The Beaded Charm on His Rearview Mirror

Chapter 3 The Records

Monday morning, I went to work early and closed my office door.

Merrick Capital occupied the top four floors of a glass building downtown, and my office had a window that looked out over the river. Usually I liked the view. That morning I pulled the blinds.

The first thing I did was open our joint credit card statement. Ethan and I had shared an account for a year, mostly for household expenses, and I had never once gone through it line by line. That morning I did.

There it was on the statement for the first week of the trip: a charge at a restaurant in Millbrook for $186, dated the Tuesday he was there. A charge for two, you might say, if you were looking. Then a charge at a bookstore for $42. Then a charge at a hotel bar for $95, followed by a charge at the same hotel's gift shop for $11.50.

I looked at the gift shop charge for a long time. Eleven dollars and fifty cents. That could be a bead kit, in theory. It could also be a bottle of water and a pack of gum.

But the restaurant charge told a different story. Ethan doesn't drink. He never has, not since college. He orders sparkling water and calls it a night. So a $186 tab at a restaurant he wouldn't have chosen, on a night he told me he was working late in his room.

I pulled up our phone records next. We were on a family plan, which meant I could see call and text logs but not content.

His phone had been busy that first week. Thirty-one calls to a number with a Millbrook area code, most of them after 9 p.m. Mountain time. And then, strangely, the calls stopped on the Thursday. After that, the only calls to that number were short, two or three minutes, in the middle of the day.

Then the texts. Hundreds of them. They ramped up in the second week and kept going right up to the night he flew home.

I copied the number into a search bar and found nothing. It was a cell number, unlisted.

I sat back in my chair and looked at the blinds. The worst part was that I wasn't even surprised. I was just tired, in a bone-deep way, and underneath the tiredness was something colder that had been waiting for this. I had known, I realized. Not consciously. But some part of me had been keeping score for months. The late nights. The phone face down on the table. The way he'd stopped asking about my day.

I should have listened to that part of myself earlier.

At lunch, I walked to a coffee shop two blocks away and called the number from a pay-as-you-go phone I'd bought that morning at a drugstore. I wasn't ready to use my own.

It rang three times, and a woman answered.

"Hello?"

Her voice was young and bright and a little uncertain. I didn't say anything. I just listened.

"Hello? Who is this?"

I hung up.

I sat in the coffee shop with my cold cup and my hands around it, and I thought about what I actually wanted. Did I want to confront her? Humiliate her? No. She wasn't the problem. The problem was the man who had hung her charm on his mirror and driven me nine miles into the dark.

But I did want to know who she was. Not for revenge. For leverage. Because if he was going to make me the villain in this story, I wanted to know exactly what he was protecting.

I went back to the office and opened my case file on Ethan.

Not a literal file. A folder on my personal drive, password protected, where I kept everything I'd been collecting since that night: the credit card statement, the phone logs, screenshots of his texts, a photo of the beaded cat I'd taken in the driveway before I got out of the car.

I am very good at my job. My job is to find what people hide. I had never turned it on my own life before.

That evening, I came home and found the charm gone from his mirror. He had taken it down.

He was in the kitchen when I walked in, making dinner, acting like nothing had happened. He'd bought flowers. He'd set the table.

"I'm sorry about the other night," he said. "I was exhausted. I shouldn't have left you there."

"No," I said. "You shouldn't have."

"I took the cat down. You were right, it was weird. I don't know why I made it."

I looked at him, and I felt something new toward him, something I hadn't felt in three years. Not love. Not hate. Clarity. He was lying to me, and he was lying badly, and he was going to keep doing it as long as I let him.

"Thank you," I said, and sat down at the table like it was a normal Tuesday.

I would give him two more weeks. Not to change. To reveal himself.