Chapter 4
JUST HOW BAD DOES IT GET?
Carter’s desk is covered.
Last time there was a legal pad and a pen and nothing else. Now—folders, a spreadsheet bleeding yellow highlighter, a manila envelope with the flap tucked in. His coffee sits untouched, the surface gone flat.
He’s been waiting for me.
“Sit down,” he says.
My purse hits the floor. The armrest digs into my elbow and I don’t fix it because fixing it would mean I’m getting comfortable and I am never going to be comfortable in this chair.
“You said ten days.”
“Took eleven. I wanted to be thorough.” He opens the thick folder. “The Pacific Coast Credit Union account is in Drew’s name only. Opened fourteen months ago—six months before your daughter was born.”
Second trimester. I was puking every morning and Drew held my hair back and brought me saltines and pressed his forehead against mine. I’ve got you, babe. He had me. He also had a secret bank account.
“Total deposits from your joint checking at Chase—fifteen thousand four hundred dollars. Transfers between one and three thousand, spaced over several months. Never round numbers. Twelve hundred here, twenty-two hundred there. Small enough to stay under the radar.”
The highlighter marks on the spreadsheet blur and sharpen, blur and sharpen.
My jaw is doing something I can’t control—this rhythmic clench that sends pressure up through my temples.
I want to put my fist through the spreadsheet.
Through the desk. Through the smug, patient face Drew makes every night when he tells me we’ll find it, babe.
“There’s a retainer payment.” Carter slides a printout across. “Thirty-five hundred dollars. Law Office of David Renner. Custody, divorce, asset division. Dated four months before Audrey was born.”
My stomach flips so hard I taste bile. Hot, sour, coating the back of my tongue.
“He hired a divorce lawyer while I was pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“While I was—” The bile climbs higher. I swallow it back and it burns all the way down. “Before she was born. Before she had a name. I was picking out crib sheets and he was—”
I can’t sit anymore. My legs shove me up and the chair skids backward and I’m standing with my hands flat on Carter’s desk and my arms are shaking—not trembling, shaking—and the overhead light is too bright and the room is too small and somewhere on the other side of this city my husband is sitting at his desk with his easy smile while I stand here choking on the life he’s been building behind my back.
“There’s more,” Carter says.
“Then say it.”
He opens the manila envelope. Photographs. Six of them. Glossy, sharp, the kind of resolution where you can see the texture of someone’s jacket.
The first one—a restaurant patio. Drew across a candlelit table from a woman with dark hair over one shoulder, her fingers resting on the inside of his wrist. That spot.
The thin skin right above his pulse point where I used to press my thumb when we were sitting close.
My spot. My spot and she’s touching it like she owns it and Drew is making the face—that soft, focused, you-are-the-only-person-in-this-room face that I thought was mine.
Carter puts down the second photo and the rage hits so hard my vision narrows.
A parking garage. Drew’s mouth on hers. His hand fisted in her hair, her back against a car, his hips pressed forward and his other hand gripping her waist. Not a peck.
Not a goodbye. The kind of kiss where the rest of the world has ceased to exist. And on his wrist—on his goddamn wrist—the watch I gave him for our anniversary.
“Take your time,” Carter says.
“Don’t.” The word comes out serrated. “Don’t manage me. Keep going.”
The remaining photos land on the desk. My eyes rip across them—a coffee shop, a park bench, a building lobby I don’t recognize—and they all blur together because I’ve stopped seeing anything except the park bench shot.
Sun behind them. Her hand on his thigh. And on her left ring finger, catching the light—
My fist hits the desk before I know it’s happening. The folders jump. Carter’s coffee sloshes over the rim of the cup. The pain cracks across my knuckles, bright and sharp and good because it’s the first thing I’ve felt in ten minutes that isn’t the urge to scream.
My grandmother’s diamond. On that woman’s finger. In the sun. Throwing light the way it always has, the way it did on my hand for seven years, the way it did against a hospital window when my mother was dying.
“She’s wearing my ring.”
“The last four photos show it consistently, yes.”
“Don’t—don’t clinical me right now.” My voice is a blade. “That is my dead grandmother’s diamond on the hand of the woman my husband is fucking. Say it like that.”
Carter doesn’t flinch. “That’s your grandmother’s diamond on her hand. Your husband gave it to her.”
“And she thinks it’s his.” My nails are biting into my palms so deep I’ll have marks for hours. “She thinks some sweet old woman wore it for half a century and he passed it down. She doesn’t know he stole it from me.”
