Chapter 6
Chapter Six
“No.” The word left Abby before she understood that she had spoken, and then it came again, firmer because repetition made it feel more defensible. “No, they aren’t.”
Evan remained several feet away, his wet clothes dripping onto the hallway runner. He did not argue or move closer, and his stillness made her want to strike at him more than anger would have.
“I know what I saw,” he said, lowering the iPad to his side. His voice carried none of the urgency that had brought him through the rain, only a terrible restraint. “I wouldn’t be here if there were another explanation.”
“There is another explanation.” Abby pulled her robe more tightly around herself, suddenly aware that she was standing in her slippers and speaking to Evan McDermott after midnight while Hudson’s side of the bed waited empty behind her.
“There has to be, because Hudson is in Ashford with his father and the merger attorneys, and Makayla is flying to Cleveland for a presentation.”
Evan’s face tightened when she supplied the locations. “Makayla never went to the airport.”
“You don’t know that.” Abby heard the desperation sharpening her voice but could not lower it. “You found an old iPad in a closet, and now you’re standing here telling me two people we’ve known for nine years are—They would never.”
She could not complete the sentence. Naming the accusation would give it a shape it did not deserve.
“Come inside,” she said instead, stepping away from the door. “You’re waking the neighbors.”
Evan followed her into the apartment without removing his coat.
Abby switched on the lamp beside the sofa, and its warm circle of light made the room look exactly as it had before she went to bed: Hudson’s empty water glass on the coffee table, the wedding samples arranged beside a vase of dying flowers, and one of his shoes beneath the chair where he had kicked it days earlier.
Nothing in the room belonged to a woman whose fiancé was sleeping with her best friend. The evidence of her actual life surrounded her too completely for Evan’s claim to enter it.
“Show me what you think you found,” Abby said as she sat on the edge of the sofa. She held out her hand, but when Evan approached with the iPad, every instinct in her recoiled. “No, you open it.”
He sat in the armchair rather than beside her and wiped rain from the screen with his sleeve. The cartoon logo from Makayla’s company smiled above a crack in the case, a cheerful blue capsule with arms and legs that Abby had teased her about when the sales team received them at a conference.
Evan entered a passcode and opened a message thread labeled with a single letter. “This was already open when I found it. The messages were coming through because the iPad was still connected to her account.”
Abby looked at the screen but refused to take it. The first visible message had been sent by Makayla to “H” at nine forty-three that evening: I told him Cleveland. He believed me.
The sentence seemed ordinary for several seconds, a collection of familiar words arranged in a way Abby could not understand. She reread it until the meaning began to press at the inside of her skull.
“That could be anyone.” She looked up at Evan, waiting for him to recognize how recklessly he had interpreted it. “H could be one of her doctors, or her regional manager, or someone from work.”
Evan scrolled to the response and held the screen toward her. “Read the next one.” Beneath Makayla’s message, H had written, They always believe us. That’s why this works.
Abby’s stomach contracted so violently that she pressed one hand beneath her ribs. “Hudson wouldn’t write like that.” Abby shook her head before Evan could answer.
Evan’s expression flickered with pain. “There’s a photograph farther up.”
“Anyone can send a photograph.” She stood too quickly and crossed toward the window, putting distance between herself and the screen.
Rain coursed down the glass, obscuring the apartment buildings on the other side of the courtyard.
“Makayla could be covering for someone. Hudson could be helping her with something she doesn’t want you to know. ”
“Abby.” Evan spoke her name quietly, and the compassion in his voice felt unbearable. “Please look at it.”
She turned because refusing had begun to feel more dangerous than seeing. Evan held out the iPad, and this time she took it.
The photograph showed Hudson’s hand resting on a woman’s bare thigh.
His face was outside the frame, but Abby recognized the square silver cuff links Robert Covington had given him, the pale scar across his thumb, and the watch she had bought for his thirtieth birthday.
Makayla’s diamond bracelet circled the wrist at the edge of the image.
