Chapter 5
UNDENIABLE PROOF
“Table for two, please. Something near the back.”
The hostess smiles and grabs two menus and leads us past the bar, past the open kitchen with its copper pots and burner flames, into the dim back half of the restaurant where the booths have high leather backs and the lighting is the kind of low that exists exclusively to make people look good and feel reckless.
I slide in facing the front. Cecily slides in across from me.
She’s wearing red lipstick and a black dress she grabbed from the back of her closet, and she looks like a woman here for a birthday dinner, not a stakeout.
“Don’t look yet,” she says, opening her menu.
I don’t need to look. I already saw them on the way in.
Front of the restaurant, window table, candlelight.
Preston in a navy blazer I’ve never seen—new, sharp, tailored in a way that nothing in our closet is.
And across from him, Sloane. Black dress.
Hair down. Her chin resting on her hand, her whole body angled toward him like a flower tracking the sun.
We’ve been in San Francisco for three hours.
I dropped all three kids at my mother’s in Rancho Santa Fe with overnight bags and told her what we were doing.
My mother took Rosie from my arms and said “Take as much time as you need to get it done.” Cecily had us booked two seats on the 11 AM out of San Diego.
I sat in the window seat with my phone in my lap, tracking the Nexus conference schedule, cross-referencing the hotel—the Fairmont, because Preston always stays at the Fairmont—and when the conference ended at five, we were already waiting in the lobby of a café three blocks away.
We followed them here. Acquerello. Northern Italian. I found it on his credit card statement two trips ago. A bottle of Barolo. He submitted that as a client dinner.
“Okay,” Cecily says. “I’m looking.”
She lifts her menu just high enough to see past the edge. Her eyes find the window table and stay there.
“Jesus, Brit.”
“I know.”
“That’s not—there’s nothing professional about that.”
“I know.”
And I do know. But there’s a part of me—small, stubborn, stupid—that’s still trying to narrate an alternate version. She’s his secretary. They’re celebrating a successful conference. Colleagues have dinners. People sit across candlelit tables from coworkers and it doesn’t mean—
His hand reaches across the table. Palm up. Open. Waiting. And Sloane lays her fingers in it, and he closes around them, and the alternate version dies mid-sentence.
“He’s holding her hand,” I say. My voice sounds like it’s coming from across the room.
“I see it.”
“I can’t remember the last time he held my hand, Cecily.”
Cecily puts the menu down. She’s looking at me now, not them. “Brit.”
“It’s been years since he took me to a dinner like this.
” The words come out cracked and strange and I hate them.
I hate the wistfulness in my own voice—the pathetic, aching smallness of it.
I sound like a woman who misses her husband, and I don’t want to miss him.
I want to be furious. I am furious. But the fury and the missing are tangled together in my chest like two angry cats fighting in a bag and I can’t separate them.
I watch him lean across the table. Watch him reach up and push a strand of hair behind her ear.
He touches her face.
The wistfulness burns off like fog hitting a furnace. My hands are shaking under the table—not the fine tremor from the school parking lot, something bigger, something that moves through my wrists and up my forearms and locks my jaw so tight my molars grind.
“He told me to join a gym.” My voice is different now.
Low and flat and vibrating. “He looked at my body like it was something broken he didn’t want to fix.
He hasn’t touched my face like that since—God, I don’t even know.
Before Lily? And he’s sitting in this restaurant touching her face like she’s—”
“I know.” Cecily’s hand finds mine under the table and grips hard. “I know.”
“He told me it was my fault, Cecily. That I let myself go. That I didn’t make an effort. I have spent two years lying next to that man wondering what is wrong with me—” My voice breaks and I swallow it down, force it back, because I will not cry in this restaurant. I will not.
I look at Sloane. Really look—not the quick scan I’ve been doing, not the peripheral glance.
I make myself see her. She’s wearing a black spaghetti-strap dress that barely exists—thin straps, open back, the kind of dress that only works on a body like hers.
