My Husband Doesn't Know I'm His Mistress

Chapter Two — The Folder

By Friday I knew three things.

The data breach was systematic, not opportunistic — whoever was feeding information to the outside had been doing it long enough to understand exactly which fragments were too small to trigger the automated monitoring system. The access pattern pointed toward someone with executive-level clearance. And Daniel Hargrove stayed in his office until at least seven-thirty every evening, which meant that if I needed to run a lateral search through the executive server without an audience, I needed a reason to be in the building after seven-thirty that wasn't Daniel.

On Friday he left at six for a client dinner in the West Loop.

I know because he texted me to say he'd be late.

He texted Leah. Not Elena. Me.

Client thing running long. Don't wait up.

I read it sitting at Elena's desk on the twelfth floor and thought about the fact that my husband had texted his wife to say don't wait up while his wife was three floors above him running surveillance on his company. I thought about it for approximately four seconds and then I put my phone face down and went back to work because the alternative was laughing or crying and Elena Marsh did neither.

His office was quiet.

I had legitimate access — the assignment gave Elena clearance to executive filing systems as part of the review scope. I sat in his chair, which I had done a hundred times in our apartment when he was travelling and I needed to use the desk, and I opened the lateral server and started with the access logs from six months prior, working forward.

The pattern emerged within forty minutes.

Whoever it was had a secondary access point that routed through the PR division's server — slightly less monitored, slightly more traffic, good cover if you knew the system. I drilled down into the PR access logs and started cross-referencing timestamps with the data fragments that had ended up at the competitor.

The match rate was ninety-three percent.

I was writing up the preliminary finding when the subfolder caught my eye.

It was labelled quarterly projections Q2, which was exactly the kind of label that makes an auditor's eye slide past it — boring by design, deliberately uninteresting. I had almost moved on when something in the filing date stopped me. Modified eleven days ago. The actual Q2 projections had been finalised in July.

I opened it.

The messages loaded in chronological order, oldest first.

I read the first one. Then the second. Then I stopped reading and sat with my hands in my lap and looked at Daniel's desk — the framed photo of his parents at the company's tenth anniversary, the coffee mug I had given him two Christmases ago with a chip on the handle he'd never got around to replacing, the small stack of papers weighted down by a river stone we'd picked up on a weekend in Michigan the first year we were married.

I read the rest of the messages.

All of them. Every one, chronological order, eight months of correspondence between my husband and a woman named Camille Voss, which would have been professionally useful information and nothing else except that I recognised the particular vocabulary of a man being careful about someone he wants. I had been the recipient of that vocabulary once. A long time ago.

I closed the folder.

Then I opened it again because I needed to know the last date.

Four days ago.

I sat in my husband's chair for a while after that. The office building across the street had one lit window at this hour, someone working late, and I watched it with the specific focus of a person whose brain is very busy doing something it cannot show on its face.

My professional conclusion was clear: the data breach routed through PR, Camille Voss had executive PR clearance, the access pattern was consistent, and I had enough to take to Jonas by Monday.

My personal conclusion was something I wasn't ready to name yet.

I closed everything. Logged out. Left the office exactly as I found it.

The elevator down felt longer than usual.

I drove home on autopilot, muscle memory carrying me through the West Loop streets while the part of my brain that was still Leah instead of Elena ran the numbers on eight months, four days ago, and a chip on a coffee mug handle that he'd never got around to replacing.

Daniel was already home when I got in.

He was on the couch with his laptop, tie loosened, the specific look of a man who had eaten too much at a client dinner and was now paying for it.

"You're late," he said, without looking up.

"Mm," I said, hanging up my coat.

"Good day?"

I looked at the back of his head. The hair that was always slightly too long. The angle of his shoulders.

"Fine," I said. "Yours?"

"Long." He closed the laptop. "There's leftover pasta if you're hungry. I put it in the fridge."

I stood in the middle of our apartment for a moment, keys still in my hand, and I thought about a subfolder labelled quarterly projections Q2 and a woman with platinum hair who watched my husband with proprietary calm.

"Thanks," I said.

I went to the kitchen. I stood in front of the open fridge for longer than I needed to.

The pasta was in the blue container I used for leftovers, right where I always kept it.

He knew exactly where to put it.

He just didn't know where I'd been.