Chapter Two
MOORE
I don't know exactly which mile marker it is. I know the night is clear and I can see Orion to the west and I'm driving sixty in a fifty-five because I always drive too fast when I'm trying not to think, and then I think it.
I left. She was right there. We were — and I left.
The thought arrives fully formed, clinical, like a diagnosis. Like a doctor saying the name of the thing that's been making you sick and suddenly every symptom makes terrible, perfect sense.
I pull into the parking lot and I sit with the engine running and I try to process what I just did with any intellectual honesty. I left my wife. In our bed. In the middle of — I left because Vanna Moireland called and said she saw a mouse.
I'm sitting in Vanna's parking lot now. Her light is on upstairs. I came here. I drove from my apartment, from my wife, from the middle of our marriage, to sit outside my twenty-three-year-old secretary's building at eleven o'clock at night because she saw a mouse.
I text her: I'm outside. Are you okay?
She responds immediately: Oh my god you actually came, you didn't have to do that!! I'm okay, it ran under the fridge. I feel so bad for calling, were you busy?
I stare at the message for a long time.
Were you busy.
I type back: I'm going to head home. Keep your front door locked.
I don't wait for her response. I pull out of the lot and I drive back to our apartment and I try to work out how to explain this to Aviance in a way that is honest, that acknowledges what I did, that doesn't excuse it but contextualizes it well enough to give us somewhere to stand.
I have explanations ready by the time I park.
I have a whole architecture of context. Vanna has anxiety.
Vanna has no family in Nashville. I'm her only emergency contact at work.
I know Aviance will say that is exactly the problem.
I know she will say: why are you anyone's emergency contact except mine?
And I won't have a clean answer for that.
I ride the elevator up. The hallway is quiet.
The apartment is dark.
Not just dark — empty. The quality of the silence is different from the silence of a sleeping person.
I have lived with Aviance for two years and I know the difference.
This is a room that has been vacated, not merely quieted.
This is the silence of a space that used to contain something and has been recently and deliberately relieved of it.
I turn the lamp on.
The rings are on the nightstand.
Both of them. Her engagement ring — the one I put on her finger in this kitchen, in this city, the morning I couldn't wait any longer — and the band we picked out together at a jeweler on Second Avenue. Both of them sitting together on the nightstand like a sentence I don't know how to finish.
The note is beside them.
Four pages.
I sit on the edge of the bed and I read it. All of it. Every line in Aviance's careful, deliberate handwriting — the handwriting she uses when she wants you to know she means every word — and I read her list.
October 14th. Her birthday dinner.
November 2nd. The ER.
December 19th. Her office party.
January 31st. Couples therapy.
She was in couples therapy with me and she was keeping a list. She was sitting on that gray couch listening to me tell Dr. Brunner that we were making progress, and she had a folder at home with dated printouts of Vanna's Instagram posts.
I get to the Valentine's Day entry and I have to put the note down.
I put it down and I press both hands flat on the bed and I breathe.
I remember Valentine's Day. I remember the pipe — or what Vanna said was a pipe, she'd texted me a photo of water on the bathroom floor and said she didn't know what to do and I'd thought: it'll take twenty minutes, I'll be home by seven.
I was home at nine and Aviance was sitting at the kitchen table in the dress she'd worn for me, her food barely touched, and she looked at me and said it's fine, Moore and she meant, in the specific language of our marriage, that it was very much not fine.
I thought it would resolve itself. I thought if I was patient and consistent it would work out. I thought the momentum of our marriage — two years of genuine love, of genuine choice — would absorb six months of poor judgment.
I finish the note.
I read the last paragraph three times.
Half of all marital assets.
Reimbursement or return of any marital assets directed to Vanna Moireland.
I close my eyes. I think about the office laptop I bought Vanna when her personal computer broke in February.
I think about the weekend conference in Memphis where I drove her separately because she didn't like highway driving.
I think about the restaurant receipt from three months ago that I ran on our joint account because I'd left my personal card at the office — a dinner that was technically a team lunch but was just me and Vanna because the other two team members had canceled.
I think about all the ways I have been careless and I understand, for the first time with true clarity, that carelessness is not neutrality. Carelessness is a choice wearing a costume.
I call Aviance's number.
It goes to voicemail.
I call again.
Voicemail.
I sit in our dark apartment with her rings on the nightstand and the four-page list on the bed beside me and I think: I need to see Vanna tomorrow.
I need to understand what exactly she's been doing.
Because reading the note — reading those dates, that escalation, that bragging — something is sliding into focus that I have been actively refusing to look at directly.
Vanna isn't just an employee I've been too helpful to.
Vanna has been keeping score. And she's been announcing it.
I lie back on the bed, on top of the covers, still dressed, and I stare at the ceiling until the light through the curtains goes from black to gray.
I don't sleep.