Over the next two weeks, I lived in two realities at once.
In one, I was visibly pregnant, shopping for crib sheets, timing Braxton Hicks contractions, answering Nathan’s distracted questions about stroller colors, and listening to him describe fictional client dinners while he loosened his tie at the kitchen counter.
In the other, I was building a case.
Doug sent updates through an encrypted email account I created under my old college login, one Nathan didn’t know existed because it belonged to a version of me he had quietly encouraged out of the frame. The first photos came in on a Thursday night while Nathan was supposedly with a contractor from Boston.
I opened them at 11:32 p.m. in the nursery, my laptop balanced on a stack of unpacked diaper boxes.
There he was.
Nathan, stepping out of a black town car outside the Meridian. Hand on the lower back of a woman in a cream coat. Her hair was dark blonde, long and expensive-looking, the kind that always falls back into place after wind. In the next image, they were at a restaurant three blocks away, leaning toward each other over candlelight.
Nathan was smiling.
Not his public smile. Not the polished one he wore at galas or client dinners. This one was loose. Easy. Boyish, almost. I had not seen that expression directed at me in years, and it hit harder than the hotel charge ever did.
I clicked to the third image and went completely still.
The woman had tucked her hair behind one ear.
At her throat, catching the restaurant light, was the sapphire pendant.
For a second I genuinely thought I might throw up. Instead, I zoomed in until the pixels broke apart.
Same oval stone. Same delicate silver setting. Same tiny asymmetry on the left side of the chain where the jeweler had shown me a sample on his website when I was researching anniversary gifts I never ended up buying.
He hadn’t returned it.
He had moved it.
I closed the laptop and sat with both palms flat on the rug while the baby rolled inside me like she was trying to reposition herself under stress.
That image did something the statements hadn’t.
Numbers told me my husband was cheating.
The necklace told me he had lied to my face, casually, while deciding another woman should wear what he pretended had never belonged to anyone.
I emailed Doug back in three words.
Find out her name.
He replied twelve minutes later.
Already on it.