Chapter Two: Two Letters and a Heart

His thumbprint wouldn't have worked on my thumb, obviously, so I used the six-digit code he'd used on every phone he'd owned since college, Mia's birthday, forwards, because in eleven years it had never once occurred to him that he'd need to keep anything from me.

It was 6:52 a.m. Daniel was three-quarters of a mile into his usual loop around the reservoir, and his phone was sitting exactly where he always left it, screen-down on the kitchen counter, charging cable still attached like a leash. I told myself I was checking the weather. I was already lying to myself before I'd even lied to him.

The message thread was three lines long, saved under a single letter. P.

Did she find out?

Not yet. Stay away for a few days. I'll handle it.

Okay. Sorry, D.

Nothing about a hotel. Nothing about a name I didn't recognize, a woman in a red coat, or a receipt for room service at 9:41 the night before. Just three lines and an initial, sent at 11:58 that night, while I was lying two feet away from him, wide awake, replaying a coat and a car and a receipt I couldn't stop thinking about.

She. Not a name. Just her, floating there, could have meant anyone. Could have meant me.

I heard the front gate before I heard him, the particular creak it made under a hundred and eighty pounds moving at a jog, and I put the phone down so fast I nearly sent it skidding off the counter. By the time he came through the kitchen door, breathing hard, pulling his shirt over his head on the way to the shower, I was standing at the coffee machine like I'd been there an hour.

"Morning," he said, and kissed the top of my head on his way past, sweat and cold air and nothing at all suspicious about him.

I waited until he'd showered, until Mia was arguing with her waffles at the table between us, before I brought it up, carefully, the way you'd defuse something instead of asking about it.

"Your phone lit up last night. I wasn't trying to look, it was just sitting there." Not entirely a lie. "Something about somebody finding out?"

Something moved behind his eyes, there and gone so fast I almost decided I'd invented it.

"That's Priya." He said it easily, like the explanation had been sitting ready in his mouth the whole time. "She's going through something and doesn't want Mom to know yet. I told her I'd help keep it quiet until she's ready to deal with it herself."

"Deal with what?"

"It's hers to tell, El." He reached over and squeezed my hand, the same gentle, closing-the-subject gesture he used when a work call got too complicated to explain. "I promise it's nothing to do with us."

I believed him. That was the terrifying part, sitting there with a hotel receipt still folded in his jacket pocket four feet away, and still, some old, well-worn part of me wanted to believe him more than I wanted to be right.

---

Priya let herself in a little after four, the way she always did, a key I didn't remember agreeing to give her, used on a door she never bothered to knock on. I heard her before I saw her, already halfway through a sentence to nobody as she came down the hall.

"—so I told him just put it on Daniel's card, he won't even notice," she was saying into her phone, and then she rounded the corner into the kitchen and hung up like she'd never been talking to anyone at all. "Elena! You're home."

"It's my house," I said, and immediately felt petty for saying it.

She didn't seem to hear the edge in it. Priya never did. She dropped her bag on the counter I'd just wiped down, went straight for the fridge like she lived there, and pulled out a container of leftovers I'd made for Mia's lunches.

"Is Daniel around? The new lease finally came through, but the agency wants a co-signer or a guarantor or God knows what, like I haven't been paying my own rent for six years." She said it through a mouthful of food, not looking up, some old defensiveness creeping into her voice that made her sound, for a second, younger than she was. "God, this house always smells so good. You should let me redo your closet sometime, by the way, I saw what's in there and it's very 2019."

I thought of the charcoal wool coat hanging in that closet, and the receipt still folded in its pocket, and said nothing.

Daniel had been covering for Priya since they were teenagers, back when their father left and their mother worked nights at the hospital and somebody had to make sure a fourteen-year-old girl ate dinner and did her homework. I used to find it sweet, the way he still treated her like she might come apart without him. Lately it felt more like a debt he'd never stopped paying, and one Priya had gotten very good at collecting on.

It was on my way past the front hall, going to find Daniel, that I saw it, a coat thrown over the bench by the door, the kind you drop the second you walk in because you know you're staying a while. Dark red wool. Nearly the same shade, in the low light, as the one on the woman who'd climbed into a town car outside the Kingsley the night before.

I stood there a full ten seconds too long, staring at a coat that could have belonged to a thousand women in this city, telling myself it meant nothing.

Then Priya called from the kitchen, bright and unbothered, like she hadn't just handed me the worst thought I'd had all day.

"Elena? Tell Daniel I said thanks for last night, by the way. He's a lifesaver.”