3. Chapter Three #3
Mostly, though, I thought about lunch.
And I decided I'd navigated it.
Probably.
That was the word I kept landing on. Navigated—like Mark's questions had been a coral reef I'd steered through without crashing and capsizing.
He'd gotten close—close enough that he'd made me sweat.
But then he'd talked himself back from the brink, preferring to believe I was a kind-hearted rube who'd let a working girl bilk me for twice the going rate.
I'd been only too happy to let him.
That bit about the shirt worried me, though. I didn't like that that detail was still on his mind this far out from the Armada. I made a mental note to make sure that particular button-down stayed in the back of Bailey's closet for a while—at least outside of the bedroom.
All in all, though, I felt pretty good. All’s well that ends well.
You'd think I'd have learned by now to stop jumping the gun.
And then, a little after three, my phone buzzed. Not a text this time. A call.
As if thinking about Bailey had put her name on the screen.
Instantly, I knew something was wrong. Bailey's generation didn't make phone calls: in all the years I’d known her, I could count the times she'd actually dialed me on one hand. And every one of them had been an emergency.
I was up and moving before I could think twice about it, muttering a vague excuse in the direction of the cubicles as I took the door to the back stairwell.
It was all concrete, always empty, although we'd had an employee a few years back who liked to come in here on his lunch break with one of those Alphasmart handheld word processors.
Working on his novel, he'd joked. I'd never asked him how that had worked out.
I understood why he'd chosen this spot to work—the stairwell was dead quiet. I'd hear anyone coming. I put the phone to my ear.
"I'm here. Bailey?”
"Daddy?"
That word never failed to activate all of my protective instincts at once. "Babygirl? What's wrong?"
"It's Debbie." Bailey's voice was high and tight, right at the edge of cracking. "I just got off the phone with her. That lunch text? She's insistent about it. It's happening later this week."
That... That wasn't bad, actually. Getting Debbie and Bailey in the same room together was the first step in our plan—baiting the trap my ex-wife was hopefully going to fall into.
"That's okay, angel," I said, clearing my throat. "We'll be ready for her—”
"You don't understand." Bailey sounded distressed. "She wants me to bring the texts. All my interactions on the app. With the whale."
Oh. Oh.
"She won't help me 'close the deal’ until she's read them, and there are no texts, we don't really have a whale, I don't—"
"Bailey. Calm down and listen to me, babygirl. I know exactly what we're going to do."
There was a pause on the other side of the line. "You do?"
I hadn’t. Not until two seconds ago. "Tell Debbie you do have a whale on the line," I said. "And tell her his screen name is SecondChance82."
Silence on the line. Then, small: "What? You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
"But that means she's going to—”
"See our texts," I said, my heart jumping into my throat. “Yep. I know, babygirl."
We didn't need to fake anything. There was no need to build a whale at all.
The texts Debbie wanted to verify were already real—every Daddy-this, every good girl-that.
I pictured my wife of twenty-one years scrolling through the things I'd typed that entire first week, hunting for the sucker, the mark, the gross old man with more money than sense.
And I knew she would read every single word and never once see me.
She'd sat across a breakfast table from Tom Cottrell for two decades and believed to the depths of her soul the man she'd cheated on could never talk to a woman like that.
Not to a girl like Bailey.
She wouldn't suspect a thing.
And my texts would be the noose we used to hang Debbie from the fucking rafters.
“Okay,” Bailey whispered, something like wonder leaking in under the fear. "Okay. But what if she wants to see him? In person. What if she wants to set up a meeting between me and SecondChance82?"
I already had an idea of how we might make that work. I was thinking about scams—and the sorts of people who understood them intimately. I didn't dare speak it out loud, though, for fear of jinxing the whole thing.
"We'll come up with something, babygirl. I promise. I'll handle it."
And that was that. Because Bailey trusted me with her.
"Okay," she said, relief filling her voice. "I love you. All of this is insane and I fucking love you."
"Love you too, babygirl. I'll be home right after work, okay? We'll talk about it then."
"I'll get us all takeout," Bailey promised. "See you soon."
"Not if I see you first."
I hung up. Stared over at the concrete wall, thinking.
Then I slid the phone into my pocket and went back to my desk smiling, because for once in my life I wasn't the one getting played.
The game had finally started. And my ex-wife had no idea who was really sitting at the other side of the board.