And her body is—God. Slim in that effortless way a woman can only be at twenty-five, before life and gravity and three pregnancies reshape a woman’s body.
Her shoulder blades are sharp. Her spine is a line of shadow between lean muscles.
Every inch of her back is on display, golden in the candlelight, and she knows it.
She’s sitting with her shoulders back and her chin up and her whole body saying look at me, look at me, look at me.
And he’s looking. Of course he’s looking.
“How am I supposed to compete with that?” I don’t mean to say it out loud. It comes out small and ugly and I hate the sound of it—the defeat in it, the surrender.
“You don’t.” Cecily’s voice is sharp. Not angry at me—angry for me. “Listen to me. If that’s all your husband wants, and all she has to offer, you are better off without him.”
“Cecily—”
“No. I’m serious. Love is not about your dress size, Brittany.
Our bodies change. They’re supposed to change—especially after having children.
You grew three human beings. You fed them.
You carried them. And if he can’t see that as something extraordinary instead of something to punish you for, then he is broken.
Not you.” She squeezes my hand so hard my knuckles ache.
“Look at me. Nothing is wrong with you. Nothing has ever been wrong with you.”
I pick up my phone. My hands are shaking so badly the camera app blurs when I open it, and I brace my elbows on the table and aim past the edge of the booth.
The distance is wrong—they’re backlit by the window, the candlelight turning everything amber—but I get three photos.
Him leaning in. Her hand in his. Him brushing her hair back.
“Got them?” Cecily asks.
“Got them.”
She watches my face for a long moment. “What do you want to do?”
I look at the window table. Preston is laughing now—head tipped back, throat exposed, the real laugh, the one I haven’t heard in years. The one that used to be mine.
“I want to walk over there and flip that table into his lap.” My fingers are white around the phone. “I want to throw his wine in his face and scream until everyone in this restaurant knows what he is.”
“But?”
I breathe. My whole body is trembling and the marble table is cool under my forearms and I press into it.
“But that’s not the plan.”
“No. It’s not.”
I put the phone in my bag and take a deep breath.
“We follow them back,” I say. “We get the rest.”
They leave the restaurant at quarter past nine.
We leave three minutes later, Cecily dropping cash on the table because there’s no time to wait for a card, and by the time we hit the sidewalk I can see them half a block ahead—Preston’s hand on the small of Sloane’s back, her heels clicking on the pavement, their bodies close enough that their shadows merge under the streetlights into a single shape.
“Across the street,” Cecily says. “Stay behind them.”
We cross. The night air is sharp—San Francisco in October, nothing like San Diego—and I pull my jacket tighter and match their pace from the opposite sidewalk.
They’re not looking around. Why would they?
His wife is four hundred miles south in sweatpants, cutting sandwiches, wiping counters.
His wife doesn’t leave the house after dark.
His wife doesn’t get fancy trips to San Francisco.
They turn the corner toward the Fairmont. I lose them for three seconds and my heart hammers against my ribs so hard I feel it in my throat—but Cecily grabs my arm and pulls me forward, and when we round the corner they’re right there, crossing the plaza toward the hotel entrance.
“We can’t walk in right behind them,” I say.
“We don’t have to. The lobby bar faces the elevators.” Cecily’s already moving. “I stayed here for a legal conference two years ago. You can see the whole elevator bank from the bar.”
The Fairmont lobby is all marble and chandeliers and that hushed, golden silence that swallows footsteps whole.
Cecily walks straight to the bar—four stools open, perfect sightline to the elevator alcove twenty feet away.
She orders two glasses of champagne and the bartender pours them and I pick mine up and my hand is shaking so hard the surface shivers.
I don’t see them. For one lurching moment I think we’ve lost them—they went straight up, they took the side entrance, they’re already in the room.
Then I hear his laugh.
That same laugh from the restaurant—open, easy, delighted—coming from the elevator alcove, where a marble column and a potted palm create a pocket of privacy that’s visible from exactly one angle. Ours.
