He Was Loyal to the Wrong Woman (The Unseen Wives #5)

Chapter 1

The thing nobody tells you about a perfect life is how much of it is laundry.

I had the house in Cedar Hollow with the porch that wrapped around two sides, the one realtors call a Craftsman even when it isn't, and a kitchen island so big you could land a small plane on it if the plane could tolerate the smell of the lemon Method spray I used twice a day because Spencer liked the counters to squeak.

I had the matching tumblers, sixteen of them, frosted glass, the kind you buy when you have decided your marriage is the sort that will host things.

I had a husband who was a dentist, which in Cedar Hollow is roughly the social rank of minor royalty, and I had a calendar on the fridge with everything color-coded in dry-erase marker, and on that particular Tuesday in March the calendar said GROCERIES in green and DR. V LATE in blue and nothing at all in the box that would have warned me.

So. Laundry.

I was folding Spencer's undershirts when Dana called.

My sister has exactly one ringtone for her own calls and a different one she assigned to herself on my phone without asking, a little air-horn blast, because Dana believes that if a thing is worth doing it is worth doing loudly enough to startle a neighbor.

I had a towel over my shoulder and one of his shirts pinned under my chin, and I answered with my elbow.

"Where is he right now," Dana said. No hello. Dana skipped hellos the way other people skip the terms and conditions.

"Hi, Dana, I'm great, thanks for asking."

"It's Tuesday. Where is he."

"He's at the office. He has a late patient, a root canal, and the Dunmore kid’s extraction.

" I tucked the phone tighter against my shoulder and matched a sock to its twin, and the twin was the wrong twin, gray instead of charcoal, and I set the impostor aside in the little graveyard pile of single socks that I refused to throw away on the grounds that one day their partners would return like soldiers from a war. "Why?”

"Because Marsha saw his car at the Residence Inn on Route 9 at four o'clock."

"Marsha saw a silver Lexus. There are about nine hundred silver Lexuses in this town. Spencer leases his because everyone in the Chamber leases the same one, it's practically a uniform."

"It had the sticker. The smile sticker with his practice logo. On the back window."

I stopped folding. Only for a second. Then I picked up the next shirt because if you stop folding you have to think, and I have always been a person who would rather fold.

"Dana, he gives those stickers to patients.

There are probably forty of those stickers driving around Cedar Hollow right now stuck to the back of forty cars that are not my husband's. "

"Forty silver Lexuses with the sticker at the Residence Inn at four in the afternoon."

"It's a hotel with a parking lot. People park there. Maybe he had a lunch meeting."

"At four."

"A late lunch meeting."

Dana made the sound she makes, which is not quite a sigh and not quite a word, a kind of exhale through the nose that has been my soundtrack since I was eleven and she was fourteen and she informed me that my haircut made me look like a thumb.

She has been right about a frightening number of things over the years, including the haircut, which is exactly why I have spent so much of my life refusing to give her the satisfaction.

"I'm just telling you what Marsha saw," she said.

"And I'm just telling you that Marsha thought the moon landing was filmed in a Costco."

"That was one time and she'd had wine."

"It was a school board meeting at ten in the morning."

"She brings a thermos." Dana let that sit, because she knew it was funny and she wanted me to laugh, and I did, because she's my sister and she's allowed to be exhausting in a way that is also the most comfortable thing in my life.

"Just keep your eyes open, Kel. That's all I'm saying. You go around with your eyes shut and a mop in your hand.”

"My eyes are open. I have beautiful, wide-open, fully functioning eyes."

"You have your mother's eyes. She didn't see Dad's second family until they were at the funeral."

That one I let go past me, the way you let a wasp go past you, very still, very polite, hoping it has somewhere better to be. Our father is a separate book and not a fun one.

I changed the subject to whether she wanted to split a tray of the good lasagna from Bartoli's for Sunday, and she said yes the way she always says yes to lasagna, like it was a concession she was making at great personal cost, and we hung up, and I stood in my laundry room that smelled like dryer sheets and lemon and looked at the impostor sock for a while.

Here is what you have to understand about me at thirty-eight, in March, before any of it.

I was happy. That's the part people don't believe later, when I tell it. They want me to have known, to have felt it in the air like weather, to have lain awake at night with a tight feeling and a sense of doom. But the truth is I slept like a stone.

I had built a life that fit me the way a good shoe fits, broken in, no blisters, and I wore it every day without thinking about my feet. Spencer was a good husband by every metric I had been taught to use.

He came home. He remembered my mother's birthday. He told me I looked nice when I had clearly put in effort and even, occasionally, when I had not.

He had soft hands, professionally soft, the hands of a man who moisturized for his career, and when he laughed he tipped his head back and you could see all his teeth, which were of course perfect, which was sort of the whole brand.

I met him fifteen years ago at a wedding where I was a bridesmaid in a dress the color of a bruise and he was a groomsman who told me my speech was the only good one.

I had a high school boyfriend in my rearview by then, a real one, the kind you measure others against for the rest of your life if you're not careful, and I had been careful.

I'd put Bryan Foster in a drawer in my head and I'd married a man with a 401(k) and a vision for a practice, and on the whole I considered that the responsible choice, the grown-up choice, the choice my mother would have made if my mother had ever once in her life chosen the man who came home.

I had no children, which in Cedar Hollow makes you a small mystery people are too polite to solve out loud.

We had tried, in the loose way you try when you are both very busy and very afraid of the answer, and then we had stopped trying without ever deciding to, and the not-deciding had become its own kind of decision, and I had filled the room that would have been a nursery with a Peloton and a reading chair I never sat in.

Spencer said we had each other and the practice, and the practice was practically a child, a child that needed a new panoramic X-ray machine and a payment plan for the new panoramic X-ray machine.

I had done the books for that practice for the first six years, by the way.

I built the spreadsheets. I knew where every dollar lived and where it slept at night, back when it was the two of us in a strip-mall suite next to a salon, before the new building, before the aquarium in the waiting room with the one mean fish, before Brielle.

But I'm getting ahead.

That Tuesday Spencer came home at six forty, which was not late for a man who had stayed for a root canal, and he smelled like the office, that clean clove-and-latex smell that I had stopped noticing years ago the way you stop noticing your own hallway.

He kissed the top of my head. He asked what was for dinner and I said chicken and he said great and he meant it, because Spencer was a man who genuinely thought chicken was great, which is either a virtue or a warning depending on your perspective.

"How was the Dunmore kid," I said.

He had his head in the fridge, looking for the seltzer, the lime kind, we only ever had the lime kind because he didn't like the others and I had stopped buying the others. "Who?"

"The Dunmore kid. The root canal. Your late patient."

"Oh." He came up with the can, popped it, and the little hiss filled the kitchen. "Yeah. Rescheduled. His mom called, he had a tournament. So I just caught up on charts."

"You stayed late to do charts?”

"You know how it is." He took a long drink, and over the top of the can his eyes did a small thing, a flick toward me and then away, the kind of look a man gives when he is checking whether you have noticed something, and I noticed it the way you notice a stair that's a half inch shorter than the rest, your whole body registering the wrongness a beat before your brain can name it.

Then he smiled, all those teeth, and said the chicken smelled great, and I told myself I was tired and Dana was in my head and Marsha needed glasses, and I went to take the chicken out of the oven.

The chicken was perfect. I'm a very good cook. That's another thing nobody tells you. You can do every single thing right, the chicken can be perfect, the counters can squeak, and the man can still flick his eyes toward the door.

I just didn't know yet that the door was already open.