Chapter 6
I didn't go looking for it. That was what I kept telling myself while I did it.
Lauren had left her laptop open on the kitchen counter that morning before her shift. The screen had gone dark, but when I tapped the trackpad it woke to our phone bill. She'd been logged into the carrier account to check our data usage, and she hadn't logged out. The PDF was still loaded.
I told myself I wouldn't scroll. Then I scrolled.
The number at the top was Ethan's. I recognized it from the card he'd left on our fridge last fall after the Foundation fundraiser, the one Lauren had said to keep because he knew people at the county planning office. His number was listed thirty-seven times in the last two weeks alone. Most of the calls were under two minutes. The texts were counted separately — a column of time stamps I couldn't stop reading.
11:42 p.m. 12:07 a.m. 1:14 a.m. All on nights she'd told me she was at her sister's apartment in Millerton because Megan needed help with the baby. I'd even texted her goodnight those nights and she'd replied, "so tired, talk tomorrow, love you." The same nights, the log showed twelve, fourteen messages back and forth with him.
I took a screenshot and sent it to myself. Then I opened our shared cloud photos. I didn't have a password to crack. We shared the same Apple ID since we got married. In the recently deleted folder, there were message previews — iPhone screen recordings she'd taken and deleted — but the thumbnails still showed his name. Ethan. I clicked one. It was too blurry to read the words, but the time stamp was clear: October 14th, 11:58 p.m. The night she'd said she stayed at Megan's because the highway flooded.
I printed the bill at the library on Main. I didn't want our printer at home to keep the history. I sat at one of those low tables with the paper timeline I'd already made from Ethan's claims and wrote the new times in red pen next to hers.
Ethan had been right about the pattern, if not the details. Lauren had lied about where she was.
I texted her around four. "Can we meet after your shift? Diner on Route 9?"
She replied fast. "Everything okay?"
"Just want to talk. No fight."
She sent back, "Okay. 7."
The diner on County Road 9 sat between a tractor supply and a gas station, one of those places with vinyl booths and a pie case that hummed too loud. I got there twenty minutes early and took the booth in the back, the one farthest from the door. The waitress knew me from high school — Carla — and she poured me coffee without asking.
Lauren came in at 7:10 still in her scrubs, her hair pulled back, her coat over her arm. She slid in across from me and tried to smile. She looked exhausted in the fluorescent light.
"Hey," she said. "You ordered?"
"Not yet," I said. I had the folded papers in front of me under my hand. My coffee had gone cold.
She noticed them. "What's that?"
I unfolded the pages and smoothed them flat on the table between us. The white carrier bill on top, the timeline underneath with her nights at Megan's marked in blue and Ethan's messages marked in red. The two colors barely overlapped except where they had to.
"I checked our phone bill," I said. My voice was quieter than I meant it to be. "We share the account."
Her face went still. She didn't reach for the papers. She just stared at the red marks.
"Lauren," I said. "Were you with Megan those nights?"
She breathed in once, sharp. Her hands tightened around her coat in her lap.
"No," she said. It was barely a whisper.
Carla came over with a menu, saw our faces, and backed away.
"How long?" I asked.
She looked down at the table. Her eyes filled, but she didn't cry the way she had at the gala. This was different, smaller, like she was bracing.
"It started about three months ago," she said. "Late August. After the Whitaker summer party. Ethan was there. We talked. It was... I don't know how to explain it without sounding terrible."
"Try," I said.
She swallowed. "He paid attention to me. He asked about my work, about us. Things felt hard between us then. You were working late every night for that grant. I felt invisible. And he didn't make me feel that way."
I didn't move. The pie case hummed behind us.
"Last month I tried to end it," she said quickly, like she'd been holding that sentence ready. "Mid-November. I told him it was over, that I loved you, that I was going to fix things at home. I meant it. I stopped answering for a week. Then he kept calling. He showed up after my shift one night. He said if I left him he'd tell everyone, he'd tell you at the gala. That's why — that's why I was so scared that night. I knew what he was going to do."
I pointed to the red timestamps. "You texted him the night you said you were at Megan's last Tuesday."
"I know," she said. "He wouldn't stop. I answered because I thought if I was nice he'd stay quiet. It wasn't — I didn't go see him that night. I swear. I was at the apartment, but I was on the phone with him, trying to get him to leave me alone."
I stared at her. The bill showed fourteen messages. That wasn't one try to calm someone down.
"You told me you were helping Megan with the baby," I said.
"I know I did."
"So when you were trying to end it, you were still lying to me every night to talk to him."
She flinched. "Yes."
The waitress had left water glasses. Lauren hadn't touched hers. Her hands were shaking around her coat.
"Daniel, I'm not asking you to forgive me right now," she said. "I'm just telling you the truth. Three months. And the last month I tried to stop. I failed at that, but I tried."
I folded the papers back up slowly. The timeline still didn't answer the only question Ethan had planted in the ballroom that night. August to November, with an attempted stop in the middle, meant the window covered both of us.
"Do Megan's nights cover the whole time?" I asked.
She understood what I meant. She closed her eyes.
May you like
"Yes," she said. "That's why I can't tell you whose it is. I don't know."
We sat there while the diner filled with the dinner rush around us, truck drivers and families, normal noise. I left the papers on the table between us. She didn't ask to take them. I didn't offer.
