Chapter 2

Brielle.

He said it the way you say something you've been thinking about all day. Soft. Easy. Like a word that lives in your mouth.

I sat there on the edge of the bed and I didn't move. The phone was still in my hand. The screen cast a thin white light across my knees, across the floor, across the six inches of space between me and my husband, who was already drifting back under, his arm still reaching, his face still slack and untroubled.

I waited for the tears.

They didn't come.

What came instead was something stranger—a hollowness, like someone had reached into my chest and removed something essential, not violently, just quietly, the way you'd take a book off a shelf. The space where it had been wasn't bleeding. It was just empty. I sat with that emptiness and I looked down at the phone and I finished reading the message.

Kade had written: *Tonight I really missed you. Coming home just felt wrong everywhere.*

Tonight. He had come home to me and Mia and the laundry on the floor and the door that still scraped and he had put his face in my neck and said *still good, still good, you're still here*—and then he had picked up his phone and told Brielle that being here felt wrong.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, the way you re-read something hoping the words will rearrange themselves into something survivable.

They didn't.

I stood up. My legs worked fine. That surprised me a little.

---

I went to Mia's room.

She was asleep in the crib, one fist curled under her chin, making the small snuffling sounds she always made around 2 AM. I sat down on the floor with my back against the crib rails, the same spot where I'd been folding laundry twenty minutes ago, before everything. The white onesie with the yellow ducks was still there, half-folded on the carpet.

I opened the messages again.

Then I started at the top.

The conversation went back seven months. Seven months—Mia had been six weeks old seven months ago, still jaundiced, still not sleeping more than ninety minutes at a stretch, and I had been a person who cried in the shower because it was the only place I could do it without worrying someone would hear. Seven months ago, Kade had been telling me he was working late on a project. He had brought me soup once. I had thought that was love.

I read for a long time.

Then I started taking screenshots.

I did it methodically, the way I used to do research papers in college—systematic, thorough, no emotion attached to the process, just the process. Message threads. The liked posts, all of them, a trail of small hearts going back to October. I went into his payment apps next, the ones he thought I didn't know the passwords to. I did. I'd seen him type them a hundred times at the grocery store checkout, at the gas station, in the ordinary careless way of someone who doesn't think they're being watched.

The charges told their own story.

Food delivery, twice a week, sometimes three times. Two-person orders. The address that kept appearing wasn't ours—it was a zip code I had to Google, an apartment complex off South Congress. I stared at the address for a moment and thought: *he drove past our exit to get there.*

I kept going.

Three weeks back, a transfer. The memo line said making up for last time. The amount was four hundred and twelve dollars. I pulled up a flight search and typed in Austin to Haikou, the dates that matched.

Four hundred and twelve dollars. Exactly.

I set the phone face-down on my knee for a moment and looked at Mia. Her chest rose and fell. She had Kade's lashes—I'd always thought that was sweet, that small inheritance. I looked at her for a long time.

Then I picked the phone back up.

I found Brielle's Instagram again and I scrolled slowly this time, not looking for evidence, just looking. She was twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Music major. She posted videos of herself playing guitar on a small apartment balcony, the kind with string lights and a single folding chair. She had a laugh that photographed well. In one post she was at the beach, sitting in the sand in a yellow bikini, and beside her were a pair of men's legs, the upper half cropped out of the frame.

I recognized the swim trunks.

Navy blue, thin white stripe down the side. Target, last summer, the clearance rack. Fifteen dollars. I had held them up and asked Kade if he liked them and he'd said *sure, yeah, those work* the way he said things when he wasn't really paying attention.

He'd been paying attention to something else, apparently.

I sat there on the floor of my daughter's room and I looked at those swim trunks in another woman's beach photo and I felt something shift in me—not break, not yet, but shift, the way ice does right before it goes.

---

I built the folder carefully.

New cloud account, not connected to anything he could see. I uploaded everything—the screenshots, the payment records, the flight match, the beach photo, the gray hoodie. I named the folder *Evidence* because that's what it was, and I had never been someone who needed soft language for hard things.

I set a password. Something he'd never guess. Mia's birth weight in grams.

Then I closed everything, cleared the recent apps, and walked back into the bedroom.

Kade was on his side now, facing my half of the bed. His breathing was deep and even. In the dark he looked exactly like the person I had married—the jaw, the lashes, the scar under his chin that I used to touch with my thumb when I thought he was asleep.

I put his phone back in his jeans pocket. I did it carefully, without a sound.

Then I got into bed.

I lay on my side facing the wall and I stared at the place where the paint met the baseboard and I breathed. In. Out. The coconut smell had faded from the pillow. Or maybe I'd just stopped noticing it.

After a minute, Kade shifted. His arm came around my waist in his sleep, heavy and automatic, the way it had for five years, the way it had always made me feel like something that was claimed.

I looked at his hand resting against my stomach.

I didn't move it.

Not because I forgave him. Not because I was confused about what I'd found. I left his hand there because I understood something now with a clarity that felt almost cold: he needed to believe nothing had changed. He needed to wake up tomorrow and find me ordinary, find me unsuspecting, find me exactly where he'd left me.

Because I wasn't done yet.

I'd only just started.