He had started showering later on Tuesdays and Thursdays, sometimes coming home with the faint citrus scent of hotel soap instead of the woodsy one he kept in our bathroom. One evening in early fall, I had found a trace of glitter on his cuff and dismissed it as a work event. Months earlier, he had purchased a sapphire pendant and told me it had been returned because of a flaw.
I wrote everything down.
By midnight, the legal pad had several pages filled with precise handwriting.
By morning, I had emailed an old colleague named Patrick Doyle, a man who had once told me I had an instinct for financial dishonesty that bordered on unsettling.
He replied before sunrise with a single sentence.
You need a private investigator and a strong attorney, and I am already making calls.
The investigator’s name was Victor Langley, a retired detective with a quiet voice and a patience that made people underestimate him at their own risk.
We met in a roadside diner on a gray Friday morning, rain streaking the windows while the smell of burnt coffee hung in the air.
He glanced over the documents I had brought, then looked at me.
“You want confirmation or you want a case?” he asked.
“A case,” I said without hesitation.
That answer earned the smallest hint of approval.
For the next two weeks, I lived two separate lives.
In one, I was visibly pregnant, preparing for a baby, discussing nursery colors, and listening to Everett describe fictional client dinners while loosening his tie at the kitchen counter.
In the other, I was building evidence.
Victor sent updates through a secure email account I created using an old login Everett did not know existed.
The first set of photos arrived late one Thursday night while Everett was supposedly meeting a contractor in Boston.
I opened them in the nursery, sitting among unopened boxes of baby supplies.
There he was. Everett stepping out of a black car in front of the Grand Marlowe, his hand resting casually on the lower back of a woman wearing a cream coat.
In the next image, they sat at a candlelit table, leaning toward each other in a way that required no interpretation.
He was smiling. Not the practiced smile he used at formal events. This one was unguarded, relaxed, almost boyish.
I had not seen that expression directed at me in years. Then I opened the third photo.