Chapter 2

That morning, I said I needed to go grocery shopping.

I deliberately asked Nathan to pick out the strawberries.

He came back carrying a carton of beautiful, bright-red berries. Every single one gleamed as if it had been picked that morning.

My heart sank.

The real Nathan always came home with a few green-tipped strawberries mixed in.

He couldn't tell red from green. To him, the difference between an underripe berry and a ripe one might be nothing more than light and dark.

That was why he had a system for buying fruit: choose the most expensive carton with the nicest packaging.

He could never reliably select a whole box of perfectly red berries.

"You picked these yourself?" I asked.

"Yeah. They looked fresh."

I took one strawberry and turned it over between my fingers.

Red all over.

Not a hint of green.

That afternoon, we went for a walk.

At an intersection without a traffic light, he took my hand, looked both ways, and crossed without breaking stride.

I glanced back at the road.

Traffic wasn't heavy, but it wasn't exactly light, either.

The real Nathan would have waited there for ages. He'd let someone else go first, or wait until there wasn't a car in sight.

Because he struggled to tell red from green, he also had trouble distinguishing certain distant brake lights from other vehicle lights. He didn't trust what he saw.

He trusted other people instead.

Either he followed them across, or he stayed put.

This man hadn't waited for anyone.

He'd looked once and led me straight across, so effortlessly it was as if he'd never had a problem reading traffic signals in his life.

My palms turned clammy. The hand he was holding began to tremble.

He felt it and looked down. "Cold?"

"A little."

He took off his jacket and draped it around my shoulders.

A sweet, familiar gesture. Exactly what Nathan would do.

But it did nothing to ease the cold settling in my chest.

Back at home, I sat on the couch and replayed every little thing I'd noticed over the past two days.

The closet. "Looks great."

The grocery store. A carton of perfectly red strawberries.

The crosswalk. He hadn't waited for anyone.

Each moment seemed to whisper the same thing: This isn't Nathan.

Yet his voice, his walk, the way he held me... all of it matched.

He even knew the tiny habits I'd only ever shared with Nathan.

What was I really suspecting?

Maybe I was exhausted.

Maybe Nathan had simply gotten tired of pretending.

Maybe after three years of marriage, he'd decided there was no reason to hide his color blindness anymore.

No. That didn't make sense.

If he'd decided to come clean, he would have told me.

"Claire, I've started seeing some colors better."

Or, "Claire, I went to a specialist recently."

But he'd said nothing.

His actions alone were telling me he could drive, choose ripe fruit, and cross the street without a second thought, as if he'd always been able to do those things. As if he'd never been color-blind at all.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture Nathan before his trip.

On the morning he left, he'd rolled his suitcase toward the door, then turned back to kiss me.

"Two weeks. Wait for me, okay?"

His voice had sounded hoarse, like he hadn't slept.

At the time, I'd assumed he was worn out from an early flight.

Now, though, remembering his expression, I realized he hadn't looked like someone leaving on a business trip.

He'd looked like someone saying goodbye.

My eyes flew open.

A new message flashed on my phone.

It was from Nathan: a photo of dinner with the caption, "The food here is terrible today."

I stared at it, my fingers going cold.

Throughout his two-week trip, he'd messaged me every day.

What he was eating. How his hotel was. How boring his meeting slides were.

Everything had seemed perfectly normal.

But now I couldn't be sure.

If the man who'd come home wasn't Nathan, then was the Nathan texting me real or fake?