Not the obvious things first. Not clothes or baby furniture. I moved the pieces Nathan would never notice were gone because he had never truly seen them.
My framed CPA certificate. The photo of me speaking at a financial fraud conference in Boston. Research notebooks from my old cases. A box of tax law binders I had kept in the study closet. The navy blazer I used to wear on depositions. Every trip felt less like packing and more like excavation.
One Tuesday afternoon, I carried a banker’s box down the apartment stairs and had to stop halfway because the baby lodged a heel so sharply into my side I almost laughed. The hallway smelled like old radiator heat and somebody’s garlic dinner. I leaned against the wall, one hand on the box, one on my stomach.
“You and me,” I whispered. “We’re getting out.”
At home, Nathan moved through the weeks with absolute confidence.
He complained about city traffic. Asked if we had decided on a pediatrician. Kissed me absentmindedly in the kitchen while texting someone else under the table. Once, when I was loading the dishwasher, he came up behind me, slid a hand over my hip, and said, “I know I’ve been busy. Things will settle down after the baby.”
I nearly dropped a plate.
That was the part that kept shocking me—not the affair anymore, but the audacity of his ease. The way he could stand in the warm yellow light of our kitchen, smelling like expensive wool and hotel soap, and talk about the future as if he still belonged in it.
Then, on a Wednesday night in late November, he called me at 7:40 p.m. from the city.
His voice was too warm.
“I cleared tomorrow morning,” he said. “Thought maybe we could spend it together. Look at nursery stuff. Get breakfast. Just us.”
I was sitting in the rocking chair in the nursery folding tiny cotton sleepers. My fingers went still around a pink cuff.
Nathan did not clear mornings. Nathan protected billable hours the way dragons protect gold.
“That sounds nice,” I said.
The second we hung up, I opened my banking app.
At first, I didn’t see it. Then I switched to joint-account transactions and there it was, sitting three days back like a lit match in dry grass.
Douglas Wright Investigative Services — $200.
I closed my eyes so hard stars burst behind them.