“You took your family out to dinner,” I said.
“Stop. Just stop this, whatever it is, stop it right now—”
“No.”
The word landed between us like something solid.
“You stopped being my husband,” I said carefully, “the moment you left me bleeding in that hospital room and told me to take the bus home.”
Silence. I could hear background noise — the restaurant, the other diners, the sounds of an ordinary evening that had abruptly become something else.
“You don’t understand what you’re doing,” he said. His voice had shifted again, moving from fear toward something colder, something that in other circumstances might have worked on me. “You don’t understand who my family—”
“I understand exactly,” I said. “I’ve understood for a long time.”
Then Elaine’s voice, close to the phone — she must have snatched it from his hand. “You listen to me,” she said, and her tone was the one she used when she wanted to remind me of the precise distance between her position and mine. “You think you can threaten this family? You think you can just—”
“I think,” I said pleasantly, “that I can prove you’ve been stealing from me.”
The silence that followed was different from the others. This one had texture to it, the specific quality of air in a room where someone has just heard something they cannot unhear.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, and ended the call.
Then I put the phone face-down on the bedside table and looked at my son, who had slept through all of it, his small chest rising and falling with the serene indifference of the newly born.
