20. Lo #3
Jeans up, clumsy with the belly, underwear shoved back into place over the mess.
Belt. Shirt yanked straight. Straw in my hair that I rake out with both hands, pink to the ears, pulse still slamming in my cunt where he’s not anymore.
I can feel him running down my leg. I leave it.
He lies there one extra breath like he’s been unplugged, cock wet against his stomach, then he’s moving too, stuffing himself back into his jeans, zipper, the performance of a man who was only ever wrestling agricultural supplies.
“Kids’ll be up here in twenty minutes,” I say, and my voice is almost normal. “The back wall still isn’t anchored.”
“I’ll finish it.”
“Your technique is still chaos.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I do not look at him when he says that. I go down the ladder first. Plausible deniability. Dignity. What little remains of it. My thighs stick together on the rungs.
He’s three rungs behind me when the question that’s been sitting in my chest since Sloane stood in my kitchen and quoted my private conversations back to me comes out of my mouth like it belongs to the bake sale, like it’s about twine.
“Did you ever tell her things about me? About us? Even once, even tired, even by accident? I know what you said about the phone. I’m asking anyway.”
He goes still on the ladder. One boot on a rung. The whole barn seems to hold.
“Never.” His voice is stripped. “Not once. Not tired, not drunk, not by accident. Everything she had, she took off my phone. I’ve gone back over it every night since you left, and it’s the only way it fits.”
My stomach turns cold.
We hit the barn floor. Dust, heat, the smell of sugar from the lawn. I don’t look at the loft. I look at him.
“The texts,” I say. “The voicemails. Our anniversary. The-” I stop. The ticklish spot below his left ribs. A teasing threat I sent him one night about hogging the blankets. Things only we had. “She stood in my kitchen and used my own words.”
“I never told her anything. Nothing about you. Nothing about us. Nothing about our marriage.” He’s steady now.
Certain in a way that isn’t performance.
“I handed over a password and never asked what else it opened, and that part is on me. But the words came off a screen, Lo. They never came out of my mouth.”
I think about the voicemail I left after our anniversary. Crying. Telling him how much it hurt that he forgot. Things meant for him alone.
“Show me.”
He pulls the phone, scrolls back, turns the screen. There it is. My words. My timestamp. My playful threat about the blankets.
“It was all sitting right here,” I say slowly. “Every bit of it.”
“Yes. I can’t prove she read it - not yet. But it explains how she knew things I never told her.” He meets my eyes. “Peter said Pruitt’s people might be able to pull access logs from the label’s system. If she was reading my messages through work servers, there’d be a record.”
“That’s not proof. That’s a theory.”
“It’s a theory that fits. And it’s better than believing I betrayed you.”
The text names the same ticklish spot Sloane mentioned in my kitchen.
She could have got them from here instead of from Jesse.
The coldness isn’t anger. It’s seeing it with my own eyes instead of taking his word for it in a barn full of phones. Used my own words against me. Made me doubt him by throwing our private life back in my face.
He didn’t hand it over. But he left the door unlocked. And she walked through it.
“I should have guarded it better,” he says. “I wanted convenient, and convenient turned into her listening to my wife cry on a voicemail.” His jaw tightens. “When those logs come back, we’ll know exactly what she opened and when.”
“It’s not your fault she’s a manipulator.”
“It’s my fault I let her get close enough to manipulate.”
“That’s probably true.”
He almost laughs. Bitter. “You’re supposed to argue with me.”
“I’m supposed to be honest with you. That’s what we’re doing now, right? Honesty?”
“Right.” His jaw sets in that particular way that means he’s made a decision. “Then here’s some honesty: I’m going to prove it. All of it. That I never touched her. That she’s been lying. That every piece of ammunition she’s used against us was stolen, not given.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to figure it out.” He meets my eyes. Hay still in his hair. My teeth-print probably still under his shirt. “In front of people this time. Not behind closed doors. Not privately. I’m going to prove it where everyone can see.”
“Jesse-”
“I let her operate in the shadows for a year. That’s done. Whatever I do next, it’s going to be public. Undeniable.” A beat. “You deserve that. You deserve to have everyone know the truth.”
I don’t know what he’s planning. The look on his face suggests he doesn’t fully know either, just that he’s drawn a line.
Outside, the choir starts another hymn. Children shriek. Someone rings the cash box. Sixty people in the yard, and none of them know what the hayloft just held, or what he’s just promised, or that my stomach is still cold, or that I’m walking around with him still wet on my thighs.
I don’t know yet what that means.