Chapter 3 #2
“Sure. Night, Caleb.”
“Love you, Mar.”
He hangs up. I sit with the phone pressed against my ear, listening to dead air, three seconds, four, five, like I’m waiting for him to come back and say something that undoes it. The screen goes dark against my cheek.
I stand up. My legs feel wrong, like the bones have been replaced with something that doesn’t bend right.
The hallway is dark and long. The bedroom is dark.
His side of the closet smells like his cologne—that cedar-and-citrus thing I used to bury my face in when he traveled because I missed him so much I’d wear his shirts to bed.
Top drawer. The velvet box in the back left corner, behind the Tag Heuer and the Garmin.
I pull it out. Open the lid.
Empty.
The indentation in the velvet is still shaped like the watch. A perfect hollow where the thing I gave him is supposed to be. I press my thumb into it and the box rattles against the drawer because my hands won’t stop.
The watch is not here. The watch is on a wrist in a photo my best friend sent me with a winking emoji.
At a restaurant. Not a Hilton parking lot next to a Chili’s.
A restaurant, with champagne, with Sloane sitting across from him glowing the way she glowed at lunch today when she told me about a man who cooks pasta in her kitchen and sends flowers on Thursdays and remembers everything she says.
My husband. She’s talking about my husband.
The box drops out of my hand and hits the floor and the sound cracks through the bedroom like a gunshot.
I grab the edge of the drawer because my vision is tunneling, going white at the edges, and my heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
This isn’t happening. This is not—I’m wrong.
I have to be wrong. There are thousands of Seamasters in the world and Sloane would never—Caleb would never—they were in the same room three weeks ago and he couldn’t even look at her—
Because he couldn’t look at her.
Because looking at her in front of me would have given it away.
My knees hit the carpet. I grab the shelf and my fingers close around one of his dress shirts and it tears off the hanger and I’m on the floor of his closet with Egyptian cotton in my fist and a sound coming out of me I don’t recognize—low, animal, scraped out of somewhere deeper than crying.
Four hours ago Sloane squeezed my hand across a table and said you deserve someone who shows up.
She said it with soft eyes and a warm voice and she meant none of it, not one syllable, because she is the reason he doesn’t show up.
She’s where he goes. She’s the phone call, she’s the Saturday emergency, she’s the laugh behind the closed door.
She sat there and listened to me describe the worst morning of my year—the cooler, the playlist, the way hope felt like swallowing glass when he walked out with that bag—and she performed.
She performed concern for a wound she put there.
I press my face into my knees. His cologne is everywhere.
Cedar and citrus, soaked into every shirt, every jacket, the air itself.
I used to love this smell. I used to wear his clothes to bed when he was gone because I missed him so much my chest hurt.
Now my chest hurts because he was never where he said he was and the woman I would have called crying about it is the one he was with.
Something ruptures.
Not grief—I’m past grief. Past the floor, past the shaking, past the part where I try to make this make sense. What’s flooding in is hot and bright and so sharp I can taste metal. I think about Sloane leaning across the table at lunch: He’s so intentional. Every single thing he does is on purpose.
She was describing my husband to my face. In our restaurant. Over lamb I helped pay for. Gushing about his hands—hands I held for years, hands I put a ring on—like they were a discovery she made, a gift she earned, something that belonged to her.
I get up. Not slowly. Not shakily. I get up like something just shifted in my spine, some load-bearing wall that was holding the old version of me in place, and now it’s gone and what’s standing here is lighter and harder and furious.
I hang the shirt back on the rod. Smooth the wrinkle.
Close the drawer. Every motion precise. My hands are completely still.
I walk to the bathroom and turn the faucet on cold and hold my wrists under the water and stare at myself in the mirror.
My mascara is wrecked. My jaw is set so tight my molars ache.
And behind my eyes there’s something I’ve never seen before—not sadness, not shock.
Something that knows exactly what it’s looking at and is already deciding what to do about it.
I dry my hands. Walk to the dresser. Pick up my phone.
Your guy has great taste in watches.
Three dots. Then:
He has great taste in everything ??
I stare at the winking emoji. She winked at me. She’s in a restaurant with my husband wearing the watch I gave him and she winked at me.
I set the phone face-down on the dresser.
I’m done crying.