Page 56 of Wrong Mail

"Of course," he says gently. "Let's call it a night. I'll see you out."

He walks me to the door and stops there, which is the right distance. The night is warm and close, the second storm still somewhere over the water, deciding whether to come. I step out onto his drive.

"It'll come back to you," he says behind me, almost to himself. "These things do. Don't force it."

Chapter Eighteen

The app knows where I was last night.

David mentions it the next evening, while he's fitting the new pane into the terrace door. He's not looking at me. He's kneeling on newspaper with glazing putty and the little tools he keeps for jobs he won't let a tradesman do.

"That app of Henry's is hopeless, by the way. It had you at Westburn's home for a couple of hours last night, then put you back home." He presses the putty flat along the bead. "I nearly said something to you. Then I thought, it's the app. It’s glitchy. The cameras are fine. It's just the tracking that's junk. It can't seem to hold a location with the power dipping every ten minutes." He looks at the door, satisfied. "I'll have Henry look at it." He rises, pleased with himself. "There. Good as it was."

I'm standing at the counter with a glass of water. I say nothing at all.

I was at Westburn's last night. In his back room, with the folding table and the dead strangers between us, exactly where the app said I was, for exactly as long as it said.

I thought about the app on the way up the road. I decided it didn't matter, because I wasn't doing anything wrong.

It didn't glitch. It didn't lie.

But David didn't believe it, because the truth was less likely to him than a glitch.

I’m reminded in that moment of three things. The app can see where I am. It keeps a record of it. And I’ve just been saved, not by anything I did, but by my husband's certainty that the location app is faulty.

Which is not something I can expect him to believe again.

There's something else I don't look at too closely. David didn't ask whether it was true. He simply decided the app was broken, as if he preferred that answer.

"I'll keep an eye on it," I say, which is true in a way he doesn't hear.

I open the app after he goes upstairs.

It's clean and simple. Four camera feeds cover the perimeter of the house from different angles. The location map shows two dots, one blue and one green. That’s David and me, sitting on top of each other in a little rectangle called home. There’s a history I can scroll. There I am, home most of yesterday, and then a clean two-hour block up the road at Westburn's, exactly as David said. I can also see when David was at work, then at home.

I could turn off location tracking. There's a toggle. I sit with my thumb over it for a long time and don't press it. I tell myself it's because David wants it. Because it makes him feel he can find me. Because after the other night, it's the least I can give him. All of that is true.

It just isn't the whole truth.

I don't turn it off because I want to see where he is.

His phone rings a little after seven.

We're on the sofa, me stretched out with my feet in his lap, both of us pretending to watch something. His phone lights up on the arm of the sofa, and I see the name before he does.

LENA HOLLOWAY.

It means nothing to me. A woman's name, two soft words, a stranger. But I watch David see it, and I watch something happen in his body that I've only seen once before, a stillness. He picks the phone up and turns it face-down against his leg, letting it ring once, twice, while he decides.

Then he stands and takes it into the hall.

"This is David." His voice is low. "No. No, that's, hang on."

He must have sensed I was listening. He goes farther into the kitchen, out of my good ear's reach. I get the sound of him and none of the words. It goes on longer than a wrong number and shorter than a fight.

When he comes back he's already patting his pockets.

"Who was that?" I ask.