Page 90 of Wrong Mail

I peel it free, fit it to the lock, and turn.

Inside are bank envelopes, held with a clip. Not our bank. An account with only his name on it.

I sit down in his chair to read them, because my legs have stopped wanting to hold me.

The statements go back about a year. Money comes in, regular deposits he's arranged so they never cross the account we share. And money goes out. The same figure, over and over, a month apart down the whole run of pages. Four thousand dollars. Cash. Eleven times, more or less. A year of him taking money out in cash, in a form that leaves no name at the far end of it.

I don't know what the money was used for. That's the part I keep chewing over. It could be for anything. A gambler’s table somewhere with cards on it. A woman who charges by the hour. A whole second life hidden inside a Thursday. The statements don't say much. All they say is that my husband has been taking four thousand dollars out of an account I couldn't see into, once a month, for a year. He never told me about this.

If he was trying to hide this from me, why did he take four thousand from our joint account? That withdrawal is the one that started all of this, the one I saw when I went to pay a bill. He'd never have risked it with this account sitting here, unless that day he had no other way. A debit card left at home. A password that wouldn't take. Some glitch that put him in front of the one account where I might be looking.

I sigh.

I pull up the calendar we share, the one that's supposed to hold his whole life. I put the withdrawal dates against his trips. Some line up with Portland, the conferences, the weekends he took Sophie to dinner. Some line up with days he told me he was somewhere else, or told me nothing at all. Dates don't lie. People do. These sit there in a row, matched up, and let me see it.

Secret money. Secret trips. A lie about where he was, laid over the top of both.

I photograph four of the pages, my hands not quite still. I'm ashamed the whole time. I do it anyway.

Then outside a chainsaw stops.

It's been going strong since I came in here, someone down the road cutting up what the storm brought down. A noise I stopped hearing twenty minutes ago.

In the quiet it leaves behind, I realize I never heard a car come up the drive. That’s when I hear the front door close. My heart jumps into my throat as his keys land in the bowl. David’s voice is low as he says something to Luna. Then it rises as he calls my name.

“Mallory?”

I move fast. The statements go back under the clip. I tuck them back into the drawer and shut it. I turn the key in the lock.

But it’s too late.

There's no time left to put the key back where I found it. His steps are already in the hall.

I rise and get my hand behind my back, the key biting into my palm. I haven't finished getting around the table before he's in the doorway.

"You're back," I say, swallowing hard.

His eyes scan the room, then land on me.

“Yeah, I forgot my tablet." He doesn't move. He looks at me in his room, and the look goes a beat past anything ordinary. "What are you doing in here?"

“Oh, just tidying the office." The lie comes out smooth and level, and I hate how ready it was. "It was a mess."

He just looks at me a second longer. Then he crosses to the desk, close enough that I feel him pass. He picks his tablet up off the desk pad. My hand stays behind my back. The key stays in it. He doesn't ask me anything else. Maybe he believes me. Maybe he's a man with reasons not to look too hard at what his wife is doing behind his back.

“You look tired. Make sure you get some rest," he says. He kisses me on the cheek and then goes out.

I wait until the car is gone. Then I tape the key back beneath the drawer, exactly as I found it. I stand there with my heart still going. I scan the room, one last time. No trace of me is left except the photographs on my phone and the thing I now know.

I've become a person who searches. Who lies to his face and does it well.

I stand in his study a while longer, then retreat to my laptop and look up Richard Thomas at OHSU.

Chapter Thirty-One

Ihaven't gone south since the crash. The driver doesn't know that. He can't understand why I sit in the back of the hired car with my hands folded hard in my lap as Oregon draws closer.

The rain starts again somewhere past Olympia.