowed to."
I told her everything. Not just about the anniversary necklace that ended up on my best friend.
I told her about the phone he'd started carrying into the bathroom.
The gym schedule that had quietly doubled.
The way he'd stopped fighting with me — how the fighting had gone somewhere, and I hadn't understood where until I stopped being able to breathe at my own reflection.
And of course, I told her about the emerald, and the way Tia's hand had come up to her throat at the luncheon, and how I'd spent three days telling myself I was insane.
didn't write much. Mostly she watched me, and every so often she made a small sound in her throat that I couldn't read.
When I finished, she set down the pen.
"You're not insane," she said. "I want to say that part first, because you've clearly been beating yourself up about it, and I'd like you to stop.
The stuff you've been ignoring? That's not you being paranoid.
That's you being suspicious and not wanting to be.
Paranoia and suspicions are two different things.
" She leaned back. "The gut knows first. It always knows first. The brain just takes a while to sign the paperwork. "
I felt my eyes sting and hated it.
"I know how you feel. I’ve been there a myself.
" She picked the pen back up. "That's actually why I do this. Somebody told me for eleven years I was crazy, that I was imagining things. Then one day, I started digging. Like really digging. You should’ve seen the look on his face when I put the photos on the table—" She stopped, and the corner of her mouth ticked up.
"Best afternoon of my life. Now I sell it wholesale. "
That had me grinning. The first real smile I’d had in days.
The wait was the worst part.
Maggie told me it would be. "Ten days, maybe two weeks," she said.
"Go home. Act completely normal. Whatever normal has been — keep being it.
This is the part people mess up. They get proof coming and they can't keep their face still, and then he gets careful, and then I've got nothing.
" She'd looked at me hard. "Can you keep him from suspecting, Naomi? "
I almost laughed again.
"He doesn’t pay me enough attention to suspect anything," I said.
Her face softened. "That’s a good thing now," she said. "Use it."
So I did. I went home and I performed my marriage like the professional I'd apparently become.
I made Aaron's coffee. I asked about his day and listened to the parts that were lies and said that's great, honey in the right places.
I did the thing I'd always done — smoothed his path, anticipated his needs, ran the whole machine of his comfortable life — except now I was watching my own hands do it, from somewhere far away, taking notes.
It's a strange thing, to discover you've spent years developing a skill for exactly the moment it would be used against the people who taught it to you.
I got very good at watching. I saw the phone-in-the-bathroom now for what it was.
I saw the nights he "worked late" line up, when I bothered to check, with the nights Tia posted nothing on her carefully curated feeds — both of them gone dark at once, again and again, a pattern so obvious once I let myself see it that I couldn't believe I'd missed it.
I didn't say a word. I just made his coffee, and waited, and kept my face perfectly, beautifully still.
Maggie called on a Thursday, right after Aaron had an over-night “emergency work trip” out of town. The thing was that I’d expected the call. I made the drive down to her office immediately.
The file on her desk was thinner than I'd imagined. I don't know what I'd pictured — some fat dossier, a lifetime of betrayal weighed out in paper. It was a slim manila folder, and she kept her hand flat on top of it for a moment before she slid it across.
"You can look, or I can tell you," she said. "Some people want to hear it first. Softens the landing a little."
"Tell me."
She didn't dress it up. "It's real. It's been going on at least eight months, based on what I found — probably longer.
They're careful in some ways and idiots in others, which is standard.
There's a hotel they use across town, always the same one, always a weekday.
He pays cash. She doesn't." A dry beat. "She's not the brains of the operation, if it's any comfort, which it won't be. "
Eight months. Eight months put the start of it before my birthday where he'd toasted me in front of his whole family and I'd cried a little, touched, stupid.
"Okay," Maggie said, watching my face. "Ready to see the proof?"
"Show me."
She opened the folder.
The photographs were exactly as clear as I'd paid for them to be.
Aaron, coming out of a hotel entrance. Aaron and Tia, in a parking lot, close in the way that leaves no room for innocent explanation — his hand at the small of her back, her face tipped up, both of them laughing at something the way people laugh when they think no one they know can see them.
Another one of them sharing a kiss. Them at dinner, candle lit. Another kiss.
I looked at them for a long time.
I waited to fall apart. I'd been braced for it for two weeks — the collapse, the sob, the animal sound.
Maggie had a box of tissues sitting ready at the corner of the desk, angled toward me, and I understood it was there because most women needed it and I appreciated, distantly, that she'd thought of it.
But it didn't come.
What came instead was quiet. A cold, clean, spreading quiet, like a room going still after a noise you'd stopped noticing finally stops. For five years I'd been the invisible thing that made Aaron's life run. Nobody in that photograph knew what I knew.
They had no idea what I could do when I finally decided to do it for myself.
"Naomi?" Maggie was watching me, and there was something new in her look now — not pity. Recognition. "You okay? You've gone somewhere."
"I'm fine," I said. And to my own surprise, it was true. "Can I keep these?"
She studied me a moment longer, and then that corner of her mouth ticked up again, the way it had when she'd talked about photos on a table and the best afternoon of her life.
"Honey," she said, sliding the folder the rest of the way across the desk, "you can do whatever you want with them. That's the whole point." She reached for the WORLD'S WORST GOLFER mug and lifted it, half a toast. "Welcome to the part where you stop being crazy and start being right."
Ididn't cry in the car.
I sat in the parking lot again — ten minutes, maybe more, I didn't check this time — with the folder on the passenger seat, and I didn't cry. It was a strange feeling. Like I was past crying. Or maybe my body and my brain instinctively knew that I couldn’t fall apart.
Not yet. And if I cried, I just might crumble into pieces.
I wasn't going to confront him. Confrontation was loud, and fast, and it gave the other person a chance to react, to spin, to grab the moment before you could think.
I was going to prepare.
I picked up my phone, opened my messages, and scrolled down to the message Tia had sent two weeks ago: Text me when you get it, I want that picture.
I looked at the necklace in the photograph on the seat beside me, around her neck, and then I looked at her message, and then, I laughed. Actually laughed. Like, I cackled like a witch.
Oh, I thought. You'll get your picture, Tia.
You have no idea what's coming.