“You called them?”
“I flagged the inquiry.”
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
“You have no idea what you’ve done.”
“Then explain it.”
She began pacing.
“It was a preliminary application.”
“You said there was no application.”
“I was trying to see what we qualified for.”
“We?”
“Yes, we.”
“You never told me.”
“I was going to.”
“For what?”
She stopped.
“That’s complicated.”
“No, Vanessa. A home equity line has a purpose. What was the money for?”
She looked toward the refrigerator, the floor, anywhere but my face.
“An investment.”
“What investment?”
“Something Adrian was putting together.”
I felt the absurdity of the sentence before the anger reached me.
“You were trying to borrow against our house to invest in a project with the man you were sleeping with.”
“That is not what happened.”
“That is exactly what you just described.”
“It was a commercial redevelopment opportunity.”
“With Adrian.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean—”
“How much?”
“Nothing happened.”
“How much were you trying to borrow?”
“Nothing happened.”
“How much?”
She pressed both hands against the counter.
“Eighty thousand.”
For the first time all night, I lost my composure.
I did not shout.
I laughed.
A short, stunned sound escaped me because eighty thousand dollars was so much larger than the version of betrayal I had prepared myself for that my mind rejected it as ridiculous.
Vanessa flinched.
“It wasn’t eighty thousand cash. It was a credit line.”
“That makes no difference.”
“The property was going to appreciate.”
“What property?”
“A small mixed-use building in Jersey City.”
“Whose name?”
“An LLC.”
“Whose LLC?”
She hesitated.
“Adrian’s group.”
I stared at her.
“You were going to put marital equity into your lover’s investment.”
“He wasn’t my lover when the opportunity first came up.”