Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
David's been gone since seven.
He didn't tell me who he was seeing. Only that it had something to do with the board.
Before he left, he kissed the side of my head like a man boarding a train. I let him go without asking the real question. Because I've become a person who doesn't ask.
And I'm ashamed of her.
So I'm alone in the kitchen when the unknown number calls.
It's not quite ten in the morning. Rain taps at the windows. The house is quiet around me.
I answer already braced.
"Is this Mallory?" a woman asks. "David's wife?"
“Who’s this?”
"I'm Elaine." She says it like it should be enough, and it is.
"I hope you don't mind me calling. I got your number from Sophie.
" I've never spoken to Elaine. However, I've seen her in the corner of Sophie's video calls, moving through the house, calling Sophie to dinner.
David says her name like a place he left behind years ago.
"I've been trying to reach David since last night.
He's not answering me. He's very good at not answering when it matters. "
"Yeah, he's dealing with a lot right now. He's out. Can I have him call you back?"
"No need. I expect you know the answer." Something in her voice gives her away.
Then I hear the soft clink of ice against glass.
"Sophie sent me a link from some Seattle station.
A missing woman on your road, and a man on the phone naming a doctor.
She wanted to know if they meant her dad. " She lets that sit.
"You should probably talk to David."
Elaine draws a breath.
"I tried. That got me nowhere. No, I wanted to hear his wife's voice. I wanted to know what he's got you believing."
“Believing? He didn't do anything," I say, and it comes out fast. She laughs, and it isn't cruel, which is worse.
"That's exactly how fast I used to say it.
" I hear the ice shift in her glass. "You want to know something about David, since we're finally talking.
He's never been good at lying. He thinks he is.
He's a surgeon. Everyone tells him he's brilliant, so he's decided he's brilliant at everything.
Lying, though? He's terrible at it. He can't stand to be looked at while he does it.
So he's careful instead. He gets quiet. He starts deciding what you're allowed to know, and he starts hiding money where a tired wife doesn't think to look.
" She goes quiet for a moment. "Have you noticed that, Mallory?
How often he decides what you get to know?
How often he takes things behind a closed door? "
I don't answer. I'm thinking of a study door held not quite shut. Of "someone from Portland." Of a gun I was never told about. Of four thousand dollars in cash, taken out without reason. Of all the things David has decided I don't get to know.
"That's what I thought," Elaine says.
"Why are you calling me?" My voice isn't level and I don't try to make it. "Really."
"Because nobody called me." For the first time, the dryness cracks and something old comes through it.
Four years old, still bleeding at the edge.
"When it was my turn, nobody picked up a phone and said, you should know what you married.
I found out by accident, years too late, with my daughter in the next room.
That's how it always came with David. Sideways, and too late.
He cheated on me, Mallory. But he probably didn't say that, right? No doubt he said we drifted apart."
Drifted apart. Those words land.
"Yeah, it happened in Oregon. With somebody from the hospital, somebody younger.
And from what I've been able to decipher, he used his position to make it all go away.
He never said her name to me. No one did, not in the divorce, not in the four years since.
Why? Because he's careful. Because of his career.
Because of how it would have hurt his reputation.
" Her voice steadies again, and the steadiness is the frightening part.
"Whatever he's shown you, whatever he's confessed to make himself look honest, understand what he keeps.
He keeps the real truth buried where no one digs. "
The kitchen has gone very quiet around me. Out on the lake the rain is stitching the surface.
I have a name. That's the thing Elaine doesn't know, the thing turning over cold in my chest while she talks. I've had it for a week. It’s the name I read off my husband's phone at seven in the evening and told myself was nothing. A name I heard him say through a study door.
Lena Holloway.
But I don't know if she's the woman from Oregon she’s talking about, or someone from now. I've been carrying the name like it might still be innocent. And Elaine, who never got a name at all, has just made it harder to believe this one is innocent.
"I have a name," I say. "I don't know if it's hers."
Silence follows. Then she says, carefully, "If you have a name, you have more than I ever did.
I don't want it. I've spent four years not wanting it.
" I hear her exhale. "But if you're going to pull on it, don't do it through him.
He'll manage you the way he manages everyone.
He'll cry. He'll be honest about the small thing to keep you off the big one. Go around him."
Ice shifts softly in her glass. She goes quiet for longer this time.
When she speaks again, her voice is lower.
"There was a man he worked with in Portland.
Richard Thomas. A surgeon at OHSU. When I finally went looking, Richard was the one I went to.
He was closest to David, and he was decent enough to hate what he knew.
He confirmed enough for me to know it was real, but he wouldn't give me her name.
He had a career to protect, and back then David outranked him.
I understood that then. That's over now.
They don't work together anymore, and Richard owes David nothing. "
I write it on the back of an envelope. Richard Thomas. OHSU. My hand doesn't feel like mine.
"Elaine," I say. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me." The tiredness is all the way back now, carrying the years and everything this has already cost her.
"I didn't do it for you. I did it because my daughter called me crying and I couldn't help her, and this is the only thing I had to give anybody.
" There’s a pause, and when she speaks again it's almost gentle, which is how I know to be afraid of it.
"I'll tell you what nobody told me. If you're smart, you'll get out now.
