My Husband’s Affair with My Sister Played on Our TV (Wives Who Bite Back #28)

Chapter One

Marnie Kessler asked me twice where I found the burrata, and both times I told her a store that didn’t have it.

She would drive across town on Monday, fail to find it, call me on the phone confused, and I would apologize and blame my own memory.

That was the price of hosting in this neighborhood.

If you gave away your sources, you gave away your value.

“Natalie, this is obscene,” Marnie said, holding up a piece of bread loaded with too much burrata. “You have to stop feeding us this well. Dana’s going to make me start hosting again.”

“I heard that,” Dana said from the couch.

“You were supposed to.”

Nick laughed from the other side of the living room, where he stood with Tom and Richard near the television, a glass of scotch in his hand. My husband laughed well. He’d built a career on it, partly. Clients trusted a man who found them funny.

“Nat, come settle this,” he called over. “Tom thinks we should’ve done the southern coast instead.”

“Tom is wrong,” I said, crossing the room. “Tom is always wrong about vacations. Remember the fishing lodge.”

“One time,” Tom said. “One time I book a fishing lodge.”

“Carol still brings it up,” Dana said.

“Carol will bring it up at my funeral,” Tom said, and Carol, next to Dana, raised her wine glass in confirmation.

Nick had connected his phone to the television, and our vacation photographs rotated across the screen in a slideshow.

There we were on a terrace with the sea behind us.

There I was in a white dress, laughing at something off camera.

There was Nick, tan and broad in his linen shirt, his arm around my waist, looking like a man who had everything he wanted.

“You two make it look easy,” Carol said. “Twenty-what years now?”

“Twenty-three,” Nick said, and he found my eyes across the room and smiled. “She hasn’t gotten rid of me yet.”

“Not for lack of opportunity,” I said, and everyone laughed, including Nick, loudest of all.

“Speaking of funerals,” Dana said, “did anyone else get the club’s email about the fall gala? They’ve put Bitsy Hollander in charge of the silent auction again.”

“No,” Carol said.

“Yes.”

“After last year? She priced a Whitfield print at forty dollars. An actual Whitfield. Natalie almost had a stroke.”

“I did not almost have a stroke,” I said. “I had a complete one. I’ve been dead since October, none of you noticed.”

“We noticed,” Tom said. “The food got better.”

Nick laughed and refilled Tom’s scotch without being asked, which was his signature move at our parties – the effortless host, always one step ahead of everyone’s glass.

He caught my eye while he poured and gave me the small, private smile we’d traded across crowded rooms for two decades, the one that meant look at us, we’re good at this. I smiled back, because we were.

Julie, our lovely daughter, drifted through around nine, said hello to everyone, accepted compliments about her college, her hair, and her whole shining future, then escaped to say goodbye to some high school friends.

“One month,” Carol said, watching her go. “Are you ready?”

“No one’s ready,” Dana said. “You think you’re ready, and then you’re standing in a parking lot next to a mini fridge, sobbing.”

Two hands touched my arm before the night was over, women telling me how hard the empty house would be, how they’d cried for a month when their kids left for college.

I said I was sure I’d survive. Nick said he wasn’t sure at all, that the house would feel enormous, and got a warm round of sympathy for it.

He was good at that too, showing whatever feeling the moment called for.

The party broke up a little before midnight in the usual, slow way.

Coats, kisses, promises about the club, Tom refusing a coffee, Carol accepting one and then abandoning it by the door.

Nick stood on the front steps with his hand raised until the last set of taillights turned at the end of the street, and then he yawned, squeezed my shoulder, and said he was heading up.

“Leave all that,” he said, nodding at the living room. “Rosa comes Monday.”

“I’m just going to sit for a minute,” I said.

“Good party, Nat.” He kissed my hair and went up the stairs.

I poured myself the last of an open bottle and sat in the corner of the couch with my feet tucked under me.

The living room held the comfortable wreckage of a good evening.

Dirty glasses on the coffee table, a bowl of olive pits, napkins folded into strange shapes by nervous hands.

On the television, our slideshow kept turning.

The terrace, the white dress, Nick’s arm around my waist.

I scrolled through my phone while I half-watched the photographs and thought about nothing in particular.

Then the images on the television changed.

The slideshow vanished, and the screen filled with Nick’s phone, mirrored and enormous. His messages sat open in a column, and at the top of the newest one, in letters the size of my hand, was my sister’s name.

Olivia: did you book it??

I looked at the stairs. The bedroom door was closed. Water ran faintly through the pipes.

The screen moved. Three dots pulsed at the bottom, then his reply appeared, typed from our bed twenty feet above my head.

Nick: booked. Thurs–Sun. The Wexley. told you I’d handle it

Olivia: what are you telling her

Nick: business trip. client offsite. she never asks details

I put my wine down on the coffee table without looking at it. My hand did that on its own while the rest of me sat very still and read my husband’s conversation with my sister on my television.

