This Time I Choose Me

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

NORA

I called Marcus first thing the next morning. He was a lawyer, and more than that, he was my friend from college, one of the few people who never treated me like glass just because I was a woman from a wealthy family.

"Send me everything you have," he said. "The certificate, the printed page, all of it. I'll make some calls."

He called back two hours later, and his voice was careful in a way I didn't like.

"The registration number checks out," he said. "It's real. It's active. But the record clerk's system is locked for privacy on the second party. I can file a request, but it takes time, and honestly, Nora, if there's a redaction like that, someone with legal standing already asked for it to be sealed."

"Someone like who?"

"Could be him. Could be her. I don't know yet."

I thanked him and hung up and sat with that word. Her. Not a system error. Not a clerical mistake. A person.

I tried other things after that. I called the courthouse where we got married and asked for archived paper copies, the kind that existed before everything went digital. A different clerk, kinder than the first, pulled old boxes and came back an hour later shaking her head. The paper file for that registration number was missing. Not damaged. Not misplaced. Gone.

I went back to the bureau in person two days later with Marcus's letterhead and a formal request. I brought the ring again, the photos again, even an old joint bank statement with both our names on it from the second year of our marriage. The clerk was polite and patient and told me the same thing in different words. The system said what it said. Nothing I brought could change a database.

"I'm not asking you to change it," I said. "I'm asking you to explain it."

"I wish I could," she said, and I believed her, which somehow made it worse.

I drove home that day going ninety on roads meant for sixty, and somewhere between the bureau and my own driveway I stopped feeling shocked and started feeling something sharper. I started remembering things I had let myself forget.

Daniel's late nights. He always had a reason. Board calls with the Singapore office. Dinner with investors. A crisis at the plant that needed him there past midnight. I never checked. I never asked for details because asking felt like an accusation, and I didn't want to be the kind of wife who accused her husband of things.

The trips. Three, four times a year, sometimes more, always work, always somewhere I couldn't easily join because of my own schedule or because he said it would be boring for me, all conference rooms and old men in suits. I used to feel almost relieved when he said that. One less obligation on my calendar.

And Sophia.

Sophia Davids had been my best friend since we were nineteen years old, roommates in a tiny dorm room, splitting ramen because neither of us had money. She was there the night Daniel and I met, laughing too loud at some party, and she was the one who pushed me toward him across the room. She was there at the wedding, crying into a tissue, telling everyone how happy she was for me.

But I started thinking about smaller things now. The way she always knew what restaurant Daniel liked before I mentioned where we were going. The way she once referenced a work trip of his that I hadn't told her about, and when I asked how she knew, she just said, "You must have mentioned it," and I let that go, because why wouldn't I have mentioned it. The way she sometimes finished his sentences at dinner, the way old couples do, the way people do when they've spent a lot of quiet time together that nobody talks about.

I used to think that was just closeness. Three people who loved each other in different ways, all tangled up together since college. Now the tangling felt like something else.

I decided not to say anything to Daniel yet. Not one word. If I confronted him now, with nothing but a redacted piece of paper and a bad feeling, he would have time to explain it away. He was good at explaining things away. He'd built a company out of convincing people to trust him. He could talk his way around almost anything, and I had spent eight years being the easiest person in the world to talk around.

I wanted proof first. Something solid. Something he couldn't smile past.

That night I sat at the kitchen island with my laptop open, waiting for him to get home late again, and I logged into our shared cloud account. We'd set it up years ago to share photos, calendar events, travel bookings, the small logistics of a shared life. I hadn't opened it in months. There was no reason to. I trusted him.

I went through the folders slowly. Photos first, out of habit, our trip to the coast, his mother's birthday, nothing unusual. Then I found the folder for travel receipts, the one his assistant used to upload expense records for tax purposes.

I almost closed it. It felt like snooping, and some old part of me still flinched at that, still wanted to be the wife who didn't check, who trusted without proof. But I made myself keep scrolling.

Hotel charges. A lot of them. More than I expected for a man who traveled four times a year for work.

I started clicking through the dates, and my stomach dropped further with every one. Some matched trips I remembered, the Singapore ones, the investor dinners in other cities. Those made sense. But there were others tucked between them, smaller charges, one or two nights, hotels in our own city, ten minutes from our house.

Why would a man book a hotel ten minutes from his own front door.

I clicked on one from three years ago. A weekend I remembered clearly, because it was the weekend of my father's memorial, the first anniversary after he passed. Daniel told me he had to fly out for an emergency board meeting that Saturday. I remembered standing at the gravesite alone, telling myself it was fine, telling myself the company needed him and I understood, because that was what a good wife did. She understood.

The hotel charge for that exact date sat right there on my screen. A hotel in our own city. Not an airport hotel. Not a business hotel near any office building I knew of. A boutique place downtown, the kind people book for a certain kind of night.

My hands started shaking so hard I had to set the laptop down on the counter.

I kept going anyway. I found more. Dates going back five years, six, some clustered around times I remembered specifically, Sophia's birthday weekend once, a night I now recalled her canceling our usual dinner plans last minute, claiming she was sick.

I sat there at the island with the laptop glowing in the dark kitchen, the house silent around me, and I did the math without wanting to. Years. This had been going on for years, threaded quietly through birthdays and holidays and the small ordinary days that made up my marriage, and I had walked through every single one of them without seeing any of it.

I heard his car in the driveway a little after eleven.

I closed the laptop fast, my heart slamming, and I sat there in the dark like I'd been caught doing something wrong, when I was the one who had been wronged, when I was the one who had spent eight years being exactly the wife everyone told me to be.

The front door opened. His keys hit the bowl by the entry, the same sound I'd heard a thousand nights before.

"Nora?" he called out. "You still up?"

I looked down at my hands, steadier now, and I made myself breathe.

"In the kitchen," I said, and I made my voice sound normal, easy, like nothing in my whole life had just quietly come apart.