The Full Moon Never Stays

The deadbolt made a sound I had memorized the way other women memorize lullabies. A soft click, then the drag of the latch, then the particular weight of his shoulder against the door when he came in too tired to lift his own keys. I was on the sofa with my laptop open and a cup of tea gone cold beside me. It was 11:42 on a Tuesday. I knew the time without looking because I had started counting minutes the way I counted everything else about Daniel Mercer: the minutes he was late, the minutes he spent in the shower, the minutes between my question and his answer when the answer was going to be a lie. "You didn't have to wait up," he said. He dropped his keys on the console table. They slid an inch and stopped. His jacket smelled like rain and something floral I did not own. "I wasn't waiting," I said. "I was working." That was true. Mostly. I had a client presentation due Friday for Halloran & Pike, the architecture firm where I had spent six years learning how to make other people's buildings look inevitable. I was good at it. I was good at making things look finished when they were falling apart. Daniel walked past me into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, stared into it, closed it without taking anything. That was his tell. When he was guilty, he stood in front of the refrigerator like a man waiting for it to confess. "There's pasta if you want it," I said. "I ate." "With Cameron?" He turned around. "With the team. You know how those nights go." I did know. I had known for eleven years, since we were twenty-two and sharing a one-bedroom in a building with a broken elevator and a landlord who painted over the mold. I had known him when he was nobody, when he was an associate at a fund that fired people on Fridays, when he came home with his tie undone and his eyes bright and said, I'm going to be somebody, Elena. Just wait. I had waited. I had waited through the promotion, the bonus, the move uptown, the apartment with the doorman who knew his name. I had waited through the nights he came home at two and the mornings he left before seven. I had waited through the year I miscarried and he held my hand in the hospital and then went back to work the next day because the deal could not wait and I told him it was fine, I told him I understood. I had waited so long that I had forgotten what I was waiting for. "You should go to bed," he said. "You look tired." "I'm not tired." He looked at me then, really looked, and for a second I saw the boy I had married, the one who used to leave notes on the bathroom mirror in dry-erase marker. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, one of them had said. I had kept it there for three weeks until the cleaning lady wiped it off and I cried in the kitchen and Daniel laughed and said, I'll write you another one. He never did. "I'm going to shower," he said. "Long day." I listened to the water run. I listened to him hum, off-key, the way he did when he thought no one could hear. And I sat in the dark living room and I did the math I had been avoiding for months. The floral smell. The late nights. The way he had stopped touching me, not with anger, but with the careful politeness of a man who was saving himself for someone else. I opened my laptop and typed his name into the search bar of the company's shared drive. I had access. I was the one who had set up the file system when Mercer Capital was three people and a rented conference room. He had never thought to change the permissions. He had never thought I would look. There it was. Cameron Reyes. Twenty-eight. Hired eight months ago. Her bio said she had gone to a small liberal arts college and liked hiking and had a rescue dog named Baxter. Her photo showed a woman with a wide, uncomplicated smile and hair the color of dark honey. I did not hate her. That was the worst part. I looked at her face and I felt nothing but a dull, exhausted recognition, the way you feel when you finally find the receipt for something you already knew you had bought. I closed the laptop. I turned off the light. And I sat in the dark and I made a decision, the kind you make so quietly that you almost miss it, the kind that rewires your whole life before you have even told anyone. I was not going to wait anymore. Not for him. Not for the door. Not for the version of my life I had been promised and never received. The next morning, Daniel left at 6:15. He kissed my forehead, the way he kissed his mother, and he said, "I'll be home early tonight." I said, "Okay." I did not believe him. I did not need to. I had already started making a list.