The Beaded Charm on His Rearview Mirror

Chapter 2 Nine Miles

My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped the phone twice.

I called Ethan first. It rang four times and went to voicemail. I called again. Voicemail. I texted him: I'm on the shoulder of County Road 12. Come back.

The message showed delivered. No response.

I thought about calling my sister, but Margot lived two hours north and would have panicked. I thought about calling the police, but what would I say? My fiancé dropped me on the side of the road after an argument. It wasn't a crime. It was just the worst night of my life so far.

So I started walking.

The shoulder was gravel, and my boots weren't made for it. Cars passed every few minutes, headlights sweeping across the fields, and none of them stopped. I kept my phone in my hand with the flashlight on, watching for the next mile marker. There weren't any mile markers. There was just road and dark and the cold coming up through my jeans.

My left heel rubbed first. Then the other. I stopped once to shake a stone out of my boot and the wind took the heat out of my hands. A ditch ran along the field, black water, a smell of wet dirt. I walked with my chin in my collar. The coat was too thin. I counted fence posts until I lost count and then I counted my steps instead, because counting was a job with an end.

I am a person who reads details for a living. I can look at a hundred-page file and find the one disclosure that doesn't match. So I walked, and I replayed the last six hours in my head, and I let the details arrange themselves.

Detail one: the charm was beaded, not stitched. That meant someone had made it with their hands, probably at a table, probably over several evenings. It was not a hotel gift shop purchase.

Detail two: it was hung with a knot I didn't recognize. I'd tied the leather tag myself with a double knot I'd used since I was a kid. This knot was a simple loop, tied by someone who had never had to secure anything important.

Detail three, and this was the one that made my stomach drop: Ethan had told me his flight landed at 10:40. But when I checked the airline's website out of habit, the flight from Millbrook had actually landed at 9:15. I'd waited in the cell phone lot for over an hour before his text came in. He'd been on the ground for ninety minutes before he told me to come get him.

What does a man do for ninety minutes at an airport after a two-week trip, before calling his fiancée to pick him up?

I didn't want the answer, but I already had it.

The wind picked up. I pulled my coat tighter and kept walking. Somewhere behind me a truck slowed, and I turned, but it was only a pickup going the other way. The driver didn't even look at me. I was just a shape on the shoulder.

Around mile four, my phone buzzed. I stopped and looked at it, my heart jumping.

Ethan: You're being dramatic. I'll be at the house. Come home when you're ready to apologize.

I stared at the message for a long time. Then I typed back: I'm not apologizing. I'm walking nine miles because you left me here. Remember that.

I put the phone in my pocket and kept going.

By mile six, I had made a decision about one thing, and one thing only: I was not going to marry him. I didn't know anything else yet. I didn't know who she was, or how long it had been going on, or what I would do about the house and the ring and the life we had built. But I knew I wasn't going to stand at an altar with a man who would leave me on a dark road to teach me a lesson. That much, the walk had given me.

The rest of it, I decided, I would find out on my own.

It was almost three in the morning when the porch light came into view. My feet were raw. My fingers were numb. The house was dark except for the kitchen window, where Ethan was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, like he'd been waiting up for a teenager who missed curfew.

I walked in through the front door without knocking, because it was my house too.

He looked up.

"Took you long enough," he said.

"Go to bed, Ethan."

"Where were you? You could have called a cab."

"I did call one," I lied, because I wanted him to wonder. "It came at mile seven. I told it to take me around the block and drop me at the corner. I wanted to walk the last part myself."

That wasn't true, but the look on his face was worth it.

He opened his mouth, then closed it. I walked past him, up the stairs, and into the bathroom, where I locked the door and sat on the edge of the tub and let myself cry for exactly five minutes. Not because of him. Because of the nine miles. Because I had walked them alone.

Then I washed my face, drank a glass of water, and made a list in my head. On Monday, I would go to work and pull the phone records from our shared account. I would check the credit card statement for the hotel. I would find out who she was, not because I wanted to hurt her, but because I needed to know what I was dealing with. I had spent my career finding out what people were hiding. I could do it at home, too.

Ethan slept on the couch that night. I heard him come up the stairs around four and stop outside the bedroom door. He didn't knock. After a minute, he went back down.

I lay in the dark with the beaded cat in my mind, swinging from a mirror nine miles away, and I let myself be angry.