Chapter 3
I tilted my head anyway. I said the line I had been planning since Tuesday.
"Baby, you're really going to throw away a marriage because I made one mistake?"
Behind me, Tyler made a noise. A short, nervous sound that was trying to be a laugh and didn't quite get there.
Aaron heard it.
His eyes moved from me to Tyler, and something happened in his expression — the smallest shift, something that might have been contempt or something that might have been recognition, or possibly both at once.
"Funny," Aaron said. "That's almost the same word you used in the hotel lobby."
The room changed.
Not loudly. Not with anybody announcing that the room had changed. It changed the way rooms change when a specific piece of information has entered the air and everyone present is processing the size of it simultaneously.
Tyler's hand came off the back of my chair.
Marcy stopped breathing beside me.
I felt the blood drop from my face the way it drops when something you believed was private has been in someone else's hands for longer than you knew.
I looked at the ring on the table.
I looked at my husband.
"Aaron," I said. "What did you do?"
He reached into his pocket and set his phone on the table beside the ring, face down. The motion was unhurried. The motion of a man who has rehearsed nothing because he prepared everything.
May you like
"No," he said. "The real question is what you forgot to delete."
Tyler stepped back.
