Playing Mr. Playboy

Elena's POV I was folding Sophie's dinosaur pajamas when my phone buzzed with a link from Corinne, my book club friend. “Look at this rooftop bar downtown, we should go sometime!” I almost didn't open it. But Sophie was still brushing her teeth in the next room, singing the alphabet song to her toothbrush the way she did every night, and I had thirty seconds to spare. So I tapped play. The camera swept across string lights and cocktail glasses, over a crowd of laughing strangers dressed for a Friday night I wasn't part of. Then it swept across him. My thumb froze on the screen so hard my nail left a little crescent mark in my palm. It was Daniel. It had to be Daniel — the charcoal jacket I'd picked out for him last Christmas, the exact tilt of his head when he laughed low and easy at something someone said. And a woman stood close to him, close enough that her hand rested flat against his chest, her face tipped up like she was about to whisper something only he was allowed to hear. The video kept scrolling. By the time my hands remembered how to work, and I scrubbed the timeline back, the frame had already moved on to somebody else's table. He's in Singapore. That's what he told me this morning, kissing Sophie's forehead, then mine, promising he'd call before her bedtime. Client dinner. Should be an easy trip, I'll be back before you even miss me. That’s what he said. But I knew that bar. I knew the neon sign glowing behind the little bandstand, because I'd walked past it a hundred times on my way to pick up Sophie from dance class. It was four blocks from our apartment. Not twelve time zones away. Four blocks. My hands were shaking when I called him. "Hey, beautiful. Miss me already?" He answered on the second ring, and behind his voice I could hear the low hum of a restaurant — cutlery clinking, a voice paging someone in accented English. "I just saw a livestream," I said, forcing my voice to stay light, casual, like this was nothing. "From some bar. I could've sworn I saw you." There was a pause. Just a half-second too long, the kind of pause that made my stomach drop before he'd even said a word. Then he laughed — that easy, warm laugh I'd fallen in love with eleven years ago. "In Singapore? I wish. I'm staring down overcooked beef right now, wondering why I let Marcus pick the restaurant." Someone called his name off camera, and he turned his phone so I caught a flash of an actual hotel ballroom, an actual banner with a client's logo I recognized, four men in suits I recognized too. "See? Riveting stuff. I'll call before Sophie's bedtime, I promise." "Okay." My chest loosened, just slightly. "Love you." "Love you more, Ellie." I set the phone down on the counter and stood there a moment, staring at nothing. The ballroom had been real. The clients had been real. I must have imagined the resemblance — every jet-lagged businessman in a charcoal jacket probably looked the same from a bad angle, didn't they? You're being ridiculous, I told myself, and went to read Sophie her dinosaur book, the one about the little triceratops who couldn't fall asleep without three specific songs and a glass of water he never actually drank. ★★★ Daniel came home a day early, looking sheepish and jet-lagged, a small gift-wrapped box tucked under one arm for Sophie and a bouquet of peonies — my favorite — for me. "Daddy!" Sophie launched herself at his legs, and he scooped her up until she shrieked with laughter, spinning her once before setting her down. Then he found me in the kitchen and kissed me, slow, unhurried, the way he used to kiss me back when we were nobody — just two broke twenty-somethings with a business plan scribbled on the back of a napkin and a mortgaged house that used to be my parents'. "I missed you," he murmured against my hair. "Both of you. So much you wouldn't believe." "We missed you too," I said, and meant it, and let myself sink into him. That night, after Sophie was finally asleep, he reached for me in the dark, and it felt so much like coming home that I forgot — almost entirely — about the woman on the screen with her hand against his chest. Almost. ★★★ Two nights later, his phone buzzed on the nightstand while he was in the shower. I wasn't going to look. I never looked — eleven years of marriage, and I'd never once gone through his phone, because what kind of woman does that to the man she trusts? But the screen was already lit. A message sitting right there in plain view, no name attached, just a number I didn't recognize. Did she find out? I stared at those four words until the shower shut off, until the bathroom door opened and steam rolled out behind him, and before I could stop myself, I was holding the phone up. "Whose number is this?" Daniel toweled off his hair, unbothered, and glanced at the screen — and for exactly half of one second, something crossed his face that I couldn't name. Something that flickered and vanished so fast I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it, the same way I'd convinced myself about the bar. Then it was gone, and he was rolling his eyes, reaching for the phone like it meant nothing at all. "That's Priya's burner number," he said. "She's hiding a new tattoo from Mom. Don't ask, you know how she gets when Mom starts in on her." I laughed despite myself, because — yes. I did know how Priya got. "She could've just told your mother herself," I said, handing the phone back. "And ruin the drama of Mom finding out at Thanksgiving? You know my sister better than that." He climbed into bed and pulled me against him, and within minutes his breathing had gone slow and even. I lay there long after, staring at the ceiling, turning that half-second flicker over and over in my mind like a stone I couldn't put down. Did she find out? She. Not did Mom find out. Not did she see the tattoo, is Mom asking questions. Just: did she find out. Down the hall, Sophie's nightlight cast its soft glow against her open door. I closed my eyes and told myself, again, the way I'd been telling myself for two days now, that I was being ridiculous. That eleven years of marriage had earned him the benefit of the doubt. I almost believed it.