Page 57 of Wrong Mail

"Just work." He doesn't say anything else about it. "I'm going to run out and grab some things for the party."

"About that." I sit up. "I've been wondering whether we should still do it."

“Are you having second thoughts?"

I sigh. "It just seems in bad taste. So soon after what happened."

"Life goes on, Mal." He says it gently. "It's a terrible thing but it had nothing to do with you. You only turn thirty-nine once. The country club's already booked." He finds the keys. "And Peggy would have wanted it. You know what she was like about birthdays."

"Yeah. I suppose."

He kisses the top of my head in passing.

"Remember your pills. Lock up behind me."

"I always do."

I hear the door close, the car start, the gravel crunch as he pulls away. Then the house goes quiet, and I'm alone in it.

I don't decide to open the app. My thumb decides for me. The way my hands sorted the clippings into columns before I'd even thought about it. The way my mouth told Cassandra I might have something, which was as good as yes.

The green dot pulls out of our driveway and onto Hunts Point Road. I watch it go, a small bright bead, off the point. I feel like a woman I don't want to be, sitting alone tracking her husband across a map. But I keep watching.

It doesn't stop in Bellevue. It doesn't stop anywhere a person buys anything or runs an errand. It heads onto the bridge toward Seattle.

I frown. “Huh.”

I sit up.

It crosses the water. It comes off at Montlake, slows, and settles on the hospital campus where my husband works.

He didn't mention work. That's the thing I keep coming back to. He stood in front of me with his keys in his hand and told me he was getting things for the party. The one true thing about where he was going, he left out.

I decide to call him. Just to ask about the party things, I tell myself. The reason is ready in my mouth.

It rings out to voicemail, his brisk recorded voice, then the beep.

I lower the phone to my lap, my mind turning over.

I watch the green dot stay exactly where it is, and then I do the only thing I know how to do with a thing that won't add up. I make it add up. He's a surgeon and that's his hospital, and there is nothing on earth more ordinary than the two of them in the same place at night. Something came up. The ward called, a patient turned, a resident panicked, and my husband went in and did what he does, and it never occurred to him to narrate it to me because it happens multiple times a month.

It's all possible. I lay each explanation down like a plank over a hole and then walk across them.

I almost get to the other side.

What stops me isn't a theory. It's smaller than that. It's that he gave me a false evening on his way out the door. He told me he was running errands. I can't work out why the small lie was necessary when the truth would have done just as well.

There you go again, building a case out of nothing.

But there's another thought underneath it. I sit on the sofa and hold it down with both hands. I'm proud of that for a little while.

I’m not sure when I stopped watching. At some point I put the phone down, and the room went dark around me, and I didn't get up to turn a lamp on.

When I pick up the phone again, the dot is moving. It's half past ten. He's coming back across the water. I put the phone face-down before it reaches the bridge, so that when he comes in I can be a woman who was already in bed. Not a woman who watched.

Chapter Nineteen

Julia doesn't offer me wine, which is how I know it's serious.