The Private Serials Box Set(7)

“What’s so funny?”

She took a bite of the licorice in her hand and waved the red rope between us. “We might be some of the worst stalkers ever.”

She wasn’t wrong, although, we had gotten most of the basics down. Black car? Check. The cover of night? Check. Black clothes to blend into said cover of night? Check and check. But we also might have indulged and turned our rental car into a snack wagon, using our stakeout as an opportunity and excuse to eat gas station fare, which we never really had a valid reason to buy. But under the guise of our stalker outfits, it seemed fitting to break a few rules, even if they were self-imposed.

It had taken two weeks from our original conversation about my husband’s possible affair for me to agree to Sam’s crazy idea. At first, although it was tempting to see if we could find out what was going on, I wasn’t really ready to know. I went home from our coffee shop date and pushed the idea of his affair out of my mind. I had gone back to plan A. If I tried to be the perfect wife, perhaps he would come around and want to be my husband again.

So I baked and cleaned and was waiting to be the doting wife when he came home from work. Only, sometimes he never came home from work, and most of the time, when he did come home, it was so late that I was either crashed on the couch in the living room, or had long given up and was asleep in our bed upstairs. On top of that, he often left for work before the sun came up and I would wake to a house just as empty as it had been when I’d fallen asleep.

I counted eight days in a row in which I didn’t once lay eyes on my husband.

I saw proof of him and his presence around the house: a coffee mug in the sink, wet towels in the laundry room, opened mail on the counter. But I never saw him and I hadn’t spoken to him since our anniversary. He wouldn’t answer when I called him at work, and I was sent directly to voicemail if I called his cell. After about the first five days of silence from him, I stopped trying to reach him at all.

Finally, I decided to take some sort of action, so I called Sam and told her to greenlight her plan. Three nights later we were sitting in a black rental car, watching the doors to my husband’s building, waiting for him to exit so we could follow him. It shouldn’t have been fun and it shouldn’t have felt like an adventure, but it sort of did. It was impossible not to laugh when trapped in a car with my best friend, especially when she was trying her hardest to keep the mood light, trying to entertain me. I knew what she was doing – trying to keep my mind off the idea that we were, in fact, trying to catch my husband in the act of cheating – and I let her do it. I let her make me laugh so hard I cried. I let her rap along to the radio even though she didn’t know all the words and made a horrible rapper. And I let her tell me the horror stories of her most recent travels into the world of dating at twenty-nine.

Suddenly, everything lost its humor as I watched Derrek walk out of the building. Both Sam and I went quiet, watching and waiting. When his car pulled onto the road, Sam gave me a look, silently asking me if I still wanted to go through with our plan. I nodded. She started the engine and pulled out, only a few cars behind his.

I had never tailed a car before and found it was a delicate balance between staying close enough to follow, but far enough away so that you melted into the background. After a few minutes, it became clear he was not headed to our home. I wasn’t surprised at all by this fact, but I was, admittedly, a little saddened. I came out with Sam to find out if he was cheating, but now that we were actually in the midst of possibly finding proof, I realized I might not be ready to deal with the reality proof would bring with it.

“You okay, Lena?”

“Yeah,” I said. I took on the role of navigator, keeping my eyes on his car and telling Sam which way to turn or which lane to move into so she could focus on just driving. His car took us more than forty-five minutes away from his work. We were a good distance out of the city, far away from our home, and unfamiliar with the area.

“Where in the world is he going?” I asked, knowing Sam didn’t have the answer. I hadn’t expected to leave the city. I imagined him pulling up to a corner and propositioning a prostitute, or pulling in to a seedy motel to meet up with some random woman. I had never imagined him leading us to suburbia. The further we got away from the city and closer we got to housing developments, the more nervous I became. My body was clued into what was happening and sending me all kinds of signals to run away. My fight or flight instincts were kicking in, and my body was telling me to fly.

But his car kept driving so we kept following. An hour after he’d left his building we watched as he pulled into the driveway of a house. We stopped down the block and turned off the headlights, watching with suicidal fascination. I wanted to look, but I knew on some unconscious level it was going to hurt. Whatever we saw was going to open me up and rip me to shreds, but I couldn’t look away.

He opened his car door and climbed out, stretching up toward the sky, obviously tight from the long drive. He grabbed his briefcase from the backseat and walked toward the two-story, cookie-cutter house. When he was halfway up the path to the house, the door opened and my mouth gaped as a small child ran toward him. Derrek dropped his briefcase and crouched down, opening his arms. When the child, a girl if her long hair was any indication, made it to him, he picked her up, hugging her tightly. Then, as if my world couldn’t fall apart any more, a woman came out of the house, a smaller child held to her hip. She stood on the front porch, watching Derrek and the little girl, a warm smile on her face.