Olivia: jason’s being weird. he checked the mileage on my car last week. MILEAGE, nick

Nick: so tell him you’re with your college girls. the wine trip thing. you’ve used it before

Olivia: he’s getting suspicious for real. I can’t get divorced, I have literally nothing. no job no kids nothing, the prenup gives me NOTHING

Nick: you’re not getting divorced. relax. four days, just us

Olivia: easy for you to say. natalie would land on her feet. she always lands on her feet. I’d be done

Nick: nothing is happening to either of you because nobody knows anything. jason suspects because you get sloppy when you’re bored. don’t get sloppy

Olivia: wow ok

Nick: liv. come on. thursday.

There was a specific kind of silence a body made when it decided not to feel anything yet. I recognized it from funerals, and it had taken over me now. I picked up my phone, opened the camera and pointed it at the television. My hands were so steady it frightened me. I pressed record.

Olivia: I keep thinking about that morning at the lake house

Nick: which part

Olivia: you know which part

Nick: the part where you couldn’t stay quiet and we almost got caught?

Olivia: the part after that

Nick: god. yes. I can’t wait to get you in that room. I’m going to take my time with you. cant stop thinking about licking that perfect pussy

Olivia: I think about your cock every night. every single night. jason rolls over and snores and I lie there thinking about you

Nick: thursday. I’ll make it worth the wait

Olivia: you better. and bring the good pillow this time, I’m not sharing mine again

Nick: yes ma’am

Olivia: I hate this. I hate waiting. I hate watching you play house with her at every family thing

Nick: soon. we’ll figure it out. we always do

The lake house. My parents’ lake house. I did the math on “we always do”, and “you’ve used it before”, and “this time”, and understood that I was not watching something begin.

I was watching something continue, comfortably, in its own established language, with its own history, inside jokes, and logistics.

The conversation slowed. A heart appeared on his last message. Then the screen dimmed, held, and dissolved back into Nick’s lock screen, which was a photograph of the three of us at Julie’s graduation, Julie in her cap between her father and me, all of us laughing.

I stopped the recording. I checked that it had saved.

It had. Four minutes and eleven seconds.

I played the first few seconds back with the sound off and watched my sister’s name appear at the top of my television in miniature, on my phone, in my hand, in my living room.

The video was clear. The names were clear. Every word was legible.

Upstairs, the water shut off.

I put my phone in my pocket, picked up the remote, and turned off the television.

Then I stood, collected the wine glasses two at a time, and carried them into the kitchen.

I ran the tap until it went hot and began rinsing them, one by one, lipstick prints and fingerprints dissolving under the water.

I lined them up on the drying towel in a neat row.

I brought in the olive bowl, the plates, and the abandoned coffee.

I wiped the coffee table. I straightened the couch cushions.

While I worked, I thought about Olivia at the party we’d hosted in the spring, sitting on this couch, drinking my wine, complimenting the new upholstery, asking Nick to explain some investment thing while she leaned in with her whole face arranged into fascination.

I’d thought nothing of it. Olivia leaned into every man in every room; she’d done it since high school.

I’d watched my sister flirt with my husband across my own coffee table and filed it under Olivia being Olivia.

And somewhere upstairs, or in a parked car, or at my parents’ lake house, the two of them had probably laughed about that.

I’d organized art openings where a sculptor threatened to withdraw an entire show forty minutes before the doors opened.

I’d stood between a drunk collector and a painting he’d decided he owned.

I knew how to keep my face doing one thing while my mind did another.

I’d just never needed the skill in my own kitchen.

Nick came down in his pajama pants and an old T-shirt, barefoot, smelling of toothpaste. He crossed the kitchen, put his hands on my shoulders from behind, and kissed my cheek.

“You didn’t have to do all this tonight,” he said.

“I know. I couldn’t sit still.”

“Great party, though. Tom’s going to talk about that scotch for a year.” He took a glass from my drying towel, filled it with water, and drank half. Over the rim, his eyes were easy and warm. “Did you have a nice night?”

I turned around and looked at my husband. Dark hair, a little damp at the edges. The face I’d woken up next to for twenty-three years. He looked back at me with the open, satisfied expression of a man whose evening had gone just as planned, every part of it.

“It was lovely,” I said. “Did you?”

“Perfect.” He kissed my forehead this time. “Don’t stay up too long.”

“I won’t.”

He padded back up the stairs. I listened to the bedroom door close, and then I finished rinsing the last two glasses, dried my hands, and turned off the kitchen lights. In my pocket, my phone rested against my hip, holding four minutes and eleven seconds of video that hadn’t existed an hour ago.

I stood in my dark, clean, beautiful kitchen and made the first decision of the rest of my life, which was this: not tonight. Not yet. First, I was going to find out exactly what I had, and exactly what I wanted, and I was going to do the math before I said a single word out loud.