Page 96 of Wrong Mail

I'm up and at the counter before I know I've moved, asking the kid to turn it up. He does, and the anchor's voice comes down into the diner.

Christopher Brockwell, the man sought in connection with the disappearance of Hunts Point woman Julia Shaw, was found dead this morning of what police are calling an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. His body was found at a motel off the highway. A firearm was recovered at the scene. Police, the anchor says, are not currently seeking any other suspects in Ms. Shaw's disappearance, and sources indicate investigators increasingly believe Brockwell was responsible.

Responsible. Past tense already. They've closed a door in a sentence.

I stand there while the diner carries on around me, a milk steamer hissing behind the counter, a toddler dropping a spoon. I wait to feel the relief I've been chasing for a week. If it was Chris, then the story still makes sense. A violent man hurt the woman he was already hurting, and David is only a liar. If it was Chris, I get to keep everything. Right?

The relief doesn't come.

What comes instead is my old instinct, the one that made me good at this before the crash took my memory. Chris was a lot of things. Loud, cruel, a man who put his hands on a woman and told her she'd imagined it. But he was in love with himself. He believed, all the way down, that he was the main character. Men like that don't check into a highway motel and turn a gun on themselves out of guilt. They lawyer up. They go on television and cry and blame the physician down the road.

He was on the phone to a news station yesterday saying he'd been set up. And this morning he's a closed case with a gun beside him?

I make myself stop. It's the fever again. I know the feeling of it. Sometimes a frightened man runs out of road. Sometimes the simplest thing is the true thing.

But the diner goes unsteady around me all the same, because Chris named my husband on the news. Now Chris is conveniently, tidily dead, and it seems to me, standing under that television, that everyone who threatens David has gone quiet.

I should go to the police.

I know I should.

Even if it makes me look a fool.

But instead, I go home.

David is in the kitchen when I come in, and he already knows. I can see it the second I'm through the door. Maybe he saw the dot in Portland before it went dark. Maybe he only reads it now on my face. Either way, he can see I've come back changed. He's unshaven. There's a glass by his hand that isn't coffee, and it isn't yet noon. His whole ruined day is in the set of his shoulders.

"You didn't come home last night," he says. "You didn't answer. You turned your phone off. I've been out of my mind with worry.”

"I went to Portland."

I set my handbag down.

The word does to him what I knew it would. He goes still, the same stillness that gave him away on the sofa the night Lena’s name lit up his phone.

"I met a surgeon named Richard Thomas," I say. My voice is coming from somewhere very level and far away. "And then I went to a little house on the east side to talk to Lena Holloway. Her brother answered the door. Lena's been dead since Tuesday. Murdered."

David sits down. Not gracefully. He goes down into the chair like his legs have quit. He puts one hand over his mouth, and above it his eyes are wet. I can't tell yet what the tears are for.

"Say something," I tell him.

"Lena's dead?"

"You knew her." I stay standing. The island is between us and I keep it there. "Don't. Don't do the face. I've had the whole drive back to watch you do that face in my head. I know about the affair, David. I know she was an intern, and you buried her career when it got complicated. You left Oregon and never told me any of it. Richard Thomas told me. Elaine told me the rest. So don't sit there and be careful with me. For once in your life, be a person who tells the truth.”

And he does. That's the part I'm not ready for. He takes his hand from his mouth and says it, all of it, in a low, toneless rush, like someone finally setting down a weight he's carried for years.

"Yeah, I had an affair with her when I was married to Elaine. It was four years ago. Before I met you. Things between Elaine and me weren't good, and I let that become an excuse. Lena wanted me, and I liked being wanted."

He groans and runs a hand around the back of his head.

"I regret it. I do. It's the worst thing I did, and when it started to come apart, I got scared. Scared that I was going to lose everything. So I used my position. I made her the problem. I made sure she was the one who left. And then two years ago she found me again." He turns the glass on the counter and doesn't drink from it. "She said there was a child. A little girl. Mine, from back then, that she'd never told me about. She wanted money. She said if I didn't pay, she'd take it to Helen, to the board, and to you. All of it. The affair, the child, what I did to her career." He looks up. "I paid her. Cash, so there'd be no name at the other end of it. I kept a separate account in my name, one you'd never see, so the withdrawals would never show up on ours. For almost a year I paid her. I hated her, and I hated myself more. I never once told you, because telling you meant losing you, and you are the one clean thing I have.”

"The cash," I say. "Monthly payments?”

"Yeah. Monthly."

“I saw money come out of our joint account when you were in Portland.”