Chapter 2

I'd known for a while, actually.

The doubt had started three months ago. I just hadn't wanted to admit it. It felt like a pebble in my shoe, catching underfoot now and then. You'd shake it out, decide it was gone, take a few steps, and there it was again.

Last month there was a smell on Charles's shirt, that gardenia perfume Gay always wore. He said a female coworker had brushed against him. I said nothing and bought him ten new shirts. I photographed each one as I cut off the tags and saved the pictures to a flash drive. He unwrapped them looking delighted and asked why I was suddenly being so good to him.

Last week Gay took me out for milkshakes. There was a stain on her straw, exactly the same as the one on Charles's, the same color, the same shape, the same slight angle. The kind of bite mark you only get from a decade of heavy smoking. She said she'd done it herself, careless with a cigarette. But she didn't smoke. Never had. She couldn't even work a lighter. I didn't call it out. I threw the milkshake away and ordered her a new one, unsweetened. She smiled and said no one got her like I did.

Gay really is a good actress. Every time she slung her arm around my neck and called me sweetie, she didn't so much as blink. She has beautiful eyes, the kind I envied for three years, almond-shaped, curving when she smiled, sincere no matter who she was looking at. I once told her she'd make a good actress someday.

Thinking about it now, she really would.

Their step counts were always in sync. When I worked until ten and Charles said he was staying late at the office, his count was twenty thousand. When Gay said she was home asleep, hers was twenty thousand too. Sometimes their location tags put one on the east side of town and the other on the west, but the tablecloth pattern in their photos was identical. Two coffees, two straws, the same tablecloth.

I saved every screenshot. There's a folder on my desktop called "Financial Reports," and it's all of this.

I never asked.

Not because I'm forgiving. Because I was waiting for a big enough bargaining chip. One that could settle all three years of accounts in a single stroke.

Now the chip had been handed to me. She'd sent it herself.

I dug the prenuptial asset agreement out of the nightstand. I'd had it done last month. Charles laughed at me for being so cautious when he signed it, asking whether the two of us really needed something like that. I told him my mother was forcing me, and he signed without thinking twice. His hand was steady. His signature came out better than mine. The last stroke trailed long and confident. I looked at that signature and remembered the love letter he once wrote me, where he said everything I have is yours.

He had no idea what that page meant.

Then there was his startup. I hold forty percent, and I was the one who found the investor back when it was registered. Trace the ownership all the way down and the actual controller is my father. Charles sat through three meetings with the investor, praising his professionalism every time, even liking the industry articles my father posted. He called my parents uncle and aunt for three years and would die never knowing the investor was the very father-in-law standing in front of him, accepting his tea.

He would die never knowing.

He thought I was the type to lose my head over love, to give him everything and never keep score. For three years, he said east and I went east, he said borrow and I transferred the money, he said his friend was wonderful and I made her my best friend. In his eyes I was a docile little lamb.

It's true, I didn't keep score.

What I kept was the debt. Principal and interest, every last cent.