I didn’t confront them. I went to Raleigh after all, drove the rest of the way in a days and spent the weekend at my friend Amy’s apartment. I told her I was just tired, that work had been hard, that I needed a break. She believed me or pretended to, and I slept on her couch and stared at her ceiling and tried to figure out what to do.
The thing you have to understand is that I wasn’t prepared for this. I know how that sounds. Nobody is ever prepared for betrayal. But I had built my entire adult life on the assumption that if you did everything right, worked hard, stayed loyal, kept your promises, then the people you loved would do the same. It never occurred to me that the rules only applied if everyone was playing the same game. And Karine had never been playing the same game.
When I got home Sunday night, Nathan was watching football and eating pizza from the box, and he looked up at me with the same easy smile he’d always had and said, “Hey babe, how was Raleigh?” I said, “It was fine.” I sat down on the couch next to him and he put his arm around me and I felt like a stranger in my own body.
The next two months were a performance. I played the role of wife, of sister, of daughter. I went to work and joked with Dr. Keller and held trembling puppies while they got their shots. I had dinner with my mother and listened to her talk about the garden club and the church fundraiser and how wonderful Karine looked now that she’d finally gotten over Bradley. “She’s really come into her own,” my mother said, sipping her wine. “Some women need to go through hardship to find their strength.” I nodded and smiled and didn’t say anything.
What I was doing during those two months was watching. I noticed that Nathan was taking money from our joint savings account. Small amounts at first, 300 here, 500 there, always with an explanation when I asked: a work expense, a golf weekend with clients, new tires for the car. But the amounts grew and the explanations became vagger, and I started keeping track in a notebook I hid in my locker at work. $8,000 in May alone. I noticed that our credit card bills had charges I didn’t recognize. Restaurants I’d never been to, a hotel in Charleston, a jewelry store. I noticed that Nathan had started checking the mail before I got home, something he’d never done before.
