All Chapters of The Other Mrs. Cross : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Isla POVPriya had printed the thread in a large font, which was how I knew it was bad. She taped the pages end to end in a long accordion down the middle of her desk that Saturday morning, and she stood over it with her coffee as though it might still turn into something harmless if she waited."Exhibit F," she said. "Filed at four fifty-nine yesterday, right behind the witness list, the way you slide a bill under a door. Four months of texts between you and Nora."I pulled the first page toward me. My own words looked unfamiliar in their little gray bubbles, shorter and more frightened than I remembered. ‘I opened a separate account. Please don't tell anyone, not even Josh.’ ‘Can you keep Mabel Thursday night? I need a few hours and I can't say where.’ ‘If he asks, you haven't heard from me.’ Near the bottom of the third page, in a bubble Priya had marked in yellow highlighter, ‘Delete this.’"I was talking about the credit union," I said. "And

Isla POVDepartment 4 was smaller than I pictured, a low room paneled in honey-colored wood that hadn't been refinished since before I was born, with eight rows of benches, a flag with a frayed hem, and a clock above the door. Priya had told me to wear something forgettable, and I'd put on the gray suit I used to wear to bank meetings, buttoned to the collar, with my hair in a plain low knot that no one would ever remember. Julian already sat at the other table in a navy suit, his hands folded on the wood in front of him as if he were waiting for a train, and he didn't look at me once when I came in.Behind me Camille had taken the first bench with Elliot, a broad quiet man in a tie that was clearly his only one, and she squeezed my shoulder through the rail before I sat. Nora was down the hall in the witness room with a paper cup of water. Dorian was nowhere, and the absence felt like a gap in a tooth."Remember," Priya murmured, uncapping her pen. "Boring.""I've never been so borin

Isla POVThe hallway outside Department 4 was long and narrow, with scuffed linoleum, a bank of tall windows at the far end, and a vending machine that hummed at a pitch just below hearing. Priya had gone to find the clerk, carrying her folder like a tray, and the rest of us had scattered the way people do in the first quiet after something loud. Through the narrow window of the witness room door I could see Nora holding her paper cup in hands while Camille told her something that made her laugh, and Elliot standing guard beside them with his one tie. I took the other direction, to the window at the end, because I wanted the cool of the glass and a view of something that wasn't the inside of a courtroom.The parking lot lay below in flat white light, rows of cars and a bailiff smoking beside a dumpster, and a gull standing on a lamppost looking thoroughly unimpressed. I leaned my shoulder against the frame and let my mind go blank. Forty-five minutes, minus nine already."Isla."I did

Isla POVBy one o'clock the courthouse steps were bright and loud with lunch-hour traffic, and the three of us stood at the bottom with no plan, like guests who arrive at a party and find it already over. Priya had gone off toward the parking structure with the clerk and a calculator, muttering about fees, after pressing my hand between both of hers and saying, "Go home. Eat something. Read nothing." Camille was wiping her eyes with the cuff of her sage sweater. Nora was holding her paper cup of water, still full."I never testified," she said. "I practiced eleven times on a staircase.""You were very good on the staircase.""I want a refund." She looked at the cup as though it had personally let her down and drank all of it. "I had a speech about Josh and the tablet. It had a pause in the middle.""Save the pause," Camille said. "You'll need it for Thanksgiving." Then she turned to me with great seriousness. "I said I needed a sandwich.

Isla POVI didn't call him from the diner. I paid for both sandwiches before Ruth could reach for the check, thanked her for it, let Gus lean against my knee for a full ten seconds as a sign of permission, and drove back toward the city with the radio off and the fox notebook open on the passenger seat to a page of mud-streaked sketches I'd been so proud of an hour earlier.It wasn't anger, quite. I turned it over the whole way home, the way I turned over every strange line item that fell, looking for the place where it stopped adding up. A man had picked up a phone in September and said a name, and that was all it came to, as far as I could tell. But in September I still believed my husband was a good man who travelled a lot, and somewhere nearby a person I barely knew had been setting small things in my path, and I developed a very well-trained instinct about people who arranged things for me.The print shop on Alder Street was cold and smelled of ink and old radiators. I let myself