Chapter 5
Naomi
Itold no one.
That was the first decision, and in some ways the hardest, because betrayal wants an audience — wants a sister on the phone, a friend across a bottle of wine, a chorus of women saying he did what, that bastard, I never liked him. I understood the pull of it. There's comfort in being witnessed.
But witnesses talk. And right now, my advantage — the only advantage I had — was that Aaron didn't know I knew.
Also, it wasn’t like I can go running to my best friend, the traitorous bitch. I also didn’t trust any other of my friends because technically, they were Aaron and Mia’s friends too.
So I kept the folder in a place he'd never look, which turned out to be almost anywhere, because Aaron had stopped looking at the details of my life years ago.
That was the thing I understood now that I hadn't before: his obliviousness wasn't an accident.
It was a luxury I'd paid for. I'd made his world so smooth, so frictionless, that he'd forgotten there was machinery underneath it at all.
He'd forgotten there was a me underneath it.
Fine.
Let him keep forgetting. Right up until the moment I wanted him to remember.
Maggie helped set me up with a lawyer. I paid the consultation in cash. I used an email address Aaron didn't know existed, one I'd made in the parking lot outside Maggie's office because some cold, forward-thinking part of me had already known I'd need it.
Diane Sullivan was younger than I'd expected and entirely unsentimental, which I appreciated. She looked at the photographs once, in a matter of fact way, the way Maggie had.
"Adultery isn't the lever it used to be in a no-fault state, I want you to understand that going in.
" She set the photos down. "But it matters for other things.
And—" she tapped one image, the parking garage, the emerald "—if he's been spending marital assets on her, that's a different conversation.
Jewelry. Hotels. Gifts. Money always leaves a mark. "
Money always leaves a mark. I wrote it down somewhere behind my eyes, next to Maggie's the gut knows first. I was collecting these women's truths like tools, and I was going to use every one.
"What do you need from me?" I asked.
Diane smiled, just slightly. "Most clients ask what I can do for them. You asked what you can do." She pulled a legal pad toward her. "Okay. Here's your homework, and you're going to be good at it, I can already tell. I need more documents. All of them."
So I got them.
For three weeks I ran the most careful campaign of my life, and I ran it under Aaron's nose, in his own house, while making his coffee every morning and asking about his day every night.
I copied statements. I photographed account numbers.
I found the credit card he thought I didn't know about — the one that paid for hotel rooms and, once, memorably, for an emerald pendant from a jeweler downtown, the total amount that made me sit very still on the edge of our bed for a long moment before I photographed that too, my hands perfectly steady.
He never noticed. Why would he? I was the wife. I was the furniture. I was the warm, reliable, unremarkable thing that kept his life running, and it had never once occurred to him that furniture might be taking notes.
I want to tell you it felt like triumph. Mostly it felt like grief. Every document was a small confirmation of how completely I'd disappeared — how thoroughly I'd let myself become invisible in exchange for a peace that had turned out to be a lie the whole time.
But grief is a survivable thing. Though it had nearly killed me those first weeks. It was starting to feel better now, because I knew I’d done all I could turn myself from victim to winner.
The hardest part wasn't Aaron. It was Tia.
She texted me on a Wednesday — bright, breezy, lunch? it's been forever, I miss your face!! — and every instinct I had wanted to let the phone go to the bottom of the ocean. But the plan needed her comfortable. The plan needed everyone comfortable.
So I went.
She wore it, of course. The emerald. Right there at her throat at a corner table in the good part of town, catching the light exactly the way I'd once imagined it would catch mine, and she talked for forty minutes about her life and her renovations and a man she was "sort of seeing but it's complicated," and I said oh, complicated how?
in a voice of pure warm interest, and watched her lie to my face while wearing the necklace my husband bought her with our money.
At one point she touched it. Absently, the way you touch a thing you've stopped noticing you own.
I drove home and sat in the garage, and I finally cried.
Because anyone who didn’t after all these couldn’t possibly be human.
Then, after a big sob, I filed it all away.
I put it in the same place I kept the documents and the photographs, the cold room in me that was filling up now with everything I'd need.
Then, with my makeup fixed, and looking perfect again, I went inside and made dinner.