He Slept with My Best Friend in My House (-The Wife's Receipts- #31)

Chapter 1

Her best friend’s Cedarspan SUV blocked Kathleen Evers’s back gate.

Kathleen slowed at the mouth of the lane, one hand warm from the steering wheel.

The blue vehicle sat crooked enough that its right tires pressed weeds into the gravel.

A white Cedarspan logo ran along the flank.

Cheryl Bledsoe had complained about that logo for two years.

It made every private errand look like company business, and it announced to anyone on the street which of them worked where.

Twelve years of Kathleen’s own paychecks carried the same name.

Kathleen glanced at the dashboard clock and then at her own house.

Her husband, Phillip, wasn’t expecting her until Sunday afternoon. Cheryl wasn’t supposed to be at the house at all.

The client meeting in Des Moines had ended before lunch when the city attorney received a family-emergency call.

Kathleen could have stayed in the hotel, eaten another meal beside a laminated room-service card, and driven home the next morning.

Instead she’d imagined Phillip’s face when she walked in with two unexpected days.

She had stopped for the smoked almonds he liked and a bunch of yellow tulips that now lay across the passenger seat.

She didn’t call him. That had been the point.

The front drive reached the house from the far side of the block. She could have used it, but Cheryl’s parking bothered her. The SUV wasn’t beside the detached garage where a visitor would leave it. Cheryl had backed toward the gate, nose pointed at the lane.

Ready to leave fast.

Kathleen drove past without turning in. She parked beside the shuttered laundromat at the end of the next street, lifted the tulips from the seat, then put them down again.

Her suitcase stayed in the trunk. She took only her phone, then slipped it into her jeans pocket before she reached the gate.

The lane ran behind six houses, most of them walled off by hedges and garages built when families still expected coal deliveries.

The Evers lot was the exception. Phillip had replaced the solid back fence with chain link the year he started the company so his drivers could see the bay, and anyone standing in the lane could see straight across the yard to the kitchen door.

Kathleen edged past the Cedarspan bumper and let herself in at her own gate.

Phillip had promised to fix the swollen latch.

She pressed upward with one hand while she drew the tongue back with the other, keeping the metal from scraping.

The kitchen curtains were open, and the window above the herb box stood cracked a hand’s width for the heat of the stove.

She heard Cheryl before she saw either of them. One short laugh. A breathless instruction. The dull knock of the island shifting against tile.

Kathleen took the phone from her pocket and moved close enough to see through the glass.

Cheryl sat on the edge of the kitchen island with her skirt bunched above her hips.

Phillip stood between her knees, his jeans low, one hand buried in hair that Kathleen had pinned for her three months ago, before a branch-awards dinner, with Cheryl complaining the whole time about the pins.

Cheryl’s pale blouse lay on the floor beside the cabinet where Kathleen kept baking sheets.

Phillip kissed her friend with his eyes closed.

Kathleen’s fingers loosened. Her phone slid out of them into the thyme.

Neither of them turned.

She crouched, found the phone by touch, and pushed it back into her pocket. Her tongue tasted metallic. She had bitten the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood.

Nine years of marriage did not break in a dramatic sound. The refrigerator motor ran. A delivery truck changed gears on the avenue. Cheryl’s heel tapped once against the cabinet Kathleen had refinished during Phillip’s worst business year because replacing it would have cost too much.

Kathleen backed away.

She stepped where she had stepped coming in, avoiding the loose gravel near the drain. The latch resisted again. She eased it up, slipped through, and lowered it without a click.

At the laundromat she got into her car and locked the doors. The smoked almonds waited in their paper bag. The yellow tulips had begun to lean toward the windshield.

She put both hands on the wheel.

Phillip had known Cheryl for almost as long as he had known Kathleen.

Cheryl had stood at Kathleen’s left side through the whole ceremony, holding a folded tissue in the pocket of her dress because Kathleen’s gown had nowhere to put one.

Cheryl had driven Kathleen to the hospital the night Kathleen’s father died.

She signed every birthday card the same way, Love you longer than either of our bad marriages, and it had always been a joke about her own.

Twenty-two months, one lawyer, no regrets. Kathleen’s was the one that had worked.

Kathleen turned her wedding ring once.

Then she stopped touching it.

Her chest hurt in a way she could not do anything about, so she sat with it.

A car went by on the avenue. Somebody’s dog started and stopped.

She thought about walking back up that lane and putting her hand through the window and letting the whole street watch her do it, and she wanted it badly enough that her jaw ached.

She did not do it.

She had spent twelve years reading contracts for the sentence that would cost her company money, and the thing she knew about people who were already lying was that the first hour was the only hour they were bad at it.

