My Husband Ignored My Thirty-Day Countdown

•MARIELLE• My hands feel so cold resting on the wheel of my car, mind you it’s not cold outside. And that alone should tell you something. The human body always knows before your brain catches up. Mine’s known for thirty days. I’m parked across the street from a building I’ve never seen in my life, my car engine is turned off, and I sit here watching the front door like it owes me money. I got this address off of Desmond’s laptop three days ago. He left it open on the kitchen counter for four minutes while he took a call in the garage with the door closed shut, which is a whole new other thing he does now, and I just stood there like a woman who’s defrosting chicken and memorizing an address instead. And so tonight is day thirty. I started counting the night he canceled dinner with my parents an hour before they even showed up, for a call he took in the garage with the door shut. Funny how that keeps happening. And funny how I didn’t notice the pattern until I was already three years deep in it. It’s not like I’m even crying. All I want is for that to be on record. I am past crying. So, I’ll be doing math instead, counting up how many lies fit inside thirty days, and then counting up how many fit inside the three years before that, and the second number is so much worse that I have to stop doing math. Then I see him. Desmond gets out of his car that’s parked across the street from me holding a bouquet of white lilies. My stomach drops so fast I actually put a hand on my chest like if that’ll catch it. White lilies. The exact same ones. The ones he used to bring me on our anniversary before he decided I wasn’t worth the walk to the flower shop anymore. I duck lower into the seat of my car and make sure that he doesn’t see me. And oh yes, of course he doesn’t. He’s already got his phone out, and is already typing something to only God knows who the flip it is, while walking into that building like he owns the sidewalk, and also like he’s done this a hundred times before and knows exactly which door doesn’t stick. I sit here for one more minute, my hand still flat against my chest, before I make myself get out of my car. The lobby only consists of marble and quietness— not like I expected any better though. It’s the type of quietness that costs a whole lot of money. A doorman glances up at me for like 0.5 second before he’s going right back to doing whatever he was doing on his phone. I take the elevator to the fourth floor because that’s the only number I caught on Desmond’s screen before he snapped it shut three days ago like I’d walked in on something fishy. It’s fishy though. I had. I just didn’t know that yet. I stand in front of apartment 4C for longer than I really do mean to. I hear laughing coming out from the other side. It’s a woman, soft, warm, and the kind of laugh you do when you’ve said something clever and you already know it landed. I knock before I can talk myself out of it. And then I start hearing footsteps moving closer to me, and the moment the door opens up, I expect to see Desmond, but it’s not him. It’s a woman. A young woman who’s maybe in her mid-twenties, she’s in a silk robe with her hair still damp from a shower maybe— who knows. Holding one white lily loose in her hand like she’d been mid-arrangement, sticking them in a vase one at a time. Her face does three things in under two seconds the moment she realizes who I am. First, it’s confusion, then it's recognition, and then something that looks a whole lot like fear. She opens her mouth to speak, and I watch carefully as nothing at all comes out. “Who’s at the door, Priscilla?” Desmond casually calls out from somewhere inside. I have never heard that tone directed at anything in this house in over a year. Not the dog, not to me, and bir to tge mail. “Don’t worry about it,” he calls out, closer now, and easy like he’s got this handled, and as if the doors just open themselves sometimes and it’s nothing. “I’ll get it.” The woman looks back over her shoulder toward his voice. That’s it. That’s the whole thing right there. One look, half panic, and half protecting him, like her body already knows whose side she’s on. I don’t wait around for Desmond’s face, because at this point I decide that I’ve seen enough. So, I turn back around and walk straight back toward the elevator, already digging my phone out of my purse, my thumb shaking so badly I can barely find the screen. I’m three steps from the elevator when my phone starts ringing in my hand before I even get my contacts open. Desmond’s name lights up on the screen. I almost let it ring out with my thumb hovering right over the red button for one whole second. Then something in me decides I want to hear him try this. To live in real time. I answer, but don’t say hello. I don’t say anything at all. Instead, I just stand there and wait to see what he wants to lead with. When his voice finally comes through, it’s shaking, clipped, nothing like the voice that just called some stranger babe through an open door. And when he finally speaks, the first thing that comes out of his mouth wasn’t what I was expecting. “How did you find this address?” He asks. I stand frozen in the middle of the hallway, with my phone pressed so hard against my ear that it hurts and I’m sure it’s going to leave a bruise, and for one full second I genuinely cannot tell if I want to scream or laugh, because out of every single thing he could have opened with, he picked asking how he got caught.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​