Chapter 4 #2
“Obviously,” I repeat, and the laugh escapes before I can catch it — a real one, short and surprised, and then it dies in my throat because I’m sitting two hundred yards from a villa my dead husband bought with my money and I just laughed.
At a Star Wars joke. While on a stakeout.
The guilt floods in, hot and irrational, like smiling at a funeral — like my body committed a crime my brain has to apologize for.
Jonah doesn’t comment on it. He turns back to the binoculars and leaves me alone with the silence, which I use to rebuild the wall I need between me and anything that feels good right now.
An hour passes. Jonah hands me the camera and walks me through the timestamp functions. “Every photo is embedded with date, time, and GPS coordinates. Chain of evidence. Admissible in court. When you shoot, hold steady and get the face. Everything else is context.”
“I know how to take a photograph, Jonah.”
“You know how to take a photograph of your friends on vacation. This is different. You’re building a legal record that your supposedly dead husband is alive and residing in a property purchased with marital assets. Framing matters.”
He’s right, and I hate that he’s right in the specific way you hate it when someone corrects you and you wanted to be mad at something and they won’t let you be wrong.
“Fine,” I say. “Face first, context second.”
“There you go.”
Another thirty minutes. The heat is unbearable. Sweat is running down the back of my neck and the water bottle in the cupholder is warm as bath water and I drink it anyway.
Then the gate opens.
“Movement.” Jonah’s voice drops low and he’s already got the long lens up, the shutter clicking in quiet, rapid bursts.
I look through the windshield and everything stops.
He’s tanned. That’s what I see first. Tanned the way you get when you’ve been living in the sun for weeks and not worrying about anything — deep and even, the kind of tan that takes leisure and time and freedom from the consequences of your actions.
He’s wearing shorts and a linen shirt, untucked, and he’s walking down the driveway to the mailbox with the unhurried stride of a man who has nowhere to be.
The shirt. Slate blue linen. I bought it for him in Nantucket, on our anniversary trip two years ago. He tried it on in the shop and I buttoned it for him and kissed his jaw and said you look perfect and he said only because you picked it, and the memory hits me so hard my vision blurs.
I blink it clear. I raise my phone.
Because here is the cruelest thing: he looks good.
He looks relaxed and healthy and ten years younger than the man who left for a boat trip and never came home, and some sick, broken part of me is cataloging it — the way his shoulders look broader against the linen, the way his hair is longer, the way he moves like a man who’s happy — and I want to scream because my body is responding to my husband the way it always has, with warmth and recognition and something that might be love if love can survive what he’s done to me.
It can’t. I know it can’t. But my hands are shaking now — not from fear, not from fury, from the sheer violence of feeling everything at once: the wife who misses him and the woman who wants to ruin him, occupying the same body, fighting over the same pair of hands.
“Sophie.” Jonah’s voice, low. “Shoot.”
I shoot. Click. Click. Click. Drew at the mailbox. Drew flipping through envelopes, casual as a Sunday. Drew turning back toward the villa in the shirt I bought him, in the life he stole from me.
My hands steady. They steady because I make them, because I choose the version of me that documents and files and builds cases over the version that still remembers how his chest felt under her ear on Sunday mornings.
That Sophie is dying right now, in a hot car in Costa Rica, and I’m letting her. I’m holding the pillow down.
Drew disappears back through the gate. It closes. The bougainvillea sways.
I lower my phone. The last photo on the screen: Drew in profile, mid-stride, the white villa behind him. Timestamped. Geotagged.
“Got everything?” I ask.
Jonah lowers the camera. He turns to me, and the look on his face — I wasn’t ready for it.
It isn’t about the case. It’s something quieter and more dangerous, something that landed while I was holding myself together, something that looks like a man watching a woman do a thing he didn’t think she could and recalculating everything he thought he knew about her.
I don’t touch it. I can’t. The cold, clean thing I’ve built inside my chest is the only architecture I trust right now, and that look — warm and specific and aimed directly at me — would crack it.
“Yeah,” he says. His voice is rougher than a second ago. He clears his throat and starts the car. “We got it.”
The villa disappears behind the curve of the road. I sit with my phone in my lap, the timestamped photo of my very alive husband glowing on the screen. Tomorrow I’m going to knock on that blue door. Tomorrow I’m going to watch his face when he sees me on the other side.
But right now, in the passenger seat, I press my thumbnail into my palm until it hurts, and I use the pain to kill the last flicker of the woman who was glad — just for one second, back in Jonah’s hotel room — that he was still alive.
She’s gone now. Good riddance.