“Brit.” Cecily’s hand closes over my wrist. “I can go. You don’t have to see this.”
“Yes I do.”
“I can follow them. I’ll get the photos. You don’t have to—”
“I need to see it.” I pull my wrist free. “I need to see it with my own eyes or I’m going to spend the rest of my life letting him tell me I was crazy.”
Cecily lets go.
Sloane is leaning against the wall with her back to the marble, and Preston is in front of her, one arm braced above her head, leaning in, his mouth against her ear.
She’s laughing—I can see her shoulders shaking, her head thrown back—and his free hand slides down her side, over her hip, around, and grabs.
His hand is on her ass. Full grip. Pulling her hips into his.
She arches into him and her hand comes up to his chest and slides down—slow, deliberate, past his stomach, his belt—and doesn’t stop.
Her palm presses flat against the front of his pants and holds there, fingers curling, and he drops his face into her neck and the sound he makes—a groan, low and guttural—carries clear across the lobby.
I have my phone up, the camera app already open. I’m taking photo after photo, zooming in as much as I can, even though it literally makes my stomach twist so much I fear I’ll vomit on the floor.
I haven’t been touched in two years because I thought I was the problem.
Because he told me—with his words, with his eyes, with every turned back and every scan and every make an effort—that my body was the reason.
That I wasn’t desirable. That I’d let myself go and it was my fault, my fault, my fault—
And he is grinding against another woman in a hotel lobby like a teenager who can’t wait thirty seconds for the elevator.
“I’m going to be sick,” I whisper.
“No you’re not.” Cecily’s voice is right next to my ear, her hand on my back, firm. “You’re going to sit right here and you’re going to breathe.”
The elevator dings. The doors slide open. Sloane steps backward into it, pulling him by the belt, and his hand is still on her and her hand is still on him and the doors close and they’re gone.
The lobby is quiet. Piano music from somewhere. A bellhop pushing a luggage cart across the marble.
Cecily lowers her phone. I lower mine. My champagne sits on the bar untouched, the bubbles still rising.
“You have everything,” Cecily says. Her voice is thick. I look at her and her mascara is smudged under her left eye. She’s been crying. I haven’t. Something in me has gone past the place where tears work.
I open the camera roll. Swipe through. His hand on her hip. Her hand on his belt. His face buried in her neck. His mouth open. Every image is sharp enough, lit enough, damning enough.
I select all of them. Move them to the Receipts folder.
“We should go,” I say.
“Brit—”
“I need to go home. I need to be there when my kids wake up. We can change our tickets—”
“Stop.” Cecily puts her hand on my arm. “Listen to me. It’s been a long day. Let’s change our tickets to first thing in the morning. We’ll get rooms at another hotel and get some sleep.” She pauses. “Or get drunk and then sleep.”
I almost laugh. It comes out as something broken and wet. “I can’t be in the same building as him right now.”
“We won’t be. There are a hundred hotels in this city. We’ll pick one and we’ll lock the door and you can scream into a pillow or drink the minibar dry or both. But you are not getting on a plane tonight looking like this, feeling like this.”
I know she’s right. My hands are shaking too hard to hold a boarding pass and my chest feels like someone’s standing on it and if I walk into an airport right now I will fall apart in a way I cannot fall apart, because I am a mother and I am not done yet. I have things left to do.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Another hotel.”
We walk out through the lobby, past the bellhop, past the piano, into the foggy San Francisco night. The city is loud and bright and full of people who are not standing on a sidewalk trying to hold their skeleton inside their skin.
My phone buzzes. A text from Preston. I look at the screen.
Negotiations running long. Might need to stay a couple extra days. Kiss the kids for me.
I read it twice. Then I type back: No problem. Get some rest.
I hit Send. Cecily glances at me. I put the phone in my bag.
Somewhere above us, floors above the street, my husband is in a hotel room, fucking another woman.
He is not getting away with this.