Before there's a version of this where you're the one on the news explaining what you knew and when.
Get out while it's still just his mess and not yours. "
Then she hangs up without saying goodbye.
The line goes dead in my ear. Rain taps against the windows, and I stand there with the phone in my hand, staring at the name on the back of the envelope.
I remain at the island for a long time.
Then I do the thing Elaine put in my head.
David's out, seeing whoever he's seeing about the board. The house is mine. I go down the hall to the study, the one room I've never had a reason to be alone in. I tell myself I'm only going to look. I've told myself a lot of things today.
The door isn't locked. It's never locked, which should comfort me but doesn't. It leaves the choice to me. I stand on the threshold with my heart going. Then I step inside. That is the part I won't be able to take back.
His desk is tidy in a way the rest of him isn't anymore.
I start with the shallow drawer, then the others, my hands careful, ashamed of themselves.
Household things. Old warranties. A checkbook for the account we share.
A stack of Sophie's school paperwork he's kept.
Nothing. I almost let myself feel the relief of it, almost turn around and leave the room as I found it.
Then the bottom drawer on the right won't open.
It’s locked. The only locked thing in a house where nothing is ever locked. I sit back and look at it. That is the moment I stop pretending I came in here to tidy.
If David keeps a key, he’d keep it close. Not on him. He wouldn't risk leaving it in a pocket, where I might find it doing laundry and ask what it opened.
My hand moves over the desk.
I check the drawers again, feeling along the backs and sides this time. Nothing. Then I slide my fingers beneath the drawer above the locked one.
Something catches against my fingertips.
The key is taped to the underside. It's barely hidden at all, just put somewhere a wife who never goes through his things would never think to check. The fact that it takes me less than a minute to find is the part that hurts.
I peel it free, fit it to the lock, and turn.
Inside are bank envelopes, held with a clip. Not our bank. An account with only his name on it.
I sit down in his chair to read them, because my legs have stopped wanting to hold me.
The statements go back about a year. Money comes in, regular deposits he's arranged so they never cross the account we share.
And money goes out. The same figure, over and over, a month apart down the whole run of pages.
Four thousand dollars. Cash. Eleven times, more or less.
A year of him taking money out in cash, in a form that leaves no name at the far end of it.
I don't know what the money was used for.
That's the part I keep chewing over. It could be for anything. A gambler’s table somewhere with cards on it.
A woman who charges by the hour. A whole second life hidden inside a Thursday.
The statements don't say much. All they say is that my husband has been taking four thousand dollars out of an account I couldn't see into, once a month, for a year. He never told me about this.
If he was trying to hide this from me, why did he take four thousand from our joint account?
That withdrawal is the one that started all of this, the one I saw when I went to pay a bill.
He'd never have risked it with this account sitting here, unless that day he had no other way.
A debit card left at home. A password that wouldn't take.
Some glitch that put him in front of the one account where I might be looking.
I sigh.
I pull up the calendar we share, the one that's supposed to hold his whole life.
I put the withdrawal dates against his trips.
Some line up with Portland, the conferences, the weekends he took Sophie to dinner.
Some line up with days he told me he was somewhere else, or told me nothing at all.
Dates don't lie. People do. These sit there in a row, matched up, and let me see it.
Secret money. Secret trips. A lie about where he was, laid over the top of both.
I photograph four of the pages, my hands not quite still. I'm ashamed the whole time. I do it anyway.
Then outside a chainsaw stops.
It's been going strong since I came in here, someone down the road cutting up what the storm brought down. A noise I stopped hearing twenty minutes ago.
In the quiet it leaves behind, I realize I never heard a car come up the drive. That’s when I hear the front door close. My heart jumps into my throat as his keys land in the bowl. David’s voice is low as he says something to Luna. Then it rises as he calls my name.
“Mallory?”
I move fast. The statements go back under the clip. I tuck them back into the drawer and shut it. I turn the key in the lock.
But it’s too late.
There's no time left to put the key back where I found it. His steps are already in the hall.
I rise and get my hand behind my back, the key biting into my palm. I haven't finished getting around the table before he's in the doorway.
"You're back," I say, swallowing hard.
His eyes scan the room, then land on me.
“Yeah, I forgot my tablet." He doesn't move. He looks at me in his room, and the look goes a beat past anything ordinary. "What are you doing in here?"
“Oh, just tidying the office." The lie comes out smooth and level, and I hate how ready it was. "It was a mess."
He just looks at me a second longer. Then he crosses to the desk, close enough that I feel him pass.
He picks his tablet up off the desk pad.
My hand stays behind my back. The key stays in it.
He doesn't ask me anything else. Maybe he believes me.
Maybe he's a man with reasons not to look too hard at what his wife is doing behind his back.
“You look tired. Make sure you get some rest," he says. He kisses me on the cheek and then goes out.
I wait until the car is gone. Then I tape the key back beneath the drawer, exactly as I found it. I stand there with my heart still going. I scan the room, one last time. No trace of me is left except the photographs on my phone and the thing I now know.
I've become a person who searches. Who lies to his face and does it well.
I stand in his study a while longer, then retreat to my laptop and look up Richard Thomas at OHSU.