Chapter 3
Claire went into the study, opened her laptop, and signed in to the cloud. The night before she had synced the dashcam in Andrew's car remotely.
She put it in three years ago for safety, and he always thought she was making a fuss over nothing.
That fuss over nothing was about to earn its keep.
The log laid it all out. The car left the office garage at 6:47 the night before. It reached zone B of the underground garage at the Sunset View Hotel at 7:23. It pulled out again at 10:51.
That put him there for three hours and 28 minutes.
Claire blew up the still from the garage entrance and saw a woman clearly in the passenger seat. It was only a profile, but she knew the dress from a post on Emily's feed. [He says I look best in red.]
She closed the page and pulled up the photos on her phone. All three came up again.
Andrew's sleeping face took her back to their first winter married, when a bad flu knocked him flat and she sat up with him all night.
He woke around two, took her hand, and said, "Claire, I dreamed you were gone. It scared the hell out of me. Promise me you'll never leave."
She had cried her eyes out and told him, "You idiot. Where would I go?"
Looking back on it, that was almost funny.
Her phone buzzed with a message from the design studio. [Ms. Nolan, your invitations are ready for review. Please confirm the layout.]
Claire: [I'll come in now and go over it in person.]
She changed, went out to the car, and something came back to her as she sat down.
It was their first year married. They had driven out of town for the day and a hard rain caught them halfway.
They pulled over and sat there kissing with the rain coming down on the roof. When his hand slid under her shirt, she went red and pushed him off.
"In the car?" he asked, grinning.
She shook her head. "No way. Doing it in a car is asking for trouble. If we're going to do this, we do it at home, in a real bed, with nothing to hide."
Andrew laughed until he could barely breathe and pulled her in. "How is my wife this cute? Fine, you win. We'll go home and get in a real bed and do it with nothing to hide."
He was the one who said a car was asking for trouble.
He was the one who said it had to happen at home, with nothing to hide.
Claire gripped the wheel until her nails cut deep half-moons into her palms.
She took one long breath and called the studio.
"Yes, rush the invitations. I need them in hand by five tonight.
"I emailed you the cover photo. Use that exact image.
"Color? Black and white is fine. Gold foil on the lettering, the loudest gold you have.
"I'm sending the mailing list now. Every one of them goes out by six."
She hung up, looked at herself in the rearview mirror, and said it quietly.
"Andrew, tonight you're getting an anniversary with nothing to hide.
"I hope you love it."
The car rolled out of the garage and merged into the morning rush. The city was only starting to get loud, and under all that calm a storm was already building.
The printer hummed away at the back of the design studio.
Claire stood beside it and watched the invitations come out one after another.
She had asked the designer to run the photo as black-and-white art, and the treatment pulled two things forward and left everything else in shadow. One was the hand with the wedding ring on it. The other was the bare curve of a waist.
The ring had been enlarged into a close-up, and the platinum read even colder in black and white.
Gold foil ran across the cover. [You are cordially invited to witness a very special moment in the marriage of Mr. Andrew Lane and Ms. Claire Nolan.]
Smaller print in the bottom right corner read, "The seven-year itch. Come see it for yourself."
Sophie, the designer, hovered next to her and kept starting to say something and stopping. She had graduated that spring and clearly had never worked on anything like this.
"Claire, are you... are you sure about using this photo?" Sophie asked carefully. "Isn't it a little..."
"A little what?" Claire smiled. "A little too accurate?"
Sophie stopped talking after that.