My Husband Doesn't Know I'm His Mistress

Chapter Seven — Contingency

The kettle boiled and I made tea I didn't want.

It was something to do with my hands while my brain worked through what I had just heard. Daniel's voice from the bedroom had dropped, which meant the call was either ending or becoming more careful, and I focused on the tea and the ordinary geometry of the kitchen — the blue container in the fridge, the chip on the coffee mug, the river stone on his desk down the hall — and I ran the Marcus Trent question from the beginning.

What I knew: Marcus Trent was the CEO of Vertex Capital. He was Camille's former lover and current handler — the person receiving the leaked acquisition data she had been feeding him for eight months. He was also, I had discovered in my background research, Jonas's former co-founder. The two men had built an intelligence firm together and then dissolved it in a legal settlement sealed tightly enough that the details required more than a standard search to surface.

What I had not known until four minutes ago: Daniel Hargrove knew Marcus Trent personally. Knew him well enough to understand his particular capacity for damage. Knew him well enough to be having a careful, private phone call about him with his CFO on a Monday evening.

Which meant the leak was not simply Camille feeding data to an old lover.

There was a relationship between Daniel and Marcus Trent that predated Camille entirely.

I heard the bedroom door open fully. His footsteps in the hallway, then the living room, then the kitchen doorway.

"You're home late," he said.

"Project ran over," I said. Elena's answer, delivered in Leah's kitchen, in Leah's voice, wearing Leah's clothes. The compartmentalisation required to hold all three of those things simultaneously was becoming a specific kind of tired I didn't have a name for yet.

He went to the refrigerator. Stood in front of it with the door open the way he always did, looking at its contents with the optimistic expression of a man who believes something better might have appeared since he last checked.

"Reid called," he said, without turning around.

My hand stilled on my mug.

"About?" I kept my voice at the same temperature it had been.

"Work thing." He took out the water filter jug, poured a glass, put it back. "Nothing interesting."

Nothing interesting.

He had just spent twelve minutes on a careful, low-voiced phone call about Marcus Trent's capacity for damage and he was standing in our kitchen telling me it was nothing interesting, and the thing that struck me — the thing I had to breathe through — was that I couldn't tell him I knew he was lying because the only way I knew was by standing in the hallway listening to a conversation I had no legitimate reason to have overheard.

We were both lying in this kitchen.

We were both standing here being completely dishonest with each other, and the difference was that I knew we both were and he thought only one of us was, and that asymmetry was so heavy I could feel it in my shoulders.

"Long day," I said.

"Yeah." He leaned against the counter across from me. Looked at me in the way he had been looking at me recently — with the attention he used to reserve for things he was trying to understand. "You okay?"

"Tired," I said. "You?"

"Same." He was quiet for a moment. "You eaten?"

"Not yet."

"There's that pasta place on Randolph that delivers until midnight," he said. "The one with the gnocchi you like."

I looked at him.

He said it the way you say things you have always known. Not offered — stated. The gnocchi you like, as though it had never required a mental note, as though it was simply part of the furniture of knowing me.

Three years of marriage and he knew the pasta place and the gnocchi and the delivery window, and he had also been sending messages to a woman named Camille for eight months, and both of those things were equally true and I was standing in our kitchen holding a mug of tea I didn't want, exhausted from carrying more information than any one person should have to carry alone.

"Sure," I said. "That sounds good."

He ordered. We ate at the kitchen counter the way we used to in the first year — not the dining table, just the counter, containers open between us, the easy geography of two people who know each other's rhythms well enough not to need formality. He told me about the Frankfurt client, which was the version of Frankfurt he was telling me, the approved version, and I listened and asked the right questions and ate the gnocchi, which was good, which it always was.

It was the most normal hour we had spent together in months.

That was the part that stayed with me after he went to bed.

Not the lying. Not the Marcus Trent question. The gnocchi and the counter and the ease of it — the way we still fit together in the small domestic moments even when everything surrounding those moments was quietly on fire. That ease was either evidence that something real remained between us or evidence of how thoroughly two people could perform a marriage without either of them acknowledging the performance.

I waited until his light went out.

Then I opened my laptop at the kitchen counter and pulled up Elena's secure inbox to file the preliminary report.

The report could wait.

Because there was an email already sitting in the inbox.

From Jonas.

Sent at seven forty-three p.m. — which was forty minutes before I had called him from the lobby. Forty minutes before I had told him about Reid. Forty minutes before the conversation in which he had expressed measured surprise at the timeline and negotiated three additional days with the careful neutrality of a man receiving new information.

He had sent this email before I called.

The subject line said one word.

Contingency.

I sat very still for a moment.

Then I opened it.

The email was four sentences. Jonas's economy with language extended to written communication — he never used six words where three would do, which made four sentences from Jonas the equivalent of a paragraph from anyone else.

The Reid Parker situation has been monitored. His dinner with DH is necessary — do not attempt to intercept. Your value to this assignment extends beyond the Voss documentation. Stand by for further instruction.

I read it three times.

Your value to this assignment extends beyond the Voss documentation.

I had been hired to find the leak. I had found the leak. By any reasonable operational definition, my value to this assignment was the Voss documentation — the access logs, the match rate, the Vertex Capital connection, the complete evidentiary package sitting in a draft folder that Jonas had asked me to file tonight.

If my value extended beyond that, then the Voss documentation was not the assignment.

It was the cover for the assignment.

The tea had gone cold. Outside the kitchen window Chicago was doing what it did at this hour — indifferent, continuous, the distant sound of the city running its overnight version of itself.

I thought about Reid's corridor question. His pleasant expression, his patient eyes, the specific way he had said I'm having dinner with Daniel on Thursday — not as a warning but as information delivered to someone he expected to know what to do with it.

Reid Parker had not been investigating Elena Marsh.

He had been communicating with her.

He knew.

Not who Elena was. But what this assignment actually was. And he had been waiting, with the patience of a man who had been briefed to wait, for the operative embedded in his building to reach the same conclusion he had already reached.

I closed the laptop.

Down the hallway Daniel's light was out. The apartment was quiet. The river stone sat on his desk where it had always sat, brought back from a weekend in Michigan in the first year when we were happy enough not to need a reason to pick things up and carry them home.

I had walked into this building two weeks ago believing I understood the shape of the assignment.

I had not understood anything.

The question was no longer what Jonas had sent me here to find.

The question was what he had sent me here to do.

And whether Daniel Hargrove — asleep down the hall, gnocchi ordered from the right place, lying about a phone call in our kitchen — was Jonas's target.

Or his partner.