Chapter 1: The Other Phone

The gym bag had been sitting by the garage door for three days, which was how Maren knew David hadn't gone in over a week. He always said he'd gone. He said it the way he said a lot of things lately — quickly, and then he changed the subject to something that needed her attention, a school form, a leaking faucet, whether they still had that thing for Sunday. She was looking for his black belt, the one that matched nothing and went with everything, because Emma's dress rehearsal was at six and Maren had promised to look nice for once, not architect-on-a-deadline nice, actual nice. She unzipped the bag expecting sneakers and found, instead, a phone she didn't recognize wrapped in a balled-up t-shirt like something being smuggled. She almost didn't open it. That was the detail she'd return to later, in Priya's office, turning it over like a stone with a flat, smooth side: she'd almost zipped the bag back up. Some competent, self-protective part of her had already known, the way you know a storm is coming by the color the sky goes, and some other part of her — the part that had spent sixteen years choosing not to see things because seeing them would cost too much — had almost won. The phone wasn't locked. That was its own small insult. He hadn't even thought her curious enough to guard against. There weren't many messages. That was almost worse than if there had been hundreds — it meant this wasn't a compulsion he'd lost control of, it was a choice he kept making, deliberately, in small enough doses to stay beneath some threshold he'd set for himself. A woman named Steph. Not a coworker's name Maren recognized, not anyone from the block, from the kids' school, from anywhere Maren's life touched. That was its own kind of engineering, keeping the compartments sealed. *miss this*, one message said, sent nine days ago, at 11:40 p.m., which was twenty minutes after Maren had gone up to bed alone because David said he wanted to finish an email. She sat down on the concrete step inside the garage, still holding the phone, the cold coming up through her jeans, and she noticed with a strange, detached clarity that her hands weren't shaking. She'd have expected shaking. Instead there was a stillness moving through her like anesthesia, like her body had decided the feeling part could come later and was, for now, prioritizing function. Function meant: put the phone back exactly as it was. Function meant: go upstairs and find the belt, actually find it, because Emma had a solo tonight and had been rehearsing her one line — *I don't want to go to the ball, Fairy Godmother, I want to go home* — in the bathroom mirror for two weeks, and nothing about tonight was going to be about Maren's marriage if Maren could help it. She found the belt in the hall closet, exactly where it always was, because she'd put it there herself in October, because organizing things had always been the shape her love took. She put on lipstick in the hallway mirror and did not look, particularly, at her own eyes. At the rehearsal, David slid into the seat beside her three minutes late, smelling like the office, like printer toner and the coffee that was always slightly burnt by four, and he took her hand without looking at her, an old married reflex, the kind of hand-take that meant nothing and had once meant everything, and Maren let him do it. She let her hand lie there inside his like an object on loan. Onstage, in a paper crown, their daughter said her line and looked for them in the dark, and found them, and beamed the way children do when they've done something brave in public and located exactly the two faces that were supposed to be watching. Maren smiled back so hard her cheeks hurt. She thought: *I have to say something.* She thought: *not yet.* She thought about the phrase her mother used to use — *don't burn the house down before you know if it's the wiring or the wall* — and hated it, suddenly, for the first time in her life, because it assumed you had time, and time to think, and a house still worth saving, and she wasn't sure of any of those three things anymore. David squeezed her hand during the bow. She let him. Outside, in the parking lot, under a sky gone the flat orange of sodium lights, he asked if she wanted to grab something to eat, just the two of them, he'd get his mother to watch the kids, and there was something so ordinary and so hopeful in the way he said it — like a man asking his wife on a date, like a man with nothing to hide — that for one disorienting second Maren almost said yes. "I'm tired," she said instead. "Another time." He nodded, easy, unbothered, already reaching for his phone — the regular one, the one she knew — to text his mother about pickup, and Maren stood there in the cooling October air watching her husband's thumbs move across a screen and understood, with the same flat clarity from the garage step, that she was going to have to decide something, and soon, and that no one was going to decide it for her. That night she lay next to him in the dark, listening to him fall asleep in the unhurried way of a man with nothing weighing on him, and she thought about the woman she'd been at twenty-six, the one with a drafting table and opinions about cantilevers and a five-year plan that had never once included becoming someone who found things out by accident and said nothing. She didn't sleep. Somewhere around two, she got up, went down to the kitchen, and sat at the table with her laptop, not to look anything up, not yet — just to feel like she was doing something with her hands other than waiting for morning.

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