Chapter 4
His blue suit was gone.
His white shirt was gone.
His work shoes were gone.
Everything had been arranged to support one story.
Lucas had gone to work.
Except he hadn’t.
I opened his closet.
I don’t know what I expected to find.
A missing suitcase?
An empty drawer?
Some dramatic proof that my husband had been living another life?
There was nothing.
His shirts hung in careful rows.
His running shoes were on the bottom shelf.
The old sweatshirt he wore on Sunday mornings was folded badly on top of a stack of jeans.
Normal.
Everything was normal.
And suddenly normality itself felt sinister.
At 8:12, another message arrived.
Project is a nightmare.
That time I took a screenshot.
I didn’t consciously decide to preserve evidence.
My finger simply moved.
Screenshot.
Saved.
Proof.
At 8:46, Lucas made the mistake that ended any remaining possibility that this was a misunderstanding.
Warren has us redoing half the numbers.
I stopped breathing.
Warren.
Daniel Warren.
The man who had called me.
The man who had told me Lucas had not been at work all day.
Lucas was no longer merely pretending to be in the office.
He had placed Daniel inside the lie.
He had given his imaginary day characters.
Activity.
Detail.
I typed:
Sounds awful.
Lucas replied almost immediately.
You have no idea.
He was right.
I had no idea.
I had no idea where my husband had spent the previous thirteen hours.
I had no idea who he had been with.
I had no idea what he had been doing.
I had no idea whether this was the first Thursday he had lied to me or simply the first Thursday someone had accidentally exposed him.
But I knew one thing.
I wasn’t going to warn him.
I wanted to see his face.
I wanted to hear him tell the lie while looking directly at me.
At 10:05, the garage door opened.
My whole body tightened.
I heard the car enter.
The engine stopped.
A door slammed.
Then the mudroom door opened.
Lucas stepped into the house carrying his laptop bag.
The performance began immediately.
He loosened his tie.
Dropped his keys into the ceramic bowl beside the door.
Exhaled heavily.
“God, what a day.”
I looked at him.
Really looked.
His hair was slightly messy.
His collar was open.
There was a faint crease across his shirt near his waist.