Chapter 4

"That's what makes it worse," I said.

I watched her go. Then I closed the door and locked it, and the house settled into the specific silence of a space that has just been cleared of something that had been wrong in it for weeks, and I stood in the living room and let the quiet hold me for a moment.

Then my phone buzzed on the coffee table.

Jenna's name on the screen.

I picked it up.

"Jimmy." Her voice was shaking. "There's something else Mia didn't tell you."

I sat down on the couch because something in her voice told me I should be sitting. Jenna had been Mia's best friend for eleven years. I had known her almost as long. She did not shake when she talked. She was the steadiest person in any room she occupied and right now she sounded like a woman holding something she had been holding for too long and had finally decided she could not hold anymore.

"Tell me," I said.

She told me.

Brady was not a snorkeling guide. Brady was the name Mia had been using for a man she had met six months before the vacation, not on a beach in the Caribbean but at a conference in Atlanta, a sales conference where Mia had been presenting for her company and where she had apparently come home from with more than a complimentary hotel pen and a set of new contacts. Jenna had known since February. She had been there in Atlanta, not as a participant but visiting a cousin who lived near the hotel, and she had seen Mia in the hotel bar at eleven o'clock at night in a conversation that was not a business conversation, and she had said nothing to me because Mia had asked her not to.

Six months. The vacation had not been a mistake of opportunity on a beach. The vacation had been a planned extension of something that had already been running for half a year.

"Why are you telling me now?" I asked.

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Jenna was quiet for a moment. "Because she came home and I thought she was going to tell you herself. And then she didn't. And then you called me this afternoon to say she was gone and I thought it was over and then I realized she still hadn't told you everything. And I can't." She stopped. "I can't watch you build something on a foundation that's missing that piece. It isn't fair."

"No," I said. "It isn't."