“Don’t what?”
“Ren’s going to k—” She stopped herself. She put both hands over her mouth. “You have to let her tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“You have to let her tell you,” she said, “because if I do it, I’ll do it wrong, and it’s — Theo, please just wait. Please. Two hours. Just wait two hours.”
And I looked at my sister-in-law standing in my hallway begging me to wait, with her eyes full, and every part of me that was still capable of thought went: she’s covering for her.
That’s what covering looks like. Panic, and please wait, and let her explain.
So I said, “Sit down or leave, I don’t care which,” and I went and stood at the window.
Renata got home at 7:35.
She came up the path with two shopping bags, and she got to the door, and her key didn’t work either.
She tried it three times. Then she rang her own doorbell.
I opened it and stood in the doorway and did not move aside.
“Theo?” She actually laughed, half a second of it, confused. “What are you — you’re not supposed to be—” And then she saw my face, and the laugh died. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Come in.”
“Theo—”
“Come in, Renata.”
She came in. She saw Cressida on the couch with red eyes and she stopped in the middle of the room.
“Cress?”
“Ren—”
“Don’t,” I said. “Sit down.”
She didn’t sit down.
I put the watch on the coffee table. I set it down deliberately, in the exact spot I’d found it.
And I watched her look at it.
Here’s what her face did: nothing. Then recognition. Then — and I need to describe this properly because I misread it so completely — a kind of horrified understanding, the look of somebody watching a glass go off the edge of a counter.
“Oh no,” she said. “Oh, Theo. Oh no.”
“Whose is it?”
“Theo—”
“Whose is it, Renata.”
“It’s Desmond’s.” She said it straight out. No pause. “He was here last night, he—”
“He was here last night.”
“Yes—”
“At one in the morning.”
“No! No, at about eight, he came at eight and he—”
“And where were you at one in the morning?”
She stopped.
That’s the moment. That’s the one I still see. My wife of almost exactly ten years, standing in our living room with two shopping bags at her feet, and her mouth open, and nothing coming out.
“Where were you,” I said, “when you told me you were asleep in our bed?”
“I was asleep,” she said. “I swear to you, I was asleep, I just wasn’t—”
“Wasn’t here.”
“No.”
“Where.”
“Theo, please, it’s Sunday, it’s two days, can you just—”
“WHERE?”
She flinched. I’d never raised my voice at her in ten years and I did it then and she flinched, and Cressida stood up off the couch.
And I opened the folder and I threw it on the table next to the watch, and eleven pages of bank statement fanned out across the wood.
“Sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars,” I said. “Since February. Out of our savings, into an account I’ve never seen. And three charges at a motel on Gullet Row. June, June, August.”
The color went out of her face in one movement, like a blind coming down.
“You looked at the accounts.”
“They’re my accounts.”
“You looked at the accounts,” she said again, and she sat down on the arm of the chair like her legs had stopped agreeing to it.
