Page 95 of Wrong Mail

David’s at home. On our sofa, probably, in the lamplight.

Rodriguez told us to rip the system out and change the codes. I never did. Deleting the app meant I couldn't watch David.

Then something cold settles in me. I should have thought of it before I got in the car. The app goes both ways. It always has. He saw me logged at Henry's once and told me the system was junk. I let him. If I can sit here and watch him not move, then he can watch me. He can see my dot, sitting on a street in Portland outside the house where he used to send four thousand dollars a month.

He knows where I am. Maybe he has known the whole time.

I look back at his text. He didn't ask why I'm in Portland. He didn't ask what I'm doing at her house. Had he even looked at the tracking app?

The driver sees me and gets out to open the door, and I don't move yet.

I look at the dot on my house. I think about the clean, quiet rooms the Ericksons died in. About Lena, dead in her kitchen. About Julia, missing.

My husband is home tonight, waiting for me. And I understand that I’m too afraid to get in the car and be driven back to him.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Idon't go home.

The driver brings me north through the dark. When we get closer, he asks for an address again. I still can't give him one. I only told him to head toward Bellevue.

I can’t make myself let him drive me home.

Instead I have him drop me at a 24-hour diner in Bellevue, a bright place open at an hour when nothing else is, with menus under laminate and a television bolted up in the corner.

I turned my phone off back in Portland, outside Lena's house. If David could watch the dot, I didn't want to give him anything else to see.

Besides, I didn't know where I was going myself.

The diner smells of old grease, burnt coffee, and the pink soap they mop the floors with. A trucker works through a plate of eggs at the counter. A woman in scrubs stares at nothing over a cup gone cold. I used to wonder why places like this kept their lights on all night. Who could possibly need them at this hour? Now I know. It's for people who can't make themselves go home.

As the hours pass, I sit in yesterday's clothes and drink cup after cup of bad coffee to keep myself awake. I try to decide whether to walk into a police station.

I have enough to go to the police. At least I think I do.

I have photographs on my phone of almost a year of cash pulled from an account I wasn't allowed to see. There’s a dead woman in Portland my husband had been paying in secret. A child she claimed was his. A hospital visit he lied about. A gun in the house I never knew we owned. Chris, who stood up at my birthday and accused David in front of the whole club.

I could lay all of it on Rodriguez's desk and let him carry it. Part of me wants to so badly my hands ache with it, because it would mean I don't have to be the only one who knows.

But I don't have proof of a single killing.

I have a gun-owning husband who lied about a woman, and I have fear. Every cop on earth has seen a frightened wife walk in with less and watched it come to nothing.

If I go to Rodriguez now, with this, I’ll be the unstable one again. The woman who walked away from a fatal crash with pieces of her mind gone. The one who can't fully trust her memory, who tracks her husband on an app and sees patterns she can't prove.

I know how I'll sound. I know he'll be kind about not believing me.

And then there's a smaller, worse reason under that one. I make myself look at it.

I want to hear David say it first.

I've been married to this man for two years. If he wanted to hurt me, he would have done so by now. I owe myself the truth.

That's when Chris's face comes up on the television.

The same wrong club photo, tanned and grinning. But the banner under it has changed. The word is one I didn't expect, and it takes me a second to read it right.

FOUND DEAD.