The Understudy

Chapter 5: Headlights

I read the text twice before I moved.

Theo: “Where are you? Delphine just called me crying. She said Eleanor knows.”

Eleanor watched my face while I read it. She didn’t ask what it said. She didn’t have to.

“She’s panicking,” Eleanor said. “Which means she’s about to make a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

“The kind where she tells him everything before either of them has a plan.” Eleanor stood, smoothing her skirt, already moving toward the door like the conversation had ended whether I was ready or not.

I didn’t move yet. My legs didn’t feel entirely trustworthy.

“What do I say to him,” I asked.

“Nothing, if you can manage it. Something ordinary, if you can’t.” She studied me for a second, the way she had all night; assessing, always assessing. “You’re good at ordinary things. I’ve watched you do it for five years.”

I wasn’t sure if that was meant as a compliment.

“Go home,” she said. “Let him wonder. Do not, under any circumstances, tell him what you know tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Because right now you have something neither of them has.” She opened the study door for me. “Time. Don’t waste it proving a point.”

I drove home with the radio off.

The streets were empty this late, streetlights strobing across the windshield at even intervals, my hands steady on the wheel in a way that felt almost separate from the rest of me. I kept waiting to feel something enormous. It didn’t come. There was just the road, and the folder on the passenger seat, and the quiet, terrible clarity of knowing exactly what I was driving toward.

A billboard passed overhead advertising a divorce attorney; the kind of thing I’d driven past a hundred times without noticing. Tonight it felt aimed directly at me.

My phone rang before I hit the highway.

Theo.

I let it ring twice before I answered, on speaker, both hands on the wheel.

“Hey,” I said. Easy. Light. The voice I’d used for five years.

“Where were you?” His voice had an edge I rarely heard. “I’ve been calling.”

“Sorry, my phone was in my bag. What’s going on?”

“Delphine called me.” A pause. Traffic noise behind him…he was in his car too, driving somewhere, fast, from the sound of the engine. “She’s upset. She thinks my mother’s found out about something.”

“Found out about what?”

The silence on the line lasted just slightly too long.

“Nothing,” he said. “She’s just stressed. Work stuff, probably.”

“Work stuff makes people cry and call you at eleven at night?”

“Wren….”

“I’m just asking.”

Another pause. I could hear him deciding what to say next, the same way I’d watched him decide things for five years; weighing which version of the truth would cost him the least.

“I don’t know what’s going on with her,” he said finally. “I’m going to check on her. Make sure she’s okay.”

“Of course,” I said. “That’s kind of you.”

“You sound weird.”

“I sound tired,” I said. “Long night.”

“Where were you tonight?”

I watched the exit sign for our neighborhood pass overhead, green and lit and completely ordinary.

“Grocery store,” I said. “We were out of coffee.”

“You hate late-night grocery runs.”

“I hate being out of coffee more.”

He laughed, short and uncertain, like he wasn’t sure if it was safe to laugh yet.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be home in an hour or so. Don’t wait up.”

“I won’t.”

The call ended. I set the phone down on the passenger seat, on top of the folder, and drove the rest of the way in silence, my pulse steady, my hands steady, everything about me arranged into something that looked, from the outside, exactly like calm.

I pulled into the driveway eleven minutes later.

The porch light was on. I always left it on for him; some habit from early in the marriage that had never quite worn off, some small automatic kindness I’d apparently never stopped extending to a man who’d stopped earning it years ago.

I sat there a moment before killing the engine, watching the porch light through the windshield, wondering how many nights I’d have to keep pretending it was still just a porch light and not something closer to a countdown.

Then I cut the engine, and sat a while longer in the dark, folder in my lap, the house in front of me lit and warm and completely unaware of what I now knew about the life going on inside it.

I thought about walking in and simply setting the folder on the kitchen counter, letting him find it whenever he got home, letting the whole thing end tonight instead of dragging out across weeks I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for.

Then I thought about Eleanor’s voice. Don’t waste it proving a point.

I slid the folder under the passenger seat instead, out of sight, and got out of the car with nothing in my hands but my keys.

Then I noticed the car.

Not Theo’s. Not mine. Parked across the street, half in shadow, engine off, someone sitting motionless in the driver’s seat.

I couldn’t make out a face. Just a silhouette, still, watching the house.

Watching me.

My grip tightened on my keys, the metal edges biting into my palm, the closest thing I had to a weapon standing alone in my own driveway at midnight.

The headlights across the street flicked on.