Page 82 of Wrong Mail

David nods. "The one who knocks his girlfriend around. He stood up at my wife's birthday and spat a lie about me in front of everyone. He put his hands on me, and now he's telling the whole club I assaulted him."

"Do you have video of any of that?"

"I have forty witnesses."

"We'll look into Mr. Brockwell." Rodriguez doesn't hurry. "But tying what happened to your dog and birds to him is a stretch, and turning up on a man's doorstep with an accusation and no proof is how you end up with nothing. Or worse."

David groans and drags a hand back over his head.

Rodriguez stands. Hanson follows. At the door, with his coat half on, Rodriguez gives us one last thing to hold onto.

"He misled you," he says. "That's not a crime, and it's not murder."

"But why would he?" David says.

"That's what we hope to find out."

David turns to me in our doorway with the rain behind the detective and the whole terrible day in his face. I understand what he wants. He wants his wife. He wants me to say it with him, out loud, in front of them. Henry is dangerous. Tell them what you know, Mallory. He's been alone in his certainty all afternoon. Now he's holding out his hand to me, and all I have to do is take it.

But I don't.

I stand there and look at my husband. I think about the green dot over the hospital, the complaint to the board, the folder on my island, the sedative in the blood, and a scene too clean to be rage. About how sure he is. How sure anyone can sound when they need to be believed.

I say nothing at all. I watch something in his face go out as he understands I'm not going to give it to him. And I let him stand there alone in it, because I'm no longer certain the danger is the one he's naming.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Ihear the name through the study door early in the morning, when he thinks I'm still asleep.

I've come down for water.

The study door is nearly shut. David is on the phone behind it, using the low voice he thinks means privacy. I stop in the hall with my glass because my whole body has learned to stop when he uses it.

The rain is loud on the skylight over the stairs. It drowns out most of the words. But I have one good ear. I turn it to the gap and catch what I can in pieces.

"I know what I said." A silence. "Lena. Lena, listen to me. I can't do this now. Do you understand what's happening? There is a complaint with my name on it, and you pick this week to do this." Another silence, longer. His voice drops under the rain and I lose it. When I catch it again, it's tighter. "No. Don't. Do not come here. I will handle it. I have always handled it."

Lena.

I remember that name.

The name from the night we were on the sofa, when his screen lit up and he turned the phone face down before taking it into the kitchen.

It's just work. That's what he'd said.

Now he's said her name out loud, in his study, in a voice he has never once used with me. A voice with history in it. The voice of someone who knows the person on the other end well enough to be tired of her.

I go back up the stairs without my water. I get into bed and lie on my back. Twenty minutes later, I listen to my husband come up and stand in the doorway while I pretend to sleep. I keep my breathing long and even. I have become very good at this, at being a woman he thinks is asleep. We have both become very good at pretending. He climbs into bed. We lie a foot apart in the dark, close enough to touch and farther apart than we have ever been.

I don't ask him who Lena is. I want to be the person who asks. But asking is a door, and I've started to be afraid of what's on the other side of David's doors. So I leave this one closed.

Julia's message comes at two in the afternoon. It's a video, the worst thing I have seen in a long time, and I watch it four times.

It’s not live. She's recorded it.

That's the first wrong thing, before I even take in her face. Julia always calls. Julia would rather talk for an hour than type a sentence. But this is a video, thirty seconds long, sent instead of spoken.

She's somewhere dim. A bathroom, I think. The sound is close and boxy, and she's holding the phone too near her face, keeping everything else out of the frame.