Chapter 1
The call came on a Wednesday night, ten days before my husband’s fortieth birthday.
I was on the couch with my feet up on a pillow and a spreadsheet of RSVPs open on my laptop.
Grant was at the gym.
The baby was doing his slow nightly rolls under my ribs, like someone turning over in a sleeping bag.
My phone lit up with a number I didn’t have saved.
“Rachel? It’s Marcus. Simone’s husband.”
We had met twice.
Once at Grant’s mother’s Fourth of July barbecue, and once at a Christmas party where he spent most of the night telling me about his tomato garden.
Fourteen kinds.
He had names for some of them.
He seemed kind, a little shy, and very much in love with his wife.
“Is everything okay?”
I asked.
There was a long breath on the line.
Behind it I could hear a turn signal clicking.
He was sitting in a parked car somewhere.
“No,” he said.
“I don’t think it is. Are you sitting down?”
I was.
I told him so.
I took my feet off the pillow anyway and put them flat on the rug, as if that would help.
“Our credit card statement came last week,” he said.
“Our joint card. There’s a hotel on it. The one by the airport. Room charges, always on a Tuesday afternoon. Eleven Tuesdays since August.”
I didn’t say anything.
The laptop fan whirred.
On the screen, the RSVP column said “Simone: yes (1).”
“She told me Tuesdays were a work training,” Marcus said.
“So last Tuesday I took the afternoon off and sat in the lobby behind a newspaper, like an idiot in a movie.”
He stopped.
I heard him swallow.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I have photos, Rachel. It’s Grant.”
The baby kicked, hard, right under my palm.
I remember thinking he had heard.
I looked at the dark window across the room and saw myself in it.
A pregnant woman on a couch, holding a phone too tightly with both hands.
“How did you even find it?”
I asked.
“Simone does your bills. Grant told me once. She’s the organized one.”
“I looked,” Marcus said.
Just that.
Something in the way he said it, flat and careful, made me not ask again.
Let me tell you about Simone, so you understand why I didn’t hang up on him.
Simone was Grant’s first wife.
They married young, when she was twenty-three, and divorced four years ago.
By the time I met Grant, she was already “the ex we’re all still friends with.”
His mother, Patricia, still called her “my Simone.”
She still came to Thanksgiving.
Patricia always set her a place right between Grant and his brother Neil.
Neil works nights as an aircraft mechanic out at the airport, and he usually spent Thanksgiving half asleep in his chair, smelling faintly of jet fuel and dish soap.
Over the last year, Simone had texted Grant more and more.
Late at night.
Early in the morning.
Little things.
A song.
A photo of a restaurant they used to love.
“Thinking of your mom today.”
Every time I mentioned it, Grant gave me the same tired look.
He would rub his eyes with his thumb and finger, the way he did whenever I was “being a lot.”
“Stop being jealous, Rachel. She’s married. She’s family.”
So I stopped.
I was pregnant and tired, and I believed him, because believing him was easier.
And because a small part of me had started to wonder if he was right.
Maybe I was the problem.
That night, Marcus sent me one photo.
Just one.
“You don’t have to open it,” he said.
“But I didn’t think I had the right to decide that for you.”
Grant and Simone at the hotel elevator.
His hand on the small of her back.
Her face turned up to him, laughing.
He was wearing the gray quarter-zip I had bought him for Father’s Day, a month early, “for practice.”
I looked at it for a long time.
I zoomed in on his hand.
I zoomed out.
Then I put the phone face down on the cushion, stood up too fast, and made it to the downstairs bathroom just in time.
When I came back, there was a text on the lock screen.
“I’m here when you want to talk. I’m not going anywhere.”
Grant came home at ten.
Keys in the bowl.
The fridge door.
His steps on the stairs.
I was in bed with the light off.
He smelled like the gym’s eucalyptus soap.
He always did.
I had never once wondered why a man showers at the gym when he lives eight minutes away.
He kissed my forehead and asked if the baby was kicking.
“He’s quiet tonight,” I said.
Grant didn’t notice that I’d said “he.”
He didn’t know yet.
That was going to be my gift.
