Chapter 2

Dial Tone

Natalie's POV

I didn't need to see all of it.

The first photograph was enough.

Daniel stood outside what looked like a hotel, one hand at the waist of a woman I had never seen before. The picture was grainy, but there was no mistaking his face, and no innocent explanation for the way her body leaned into his.

I kept scrolling anyway.

In the second photo they sat at a restaurant table, his hand resting on her thigh. In another, she was laughing against his shoulder. There were more after that. Different clothes. Different restaurants. Different days.

Not one mistake. Not one bad angle at the wrong moment.

A pattern.

My fingers had gone cold on the mouse. For years I had gotten very good at explaining Daniel. The late nights were work. The hotel charges were business trips. The unanswered calls were meetings, because being a Whitmore meant people needed him at all hours. I had built those explanations so carefully that sometimes I couldn't tell whether I believed them or had only repeated them enough times.

These photographs didn't need an explanation. They were already telling me the truth.

I closed the laptop, quietly, as though a softer sound might make it less real, and sat with my palms flat against the lid. Across the room a phone rang and someone answered it in a bright voice. The office kept going. That felt like its own kind of insult.

The shock was already fading, and what came behind it was worse: a slow, sinking humiliation. Strangers had seen my husband with another woman before I had. They had shared it, commented on it, and apparently decided I ought to know.

Then, because I couldn't help it, I did the math I had done for years. How many parents at Noah's preschool had seen this? Would some mother in the pickup line say something within his hearing? Would he come home one day repeating a word he was too young to understand?

I picked up my phone and called Daniel.

It rang four times. I almost hung up before he answered.

"Nat."

His voice was calm. It was his meeting voice, and it made me angrier than shouting would have.

"Daniel."

"Look, I know how this looks—"

"How it looks?" I stood and turned toward the window, keeping my voice low, aware of Priya's eyes flicking up from her desk. "There are pictures of you online. With another woman. My cousin texted me. Strangers texted me."

"I know."

The words landed and stayed there.

"You know," I said.

"Yes."

"And you didn't think I should hear it from you?"

"It's being handled."

I laughed once. There was nothing funny in it. This morning I had made his coffee, and the whole time, somewhere across town, he had already known.

"Who is she?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Then why is she in photographs with my husband?"

"Because you're looking at something without knowing the context."

"Then give me the context."

Silence. Not long. Just long enough.

"It's not as bad as it probably looks," he said. Then, in the same patient tone, "You're overreacting."

I closed my eyes. There it was. The sentence. The calm dismissal he used every time I asked a question he didn't want to answer, the one that always turned the problem into something wrong with me.

"I'm overreacting."

"You're upset, and I understand that. But this isn't the way to handle it."

"The way to handle what?"

"This. Calling me at work. Making a scene."

"I haven't made a scene, Daniel. I'm standing at my desk while my whole office pretends not to listen. The scene was made by everyone else."

He sighed, the sigh of a man being inconvenienced by his own choices. "I have back-to-back meetings until six. I'm across town. Can we not do this over the phone?"

Outside the window, cars moved along the street as if my entire marriage hadn't just been dragged into daylight. He wanted time. Of course he did. Time to think, time to prepare, time to decide which version of the truth to bring home.

"Tonight," he said. "I'll come home and we'll talk."

"Are you coming home to explain who she is?"

"Nat—"

"Because I want an answer."

"It's really not what it looks like. I promise."

I swallowed. "You said that the last time."

He went quiet.

"And the time before that."

He let out a breath. "Until we talk, don't discuss this with anyone. Not your friends. Not my family. I don't want it getting worse before I've had a chance to fix it."

Fix it. Not I'm sorry. Not Are you okay. The whole world had watched my marriage come apart, and his first instruction to me was to keep quiet about it.

"Tonight," he said again, and the line went dead.

I lowered the phone slowly. I wasn't shaking. I had expected to shake, or cry, or want to throw something. Instead I felt cold and very clear, and that frightened me more than tears would have. He hadn't even sounded surprised. He had sounded like a man rescheduling a meeting.

I sat back down and opened the laptop, though I had promised myself I wouldn't. The photographs were still there. The woman I didn't know. Daniel in a dark suit, smiling.

That was what I couldn't get past. Not the woman. Not even the closeness. His face.

He looked happy.

He hadn't looked at me like that in years, and I felt that loss more sharply than I felt the betrayal, which was its own kind of shame.

My eyes went to the photograph in the corner of my desk. Noah last summer, one front tooth missing, his small hand wrapped around mine. He was the reason I had swallowed questions and accepted apologies and called distance a phase. But looking at his grin now, I asked myself something I had never let myself ask. How much longer could I keep pretending that staying was the same thing as protecting him?

I closed the laptop again.

My phone buzzed against the desk, and I flinched. Another message, or another person with an apology. I reached for it, ready to ignore it, and then I saw the name on the screen.

Marcus.

Daniel's brother.

Of everyone who might have heard, he was the one I least wanted to face.