Give them a night and they would have a story.

Give them a warning and they would show her exactly which story they had picked.

Her first impulse had been the gate. Her second was Cheryl’s regional vice president. The third arrived colder and stayed longer: find out what they believed she would do.

She called Phillip.

He answered on the fifth ring. “Hey, sweetheart.”

His voice caught, followed by the quick clearing of his throat.

Kathleen watched a bus pass the laundromat’s papered-over window. “The meeting wrapped early.”

Phillip didn’t answer right away. A cabinet closed on his end.

“That’s great,” he said. “Are you still in Des Moines?”

“I’m about twenty minutes from home. I thought I’d warn you so I didn’t scare you coming in.”

Something struck tile. Cheryl muttered too far from the phone for Kathleen to make out the words.

“You should’ve called sooner.” Phillip laughed, but no humor reached the sound. “I would’ve had dinner started.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

“Wait, Kat. I spilled grease across the kitchen floor. Give me twenty before you walk through it.”

“Twenty.” Kathleen disconnected.

She put the phone face-down on the passenger seat, beside the tulips, and watched the dashboard clock change.

It was the longest twenty minutes of her life and she gave him every one of them.

At six minutes, the nose of Cheryl’s SUV swung out of the lane and onto the cross street without stopping at the sidewalk.

Cheryl drove with both hands clamped high on the wheel and her blouse misbuttoned at the collar.

She looked straight ahead. She passed within twenty feet of Kathleen’s car and never turned her head, because there was no reason on earth for Kathleen’s car to be parked outside a closed laundromat.

At fourteen minutes, Kathleen took the tulips and the paper bag of smoked almonds and dropped them into the trash barrel chained to the laundromat wall.

At nineteen, she slipped her phone back into her pocket, started the engine, and drove the long way around the block to the front of the house, the way a woman coming in from the highway would.

The front curtain shifted as she pulled into the drive. Phillip opened the door while she was still at the trunk. He wore clean jeans and a navy polo, damp along the neckline. He had used mouthwash. Kathleen smelled mint when he kissed the air beside her cheek.

“Look at you,” he said. “Home two days early.”

“The attorney had a sick child.”

“I knew there had to be a reason.”

He reached for the suitcase. Kathleen let him take it. A crescent of coral polish had caught under the edge of his thumbnail. Cheryl had come to Thursday’s staff meeting with the same shade on and complained about it for an hour.

Inside, the kitchen floor gleamed in wide wet strokes. A greasy shop towel lay beside the sink. Phillip had pushed the island back against the grout line, but one leg sat crooked. A wineglass stood upside down in the drying rack beside his water glass.

“Cheryl stopped by,” he said.

Kathleen hadn’t asked.

“Did she?”

“Vendor file. She needed a courier answer before Monday.” He nodded toward a blank blue Cedarspan presentation sleeve on the table. “I told her she could’ve emailed, but you know Cheryl. If she’s already in the neighborhood, she wants the answer now.”

Kathleen looked at the sleeve. The Cedarspan logo faced the correct direction, but the clear title pocket was empty. It could have held anything or nothing.

“Her SUV was pulling out when I came in,” Kathleen said.

Phillip bent to fuss with the suitcase zipper. “She was late meeting somebody. Probably embarrassed you caught her using company wheels for a personal stop.”

It came out whole, with the anxious generosity he used when a customer accused one of his drivers of damage. The sleeve, the vendor file, the reason she couldn’t email, the reason she left in a hurry. Twenty minutes had been enough to build all of it.

Kathleen walked past him to the refrigerator. “I need water.”

She took a bottle and drank until the metallic taste weakened. Phillip stood behind her, waiting for a question she did not intend to ask.

“Want to go out?” he said. “Make a night of it?”

“I’ve been on the road since noon.”

Phillip offered tomorrow instead and said Cheryl had recommended a new place downtown.

Kathleen tightened her grip on the bottle until the plastic crackled.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

?

That night Phillip slept with one arm across the space between them. Kathleen lay on her side facing the dresser. She did not close her eyes until his breathing settled into the soft whistle he denied making.

Her work phone lit on the charging stand.

She reached for it before the vibration woke him.

The email came from Cedarspan’s equipment-transfer system. The subject line read: EXCEPTION REQUIRES ACCOUNT APPROVER REVIEW.

Kathleen opened it.

A shipment of commercial cellular gateways had left a branch on an approved courier route and never arrived.

Cedarspan installed the sealed units on construction sites, twelve to a carton, and they were not cheap.

When equipment went missing between two scans, the system opened an exception and sent it to the one person whose approval had put that shipment on that route.

The notice listed her.

Kathleen Evers.

She had never seen the shipment before.