Chapter 3
The deleted reply stayed in my mind for days.
But Adrian behaved as if nothing had changed.
If anything, his life suddenly seemed fuller.
First came running.
A man who used to hit snooze two or three times was now dressed before six. His shoes sometimes brought tiny grains of gravel onto our dark entryway floor.
One morning, I teased him.
"Since when are you this disciplined?"
Adrian bent to tighten his laces.
"I sit behind a desk too much. Thought I should move."
Then came photography.
A new camera appeared in his study. The black body was polished clean of fingerprints, with a book on street photography beside the lens.
Then came the music.
One morning, an unfamiliar song played through our kitchen speakers.
"When did you start listening to this?"
Adrian was knotting his tie.
"Found it recently."
That Sunday, I had a rare day off.
"Want company on your run tomorrow?" I asked. "I could come with you."
He hesitated.
"You're exhausted enough already. Sleep in for once." He smiled. "Besides, you've never liked running."
It sounded considerate.
So I didn't insist.
A few days later, I went into Adrian's study looking for a document and accidentally woke the camera screen.
The first photograph showed the river at dawn.
The second was a food cart.
In the third, Sophie stood with her back to the camera, her ponytail blown sideways by the morning wind.
I kept scrolling.
She was laughing beside the food cart.
Crossing a street with coffee in her hand.
Standing beside Adrian as they looked down at photographs on the camera.
She wasn't the subject of every picture.
But she kept appearing.
Like punctuation in a private language scattered through all the new parts of my husband's life.
I thought about the unfamiliar song in our kitchen.
That evening, I was washing a glass when Adrian came home.
"Do you usually go out taking pictures alone?"
He opened the refrigerator.
"Sometimes people from work come."
"Does Sophie?"
His hand paused for barely a second.
"A few people from the project team come sometimes. Why?"
"No reason."
I turned off the faucet.
One drop of water clung to the glass, sliding slowly downward before stopping beside my thumb.
The next morning, I opened the camera again.
This time, I didn't study the photographs.
I checked the timestamps.
The last picture of Sophie had been taken at 9:17 p.m. She stood beneath a streetlight, looking away from the lens.
I remembered the date immediately.
I had finished an exhausting emergency surgery that evening, and Adrian had promised to pick me up from the hospital.
At 9:05, he texted that an unexpected meeting had come up at the office.
I sat near the hospital entrance for forty minutes waiting for him.
The coffee I bought from the vending machine slowly went cold in my hands. By the end, it was too bitter to finish.
But at 9:17 p.m., Adrian hadn't been in a meeting.
He hadn't even been at the office.
He had been somewhere across the city.
Taking Sophie's picture.