All We Ever Wanted(65)

“I mean, where are you?”

“I’m in Dallas.”

“Where in Dallas?”

“My room.”

“Which hotel?”

“The Mansion on Turtle Creek,” he said. “Where I always stay.”

“Who are you with?”

“Nobody.”

“Who were you with an hour ago? When you pocket-dialed me?”

“I pocket-dialed you?” he said.

“Yeah, you did, Kirk.”

“Well…let’s see…an hour ago?…I was with Gerald Lee….”

   “I heard a woman’s voice, Kirk.”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“So, finish.”

“I was with Gerald—and his fiancée. Did I tell you he got engaged?”

“No,” I said, thinking that it had been years since I’d even heard him mention Gerald, making his old college friend a very convenient alibi. “You sure didn’t.”

“Yeah. So anyway, we had a quick bite….”

“I thought you had a migraine?”

“I did. Still do. But I had to eat. And now I’m headed to bed.” His voice was suddenly both hushed and hurried.

“I’m so sorry you’re not feeling well,” I said as insincerely as I could.

“It’s okay. I’ll be fine,” he said. “Everything okay there?”

“Sure,” I said, pausing, listening to the conspicuous silence in his background. I pictured him huddled in a marble hotel bathroom, someone waiting for him in the next room. Maybe she was even beside him in bed, craning to hear my every word so they could analyze it together.

“Okay. Well. I’ll see you tomorrow?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, then made myself say the last three words I wanted to say to him: I love you. It didn’t feel like the truth at that second, more like a test, as I waited to see what he’d say in return.

“You, too,” he simply said back, failing with flying colors.



* * *



—

A FEW SECONDS later, my phone rang again. I expected it to be Kirk, attempting to apologize for his abruptness, fix things, talk to me. But it was Tom. Surprised, I answered hello. He said hello back, sounding tentative as he went on to thank me for coming over this morning. I told him of course, then thanked him for allowing us to come. After an awkward pause, he told me a disturbing story about him overhearing a conversation between two women I apparently knew. Something about Lyla and Finch and the incident. But it was a comfort to hear from him—and a welcome interruption in an intense period of panic and loneliness.

   Bolstered by the brief exchange, I went to Kirk’s office, determination replacing sadness. I sat in his desk chair, swiveling to the left and right, staring at the neat piles of papers, his pewter pencil cup filled with only black Pilot rollerball pens. I opened his drawers, one at a time. Three down the left, three down the right, and one long, skinny one in the middle. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I methodically combed through everything. I found nothing suspicious but ascribed the lack of evidence to his fastidiousness, not his innocence. I turned on his laptop. I didn’t expect to find anything there either, as he knew that I knew his password. But I still scrutinized his email in-box, just in case, scanning rows of names and boring subject lines.

Just as I was about to give up, I saw an email dated today from Bob Tate, Kirk’s ticket broker. I clicked and read the thread—a complicated back-and-forth among Bob, Kirk, and Finch—and pieced together a very different story than the one Finch had given me earlier. In a nutshell, Finch wanted four tickets to the show (not two), for the express purpose of making amends with Lyla Volpe (he didn’t think she’d go if it were just the two of them). Kirk summarized the request to Bob, who came through in grand style, explaining that the price was steep because they were limited admission and last minute. Kirk said no problem, and he’d settle up in cash when back in town.

   Son of a bitch, I said aloud, the magnitude of their betrayal sinking in. My son and husband had, essentially, conspired against me. It occurred to me that I had done the same thing this morning. I had brought my son to the Volpe home unbeknownst to my husband. I had encouraged Finch to lie to his father, at least by omission. But I believed in my heart that there was a vital difference. I had been trying to do what was right—and show my son how important that was; Kirk was, as always, simply trying to manipulate others in his quest to get his way.

There was really no way around it. My husband, whom I’d once thought of as charming and take-charge, was simply a user and a liar. And the worst part of it all was that he was teaching our son to be those very things.

I’d always pictured marriages severing more dramatically, with an explosive fight or irrefutable proof (stronger than a pocket dial) of an affair. But in that quiet moment in Kirk’s office waiting for our son to return from a concert with a girl he had mistreated and maybe even manipulated, I felt in my bones that my marriage was over.

I wanted a divorce. I was done. So done.



* * *



—

I WOKE UP the next morning to a disjointed dream about Tom and suddenly remembered his call the night before. It almost seemed like a dream, too, coming, as it had, during so much turmoil. I found my phone on my nightstand and started a text to Tom, confessing that I’d had something of a rough night, and apologizing if I’d acted a bit off. I reread my words, then deleted them, the statement sounding a little inappropriate.