I looked at the black lettering on the card, the title of private investigator printed in a plain, block font beneath the phone number.
“I just need to know if the late nights are actually about work,” I said, my finger tracing the edge of the paper.
“They usually are not,” Sarah said.
I picked up the card and slipped it into the small zippered pocket of my purse.
I stepped out onto the damp asphalt of the driveway at ten o’clock that evening. The autumn air was cool enough to prickle my arms through my thin cardigan, but I did not want to go back inside for a jacket.
The two-story brick house on Maple Street was dark except for the single lamp left on in the hallway. Jason was upstairs, claiming he had a headache from a long day of reviewing land surveys, but I had seen the way he kept his phone close to his chest all through dinner.
I unlocked his silver sedan using the spare key fob I kept in the ceramic bowl by the front door. The locks cleared with a soft, heavy click that sounded incredibly loud in the suburban quiet of our neighborhood.
The interior of the car smelled of his expensive leather seats and a faint, sweet perfume that was entirely unfamiliar. It was not the crisp, citrus scent I had used for years, but something heavier, like jasmine.
I reached into the center console to search for his spare phone charger, the one with the braided silver cord he always insisted was missing from his briefcase. My fingers brushed past a handful of loose quarters and a plastic sleeve of mints before they hit a crumpled piece of paper.
I pulled it out and smoothed it against my knee.
It was a printed receipt from a Mobil gas station in Bloomington, Illinois.
The date at the top was the fourteenth of October. The timestamp showed three o’clock in the afternoon.
I leaned closer to the dashboard light to make sure I was reading the numbers correctly.
On the fourteenth of October, Jason had texted me at noon to say he was locked in a regional planning seminar in downtown Chicago and would not have cell service until late. Bloomington was nearly three hours south of Chicago.