The park bench photo is still facing up. Patty’s hand on his thigh, the ring catching sunlight. I flip it over so hard the glossy paper buckles against the desk.
“The retainer to Renner is the piece that concerns me most.” Carter’s voice is steady. Measured. It makes me want to throw something. “Divorce attorneys don’t take retainers that far in advance without a strategy in place.”
“I understand what you’re saying.” My chest is heaving.
I can feel my pulse in my neck, in my wrists, hammering against the inside of my skin like it’s trying to get out.
My voice has gone quiet. Not calm—the opposite of calm.
The kind of quiet that happens when something inside you gets so hot it stops making noise.
“I’ve suspected since the phone call from the jewelry store.
I just needed someone to show me I wasn’t crazy. ”
“You’re not crazy.”
“No. I’m pissed.”
“Good.” He leans back. “Is it enough—for divorce court? More than enough. Hidden assets, dissipation of marital funds, premeditation. Any family judge in this state would tear him apart.” A beat. “What are you actually planning?”
I stare at the stack of photos. My husband’s double life in six glossy prints. His mouth on another woman in a parking garage. My grandmother’s diamond on a stranger’s hand.
“His texts sync to his laptop,” I say. “iMessages. I know the password.”
“I can’t advise you on that.”
“Not asking.”
“If you find anything relevant, screenshot it. Send it to your attorney, not to me. Chain of custody matters.”
“I don’t have an attorney.”
“Get one.” He pulls a business card from the drawer. “Valerie Mueller. She’s an excellent divorce lawyer.”
I take the card. Take the photos. Everything goes into the folder. The hallway outside is bright and quiet and my hands are vibrating and the fluorescent lights are buzzing above me and I stop walking because my knees are about to give.
I lean against the wall. Press my forehead to the cool drywall and close my eyes and breathe.
Just breathe. The nausea is there. The rage is there.
The image of his hand fisted in her hair—that’s there too and it’s not leaving, it’s seared into the backs of my eyelids, it will be there every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life.
But underneath the shaking, underneath all of it—something is building. Locking together. Structural.
I am going to destroy him.
Not today. Not from this hallway. But it’s coming, and when it gets here, Drew is going to wish he’d never touched my grandmother’s ring.
Drew is at work. Audrey is in her high chair smearing banana into her hair. Kellee is across the kitchen table and Drew’s laptop is open in front of me and my fingers are hovering over the trackpad because once I click on these messages I can’t unread them.
“You don’t have to do this today,” Kellee says.
“Yeah. I do.”
His iMessages. Right there, synced from his phone. No passcode. No lock. Because Drew has never once considered the possibility that I would look. He has moved through this entire marriage with the absolute confidence that I would stay exactly where he put me.
I click.
Patty Yates. Nine months. I drag the scroll bar to the beginning and Kellee pulls her chair so close our shoulders press together.
The early texts are flirty. Restaurant recs.
Podcast jokes. A sunset photo he sent on a Wednesday while I was pacing the living room with Audrey pressed against my bare chest because skin-to-skin was the only thing that stopped the screaming.
I walked until my shins burned and my arms gave out and I cried so hard I couldn’t see the hallway.
Drew was at the office late. He was photographing the sky for another woman.
My teeth grind together. The pressure shoots through my jaw and up into my temples. Keep scrolling.
Month three, the flirting stops. The confessional begins. His situation. His ex. The custody battle he just dreads.
I don’t want to take Audrey away from her mother. But when I come home and the house is a mess and she’s been crying all day and the baby hasn’t been bathed—what am I supposed to do?
The baby hadn’t been bathed because she screamed every time water touched her that week. The pediatrician said washcloths. I told Drew. He nodded. Whatever you think is best, babe. Then he picked up his phone and typed that she hadn’t been bathed like I’d left our daughter sitting in filth.
My hand slaps the table so hard the coffee mugs jump. Audrey startles in the high chair and Kellee grabs my wrist.
“Sloane—”
“He nodded at me.” My voice is a snarl. Something animal and ugly. “He stood in the bathroom and nodded while I explained the washcloths and then he sat down and told her I wasn’t bathing the baby.”
Patty’s reply glows on the screen: That sounds so hard. You’re such a good dad for paying attention to those things. Has she considered therapy?
The laugh that rips out of me makes Kellee flinch.