I didn’t sleep.
At three in the morning I sat in the nursery, in the glider Patricia had bought us, and held the newest ultrasound print up to the night-light.
It was the first one where you can see his face.
His little nose.
His fist up by his cheek, like he was thinking something over.
I had asked the tech to write the sex on a slip of paper and fold it, so I could open it alone.
I opened it in the clinic parking lot and cried happy tears into the steering wheel.
Then I started planning the toast.
The plan had been simple.
Twelve people, one long table, Grant’s speech, and then me, standing up.
“Actually, I have a gift too. It’s a boy.”
I had practiced it in the shower.
Now I sat in the dark and practiced a different line.
“I know about the hotel.”
I said it out loud, quietly, to the empty crib.
The crib was still half built.
Grant had started it in August and stopped.
“Tuesdays are crazy,” he’d said.
“I’ll finish it on a weekend.”
I already knew how the conversation would go.
He would sigh.
He would rub his eyes.
He’d say Marcus was paranoid and the photo was a hug in a lobby.
He’d say Simone was going through something.
He’d say I was jealous.
And somewhere in the middle of it, I would start to believe him.
I had done it for a year.
I needed something he couldn’t talk his way around.
I needed him to show me himself.
The next afternoon I met Marcus at a diner off the highway, halfway between our houses.
It was raining.
The booth was red vinyl, patched with tape, and the waitress kept calling us “you two” like we were a couple.
He had a manila folder.
He kept one hand flat on top of it and didn’t open it right away.
With the other hand he turned his wedding ring around and around.
“I didn’t want to do this on a phone,” he said.
The statements were inside, with eleven dates circled in yellow highlighter.
Under them, printed photos.
The lobby.
The elevator.
The two of them walking out to the parking lot, not touching, which was somehow worse.
I looked at every page.
He watched me look.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
The coffee went cold.
“She RSVP’d for one,” I said finally.
“To the birthday.”
Marcus nodded slowly.
“She told me Saturday is a girls’ night. She told your mother-in-law I’ll be in Denver for work.”
He almost laughed.
“I’ve never been to Denver.”
“Grant added her himself,” I said.
“Two weeks ago. ‘She’s family. Mom loves her. Don’t make it weird.’”
Marcus pressed his lips together and looked out at the rain.
That’s when I told him my idea.
I said it fast, before I could talk myself out of it.
“Come to the dinner,” I said.
“Wait at the bar downstairs. I’m writing the place cards. Grant at the head, me on his right. If Grant keeps me beside him, go home. I’ll handle him in private, and you handle her. And maybe I’m wrong about who he is.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“If he doesn’t, come up when I text you.”
Marcus was quiet for a long moment.
He picked up his cold coffee and put it down without drinking.
“That’s a fair test,” he said.
“It’s the last one,” I said.
The next Tuesday, at 1:52 in the afternoon, Grant texted me.
“Client thing ran long, don’t wait on me for dinner.”
With a heart.
I was folding baby clothes on the bed.
Tiny socks.
A green sleeper with ducks on it.
At 2:40, Marcus texted.
“Both cars are in the lot.”
I put the phone down.
I folded every single piece of clothing in the basket, one by one, and lined them up in the drawer by color.
Then I went downstairs and wrote the place cards.
Twelve cream cards with a thin gold edge.
The same calligraphy pen I had used for our wedding invitations.
Grant at the head.
Me on his right.
Patricia on his left.
Neil and his wife, Corinne.
His three closest friends from college and their wives: Dev and Amara, Chris and Becca, Jamal and Lisa.
And Simone, at the far end.
The last plate.
Grant came home at nine-forty, smelling like eucalyptus soap.
He saw the cards drying on the kitchen table and picked up his own.
“Head of the table,” he said, smiling.
Then he found Simone’s at the very end of the row and his smile went flat.
“You put Simone at the end?”
“Someone has to sit at the end.”
“She’ll think it’s a statement.”
“It’s a seating chart, Grant.”
He set the card down, a little harder than he needed to.
“Don’t make it weird, Rach.”
He went upstairs to shower.
Again.
