Happiness Index at Ninety-Nine, Love at Zero

The app was called Maritalytics, and it had been my husband's idea. Not ours. His. I sat on the edge of the bathtub with my phone in my hand, the bathroom door locked, the fan humming loud enough to cover the sound of my breathing. August in Los Angeles pressed against the window like a wet hand, and the cold tile under my bare feet was the only thing keeping me upright. I had opened the app because I wanted to see the average. That was all. Just the average, to prove to myself that the spike I had noticed two weeks ago was a glitch, a data lag, a rounding error. The average was eleven percent. His was forty. Forty percent. Up from four. I pressed my thumb against the screen until the glass squeaked. When I was pregnant with our daughter, the app had told me his happiness rose one percent. One. I had cried in the kitchen over a sink full of dishes because one percent felt like a verdict. I had told myself it was because he was scared. Because he was a man who expressed love through spreadsheets instead of sentences. Because the pregnancy had been hard on me and therefore hard on him, and the number was just a number. Now there was another woman, and the number was forty. I had known about her for six days. I had found the texts by accident while looking for a receipt, and I had not confronted him yet, because I was the kind of woman who gathered evidence before she spoke. Nineteen years of marriage had taught me that. You do not walk into a courtroom without your exhibits. But this was different. This was not a text. This was the thing he had built. He had designed the app himself, in our first year together, back when he was a junior engineer with a rented apartment and a mattress on the floor and a habit of kissing my shoulder while I cooked. He had called it his love letter. A way to make visible what people usually only felt. Every couple tracked their own happiness, their own affection, their own investment. He said it would save marriages. He said it would save ours. It had saved nothing. It had only made a scoreboard. I heard him come up the stairs. Two steps at a time, the way he always did, that boyish lope he never grew out of even at forty-six. I locked the screen and slid the phone into the pocket of my robe. He knocked. "Nora? You in there?" "Yes." "Come down. Lila's here. She wants to talk to you." Lila. His mother. A woman who had never once called me by my first name without a small pause in front of it, as if the word needed to be inspected before it was allowed out of her mouth. I looked at myself in the mirror. Forty-three. Dark hair pulled back. No makeup. Eyes that looked like they belonged to someone who had been awake for a week. I opened the door. Lila was sitting in the living room like a duchess surveying a property she intended to sell. She was seventy-one and wore linen in the summer, always, even when the linen wilted. She had a glass of iced tea on the coaster, positioned precisely in the center, and she did not stand when I came in. "Nora," she said, with the pause. "Sit down." I sat. My husband, Daniel, sat across from me in the wing chair, the one he had bought because he said it made him look like a man with opinions. His happiness was still at forty. I could feel it in the room like a smell. "Lila has a proposal," he said. "I have a solution," Lila corrected. "Daniel tells me he's been... indiscreet." I said nothing. "There's a woman. A younger woman. She's pregnant." Lila took a sip of her tea. "I'm not going to pretend I approve. But the child is a Vale. That matters. And the way things currently stand, Daniel's reputation is doing something that reflects on all of us. The foundation gala is in three weeks. The board is watching. The press is always watching." The Vale Foundation. The family money. The thing that had bought this house, this street, this life. "What do you want me to do?" I asked. "I want you to be practical." Lila set down the glass. "He's going to end it with her. He's going to make provisions. But she's refusing to carry the pregnancy to term, and Daniel believes it's because you frightened her." I turned to look at him. "You sent her that message," he said quietly. "The one about the soup. It scared her." The soup. Two weeks ago I had made minestrone, and I had sent a photo to a group chat with the other women on the block, and somehow she had seen it. Somehow she had taken it as a threat. I had not known who she was. "You think I threatened her with soup," I said. "I think you weren't careful." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and I watched him arrange his face into kindness. He was good at that. He had always been good at that. "I need you to call her," he said. "Apologize. Tell her you were in a bad place, that it won't happen again, that the baby is welcome. Once she's calm, she'll go through with it. After the birth, the child comes here. We raise it. Your name is on the birth certificate. She disappears." He paused. "You stay the wife. Nothing changes. The house, the foundation, all of it. You're Mrs. Vale. You'll always be Mrs. Vale." "And my happiness score?" I said. He blinked. "The app," I said. "You track it. You've tracked it for nineteen years. What's my number right now?" He did not answer. "I'll tell you," I said. "It's two. It's been two since the day I found your phone." Lila made a small sound of impatience. "This isn't about an app, Nora. This is about the family. Do you understand what's at stake?" I stood up. My legs were steady. I was surprised by that. "I'll think about it," I said. "Don't think long," Lila said. "She has a doctor's appointment on Friday." I walked out of the room, up the stairs, into the bedroom, and I closed the door. Then I stood there in the dark and I let myself shake for exactly one minute, because I had learned that grief was a thing you scheduled or it ate you. Then I opened my laptop. I had spent nineteen years learning his systems. The app. The foundation. The trusts. Every password he thought I didn't know because I had never needed to use them. I had been a good wife. A quiet wife. The kind of wife a man tells his secrets to because she never writes them down. I wrote everything down.