By the time I pulled onto our street, a neighbor's porch light was on and somebody had left a small child's bicycle against a tree. Our house looked exactly as it had at dinner. The porch steps still needed paint. A package sat beneath the mailbox. Upstairs, one bedroom window glowed because I had forgotten to turn off the light when I put away laundry.
I carried the package inside, set it on the kitchen counter, and stood staring at the drawer pull I had meant to repair. The screwdriver lay beside it, where I'd placed it before the text arrived. I picked it up and tightened the screw, once, twice, until the brass handle stopped moving. When I closed the drawer, the click sounded obscene in the silence.
Sabrina called at 11:18. I let it ring until it stopped. She called again at 11:24, then sent a message asking where I was and whether I was safe. A minute later she wrote that we needed to talk before I told anyone. I stared at that sentence for a long time. She had already decided the first emergency was not the marriage she had damaged but the possibility that somebody else might learn about it.
At midnight she came home. I heard the familiar scrape of her key and the pause in the hallway when she realized I had left the lights on. She entered the kitchen without her heels and stood near the doorway, holding her purse with both hands. Her face looked washed out beneath her makeup. The pearl earrings were gone, leaving two small pink marks where the clasps had pressed against her skin.
"Reid," she said. "Please look at me."
I was seated at the table with a glass of water. "I'm looking."
She put down her purse. "I know what you saw. I know how terrible it looked."
"It didn't look like anything. It was exactly what it was."
"You don't know everything." She crossed her arms. "Colin and I have been under enormous pressure at work. There are things happening at the firm you wouldn't understand."
I had known Sabrina to build a convincing case out of almost nothing, but I had never expected to watch her try it in our own kitchen. "Does the firm require you to sleep with its vice president?" I asked. "Because if that's in the employee handbook, you should show me the page."
She flinched. "Don't be cruel."
"I'm not trying to be cruel. I'm trying to find out whether you can tell me the truth without making me drag it out of you."