“I don’t want this to be happening.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want lawyers.”
“I know.”
“I want my husband to explain why he suddenly thinks I cheated on him.”
Delaney closed Grant’s message.
“Then the fastest way to get the truth may be to stop asking Grant to volunteer it.”
That night I slept in Delaney’s guest room.
Or tried to.
At 2:14 in the morning, I woke with the baby moving hard enough to make me sit upright.
I rested my palm against my stomach.
For months, Grant had done the same whenever the baby moved.
He would stop whatever he was doing and wait with his hand against me until he felt it.
The memory hurt more than the boxes.
I opened our old message thread.
Six weeks earlier, Grant had been normal.
Love you. Picking up dinner. Need anything?
Three days later, the tone changed.
Working late again?
Then:
Elliot there?
Then:
Funny how often his name comes up lately.
I scrolled slowly.
The change was obvious now.
There had been a trigger.
Something had happened between those messages.
I checked my calendar.
The first suspicious text from Grant came the day after a client presentation in Richmond.
Elliot and I had attended together with four other employees.
We spent most of the afternoon inside a conference room at a hotel near the convention center.
Then our team had dinner in the hotel restaurant before driving home.
I remembered Grant asking how the presentation went.
I had told him it was exhausting.
He asked who attended.
I listed everyone.
Including Elliot.
The next evening, Grant asked whether Elliot had driven me home.
He hadn’t.
I had driven myself.
At the time, I thought Grant was being oddly jealous.
Now I wondered what he had been shown.
I searched my photos from that day.
There were several team pictures.
In one, Elliot stood beside me.
His hand wasn’t touching me.
We were surrounded by six other people.
Nothing unusual.
Then I noticed another photo.
One our receptionist had posted to the company’s social account.
The angle was tighter.
Two people were cropped out.
From that angle, Elliot and I appeared to be standing almost alone.
I stared at the image.
Then at the date.
Something cold moved through me.
I sent it to Delaney.
Her reply came almost immediately.
Call me.
I walked downstairs.
She was already awake.
“I was looking at the same thing,” she said.
“What?”
“Grant’s social media.”
My stomach tightened.
“What did you find?”
“Nothing public.”
“Then why are you awake?”
“Because I searched Talia.”
I sat beside her.
Delaney turned the laptop toward me.
Talia’s professional profile filled the screen.
Monroe Development Strategies.
Richmond, Virginia.
Client partnerships.
Commercial redevelopment.
Before that, another company in Norfolk.
Before that, a degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Delaney scrolled.
“Look at the year.”
I did.
Talia had been at VCU during the same time I had been finishing my architecture degree.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“No.”
Delaney clicked another result.
An old student organization page appeared.
The photograph was more than a decade old.
About twenty students stood outside a campus building.
Delaney enlarged the image.
Third row.
Far left.
A young woman with dark brown hair instead of Talia’s current blonde.
I leaned closer.
My chest tightened.
It was her.
“You knew her,” Delaney said.
“I don’t remember her.”
“You were on the same campus.”
“So were thousands of other people.”
Delaney clicked another cached page.
Talia Monroe.
Student volunteer.
Richmond Urban Design Initiative.
My mouth went dry.
I knew that name.
Not Talia’s.
The initiative.
During my final year of college, I had completed an internship with a small architectural consulting firm that helped review documents for a redevelopment project near Shockoe Bottom.
There had been a problem with one of the subcontractors.
Numbers in a structural report didn’t match supporting documents.
I had noticed the discrepancy while preparing a file for a senior architect.
At first, I assumed I had organized something incorrectly.
I brought it to my supervisor.
He checked.
Then checked again.
The issue eventually became much bigger than my internship assignment.
A subcontracting firm lost the project.
There was an internal investigation.
People were dismissed.
I barely knew the details because I had been an intern.
But I remembered one name.
Monroe Engineering Services.
I looked at Delaney.
“No.”
“What?”
“Search Monroe Engineering.”
She did.
The results appeared immediately.
The firm had closed ten years earlier.
Several old articles mentioned contract disputes and an investigation into falsified project documentation.
The company president was Martin Monroe.
Delaney went still.
“Talia’s father?”
“I think so.”
We opened another article.
There was a photograph.
Martin Monroe stood outside a courthouse beside his wife and two daughters.
The younger daughter was Talia.
I recognized her even with darker hair.
The older daughter looked familiar too, though I couldn’t place her.
Then I saw the caption.
Talia Monroe, nineteen.
I had been twenty-two.
Delaney turned toward me.
“You were the intern who found the discrepancy.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know her father?”
“No.”
“Did you report him?”
“I reported numbers that didn’t match.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I gave the documents to my supervisor. Whatever happened after that had nothing to do with me.”
Delaney looked at Talia’s photograph.
“It might have had everything to do with you from her perspective.”
A memory surfaced so suddenly I stopped breathing.
A hallway.
My old internship office.
A young woman standing near the elevator.
Dark hair.
Red coat.
I had been carrying a stack of folders.
She had looked directly at me and said, “You think you’re better than everyone because you found one mistake?”
I had assumed she was talking to someone behind me.
Then a receptionist hurried over and asked her to leave.
I never knew who she was.
I never thought about it again.
Until now.
“I met her.”
Delaney looked at me.
“What?”
“Once.”
I described the hallway.
The red coat.
The words.
Delaney slowly closed the laptop.
“That’s why she said you didn’t remember her.”
My heart pounded.
“But that was more than ten years ago.”
“Apparently she remembers.”
I barely slept after that.
The following morning, Delaney contacted a family attorney recommended by one of her coworkers.
Her name was Rebecca Hale.
She met us that afternoon in a small office in downtown Fredericksburg.
Rebecca listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she asked me to send her every message Grant had sent during the previous two months.
Then she asked something that surprised me.
“Does Grant know about the Monroe connection?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t ask him yet.”
“Why?”
“Because right now we don’t know what Talia has told him, what he believes, or what evidence he thinks exists.”
“I want to know.”
“I understand.”
Rebecca folded her hands.
“But the fact that someone from your past appears to have deliberately inserted herself into your marriage changes how carefully we should approach this.”
I looked down.
“I’m not trying to ruin Grant.”
Rebecca’s expression softened.
“I know.”
“I want the truth.”
“Then protect your ability to find it.”
