She Came Home With More Than A Suitcase

On the drive home she talked too much. Beaches and bonfires and restaurants, Jenna this and Jenna that, every story arriving polished and every laugh coming half a second too fast. At home she dropped the suitcase in the living room and said she was dying for a shower.

I stood where I was.

"You didn't come back empty-handed," I said.

She turned too quickly. "Of course not."

When she opened the suitcase I saw it for just a moment, a flash of bright lace tucked between folded clothes, expensive and new, the kind of thing that is not bought for comfort. Her hand moved fast. She covered it with a dress and pulled out a small black bag instead. "Rum," she said, and her smile arrived slightly after it should have. "For you."

Her eyes did not reach mine.

I kept that detail and said nothing.

Over the following days the cracks spread in the small specific ways that a man notices when he has been watching someone for eight years and knows their particular patterns. Her phone never left her side. The passcode changed. Late at night when it buzzed on the counter she flipped it face-down with the speed of someone managing a flame they do not want others to see. Then one evening while she was in the shower the screen lit up and stayed lit long enough for me to read the name.

Brady.

A shirtless man with a sunburned grin in the tiny profile picture.

When she came back in the towel I kept my voice completely level. "Who's Brady?"

Her body stopped before her face did. That tell, the one where the muscles register the problem a half-second before the performance catches up, was the tell I had fallen in love with years ago when she could not lie well and it seemed charming. Now it felt like a knife finding a seam.