Chapter 4
I unlocked the heavy oak front door, easing it open as quietly as possible, intent on surprising him in his study down the hall.
The house was incredibly still. The grandfather clock in the hallway ticked its familiar, rhythmic pulse. But beneath that metronome of our domestic life, there was another sound. It was coming from upstairs. From the master bedroom.
It was a woman’s laugh.
It was light, musical, breathless, and undeniably young.
I froze. The heavy folio of documents suddenly felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. My purse strap dug into my shoulder.
Then came Michael’s voice. It wasn’t the voice he used to ask what was for dinner, or the voice he used to complain about his clients, or even the voice he used when we made love on Sunday mornings. It was a low, guttural, fiercely intimate sound—a sound I hadn’t heard from my husband in a decade.
My mind, trained for thirty-two years to solve problems and find logical explanations, immediately scrambled to protect me. He’s on a Zoom call, my brain insisted. A client made a joke. Or maybe he brought the iPad upstairs and he’s watching a movie. But we had a strict rule about no screens in the bedroom. And that laugh—that breathy, echoing laugh—was not compressed by laptop speakers. It was bouncing off the drywall of our home.
May you like
I should have turned around. I should have walked back out the front door, gotten into my car, and driven away until I figured out what to do. But a dark, terrifying, undeniable need took root in my stomach. I needed to know. I needed to see it, because if I didn’t see it, I would spend the rest of my life convincing myself I had imagined it.
