The second thing I found was a text message. This was February, 4 months before the end. Nathan had left his phone on the bathroom counter while he was in the shower, and it buzzed with a message. I glanced at it automatically. I wasn’t checking up on him. I was just there and saw Karine’s name. Last night was perfect. I miss you already. I read it three times. My hands went cold. I could hear the shower running, the steam curling over the top of the curtain, Nathan humming something under his breath. I put the phone back exactly where it had been and walked out of the bathroom.
There are moments when you know something and moments when you refuse to know it. I spent the next 2 weeks in the second category. I told myself the text was innocent. Sisters sent texts like that to their brothersin-law, didn’t they? Maybe they’d gone to dinner while Nathan was in Charlotte for work. Maybe they’d gone to a movie. Maybe perfect was just how Karine talked. I didn’t ask Nathan about it. I didn’t ask Karine about it. I kept going to work, kept feeding the dogs and cats, and one memorable iguana named Gerald kept coming home and cooking dinner and lying next to my husband in the dark. But I started paying attention.
Nathan’s work trips got longer. His phone was always face down on the table. When I asked him about his day, he answered in summaries. Fine, busy. You know how it is. Rather than stories, he used to tell me stories. Used to do impressions of the doctors he called on, make me laugh until my stomach hurt. I noticed he’d stopped touching me casually. The hand on my lower back when we passed in the kitchen. The kiss on the top of my head while I was reading. All the small physical punctuation of a marriage, gone.
I noticed my sister stopped calling me. We used to talk at least twice a week, long rambling conversations about nothing in particular. Now it was just texts, brief and practical. Mom’s birthday is Sunday. Are you bringing the cake? I noticed that when we did see each other, family dinners, my mother’s house, Karine wouldn’t meet my eyes. And Nathan was careful to stay on the opposite side of the room from her, which I might have found reassuring if I hadn’t started to understand that people who had nothing to hide didn’t need to try so hard to look innocent.
One night in April, I told Nathan I was going to visit an old college friend in Raleigh for the weekend. I packed a bag, kissed him goodbye, drove 30 minutes up I 85, and then came back. I parked two blocks from our house and walked. Karine’s silver Audi was in our driveway. I sat on the neighbors lawn, hidden by their boxwood hedge, and waited. I don’t know why I didn’t just go inside. I could have confronted them. I could have screamed, thrown things, made a scene the whole neighborhood would remember. Instead, I sat in the wet grass, feeling the damp soak through my jeans, and waited to see what would happen.
An hour later, they came out the front door together. Nathan’s arm was around her waist. Karine was laughing at something he’d said, her head tilted back, her hand on his chest. He pulled her close and kissed her. Not a quick kiss, not a friendly kiss, but the kind of kiss you give someone when you’ve kissed them a thousand times before. I watched my husband kiss my sister in the doorway of my house, and something inside me went very quiet.
