My Husband Doesn't Know I'm His Mistress

Chapter Four — How She Takes It

He called it a debrief.

The email arrived Tuesday afternoon, routed through Elena's work account with the subject line Project check-in — end of week two, and it was professionally worded and entirely reasonable and I read it four times trying to find an angle from which declining made operational sense and could not find one.

So Elena went to dinner.

The restaurant was the kind of quiet that costs money — low light, good linen, the type of menu that doesn't list prices because the clientele finds that conversation uncomfortable. Daniel was already there when I arrived, jacket on, phone away, which was not nothing. Daniel Hargrove putting his phone away before you arrived meant you had his attention, and his attention, undivided, was a thing I had almost forgotten the texture of.

"You found it," he said.

"You gave good directions," I said.

He smiled. "I gave the address."

"Same thing, if the address is right."

We ordered. He got the steak because he always did, and I almost said you always get the steak and caught it behind my teeth and ordered the salmon instead, which Leah didn't particularly like but Elena had no feelings about either way.

"How are you finding it?" he asked. "The company, honestly."

"Honestly?" I considered. "Smart people who are slightly too comfortable. Which is usually where the cracks are."

He looked at me. "That's a precise observation for two weeks in."

"I'm a precise person."

"Yes," he said, in a way that suggested he had already noticed and had been thinking about it. "You are."

The food came. We talked about the company the way people talk when they are ostensibly discussing one thing and actually taking the measure of each other. He asked good questions — the kind that assumed intelligence rather than establishing it. I answered as Elena, which required less performance than I expected because Elena's opinions and Leah's opinions were not, it turned out, as different as I had believed when I constructed her.

Somewhere between the main course and whatever they brought afterward that he waved away, the conversation slipped sideways.

"Do you have family here?" he asked.

It was a normal question. Dinner conversation. I had a cover answer ready — Elena's parents in Boston, an older brother in Seattle, the biographical details Jonas had assigned her.

"No," I said. "Not here."

He nodded. "Hard city to be new in."

"Are you speaking from experience?"

"I grew up here," he said. "But I've managed to feel like a newcomer in my own life recently, so." He stopped. "Sorry. That was unexpectedly honest for a work dinner."

"I don't mind honest," I said.

He looked at me with the expression I had been cataloguing for two weeks and still couldn't fully name. "No," he said slowly. "I don't think you do."

We left at nine-thirty. He walked me to the corner where I'd parked and stopped at the edge of the pavement with his hands in his coat pockets, the cold making everything more visible somehow, and he said — "You mentioned on Wednesday that the monitoring gap in the system runs between eleven and eleven-forty p.m."

I stared at him.

Wednesday. A passing comment in a briefing I had delivered to a room of twelve people, specific and technical and entirely unremarkable.

He had remembered it.

In three years of marriage Daniel Hargrove had forgotten my sister's birthday, our anniversary restaurant, the name of my closest friend from university, and the fact that I took my coffee without sugar.

He had remembered a technical detail Elena mentioned in a crowd.

"Goodnight, Mr. Hargrove," I said.

"Daniel," he said.

I walked to my car.

I sat in it for two minutes before I started the engine.