Abby enlarged the photograph with unsteady fingers. Beneath their hands lay a hotel bedspread patterned in dark green leaves, and on the nightstand sat a room-service tray holding a bottle of champagne and two glasses. The caption my favorite place is inside you.
Abby felt bile rising in her throat. She fought the urge to vomit. “This doesn’t show their faces.” Her voice sounded far away, blurred by the pressure filling her ears. “You can’t know it’s them. Or when it was taken.”
“It came through last week” Evan leaned forward with his forearms braced against his knees, but he still did not reach for her. “There’s a room number in the messages. They’re at the Harrington tonight in Ashford.”
Abby stared down at the photograph until Hudson’s hand ceased to resemble part of a human body. It became scar, watch, cuff, fingers—the separate pieces from which her mind might construct someone else if she tried hard enough.
She backed out of the image and scrolled. The messages above it reached beyond the evening, past arrangements for Ashford and Cleveland, into conversations whose dates stretched backward through the months.
She chose the ivory, “H” had written four days earlier. Of course she did.
Makayla’s answer appeared beneath it. She’s so basic.
Hudson had responded with a photograph of the wine in their refrigerator. Abby recognizd it as theirs from the casserole dish that had been her grandmothers. You should have taken the rest of the wine. She wasn’t drinking it anyway, she’s so fucking wasteful.
Abby dropped the iPad onto the sofa, where it landed facedown against the cushion without breaking.
The sound seemed enormous in the quiet room, and she stood over it with both hands pressed to her mouth as Friday night rearranged itself around the messages: Makayla touching the bracelet, Hudson watching her hand, their brief pauses.
“How long?” she asked, although she did not know whether she wanted an answer. Her hands lowered enough for the words to pass between them. “How far back do the messages go?”
Evan’s answer was a hesitation, a moment in which Abby watched him decide exactly how to translate his private devastation into something that could be shared.
Wet hair stuck to his forehead, a line of water ran from his collar, and the cold in his voice was the cold of a man who had not come in from the street but who had been walking outside for years.
“I stopped reading after eighteen months,” he said.
The number entered her body like cold. If she touched Evan’s shoulder she imagined her hand would find the chill there already; it was the only thing that belonged to both of them. Eighteen months.
Eighteen months ago, Hudson had proposed in the garden behind his parents’ house while Makayla waited inside with champagne and a camera.
Makayla had cried harder than Abby’s sister, then spent the rest of the night asking to see the ring whenever the light caught it differently.
In the pictures, Makayla’s face was pressed to her shoulder, her arms looped around Abby’s waist, her nails painted with the same pale pink because Makayla had insisted they get them done together the day before.
The photographs lived in a folder called “Family” on Abby’s phone, and she had looked at them every time she doubted that anyone could want her that much.
Hudson had told her once that she was incapable of reading people’s motives. He meant it as a compliment, because she believed the things she was told and did not operate by permanent suspicion. It had sounded like a compliment at the time, and she believed him.
Now, she saw the proposal as a rope thrown into water, the way it skipped over the surface, only reaching her because someone else had pulled from the opposite shore.
“No,” Abby said, but the word was for herself.
She walked toward the kitchen because the living room no longer contained enough air.
She gripped the edge of the island and stared at the dark window above the sink.
Outside, the rain fell with such precision that it looked staged.
The city was washed blank, the buildings flattened.
She watched her own reflection in the glass and tried not to cry.
Behind her, Evan remained where he was, allowing the distance she had created.
“She planned the engagement dinner,” said Abby, not for the first time discovering her voice by accident.
“She helped Hudson pick out the ring. She went to four different jewelers with him. She sent me memes about bridesmaid hair.” Here the words caught, but Abby pressed through them.
“She told me that I would make a hot wife, and she said she’d always be my person, even if we ended up broke and eating boxed cake for holidays. She is my best friend. Was.”
The last words sounded so adolescent, so insufficient, that she wanted to take them back. Instead, she gripped the countertop harder, the sinews in her wrist standing out.
“I know,” said Evan, and there was nothing judgmental in his tone, only an echo of the thing she did not want to admit: that he knew all these things about Makayla, too.