Page 15 of The Wife

“I have no idea. I mean, he told me that a female intern complained he said something sexist. He sounded annoyed by the whole situation, but he didn’t mention the police. He left this morning for a segment he was supposed to do onNew Day. They canceled it as if Jason were Ted Bundy or something. He didn’t call you?”

“No,” Colin confirmed.

I tried to find comfort in that fact. Colin was a well-connected insurance defense lawyer at a big law firm that represented big corporations. If Jason thought he was in legal trouble, surely he would have called Colin.

Now that I was on the phone with another person, I felt tawdry for scanning Rachel Sutton’s Facebook page. She probably had no idea that one of her classmates had outed her name in an online comment, and that others were now repeating it on various less-than-reputable websites.

Graduated with honors from Rice University in Houston, head of the Environmental Society. Volunteer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals while pursuing her graduate degree in economics at NYU.

There was a photograph posted a week ago of two hands entwined on a tabletop. The female hand bore a solitaire diamond ring. The caption read, “I said yes.” Seventy-two comments of congratulations followed for Rachel and the groom-to-be, who was apparently named Michael Logan.

Colin was asking if I had tried calling both of Jason’s offices, at the university and at FSS.

“He didn’t answer,” I said, scrolling down to scan more photographs of Rachel. She had dark brown hair, pale skin, and pretty almond-shaped eyes. She looked like she could be mixed-race. She looked nothing like me.

“Did you call Zack?” Colin asked.

I realized that Colin knew Jason’s professional friends better than I did, the consequence of my avoiding his work-related shindigs, where I inevitably felt out of my element. I have no interest in socializing with grown adults who always seem to launch a first conversation with “And where did you go to school, Angela?”

When I told him that I hadn’t reached out to Jason’s protégé, Colin said he would call Zack and let me know if he heard anything. Before he hung up, he told me to let Jason know that he had the name of a “hard-core crim shark” ready to go. He also promised that everything would be all right.

I found myself staring at a photograph of Rachel with two other gorgeous twentysomethings, one male, one female. According to the “check-in,” the photograph was taken at some place called Le Bain, apparently a rooftop bar at the Standard Hotel. Swanky.

I clicked on the name of the male friend tagged in the picture—Wilson Stewart. He had perfect white teeth and floppy, sandy brown hair. He was a frequent poster: politics, food reviews, lots of photographs. At this point, I was hitting my laptop’s touchpad at random to keep my mind occupied.

I was reading about the online persona created by this stranger—Rachel’s young, good-looking friend, Wilson Stewart—when my cell phone rang again. The screen told me it was Jason.

“Where are you?”

“At school. Shit, you heard already, didn’t you?”

“It’s all over the news,” I said, “online, at least. And Susanna called. So did Colin—he has a lawyer he wants you to contact. What the hell is going on, Jason? Rachel’s claiming you assaulted her? You told me it was an offhand comment.”

“It’s complicated, okay? I didn’t think it would come to this—”

When he mentioned it at dinner right after it happened, he’d sounded amused by it. Now it was complicated.

I heard him sigh on the other end of the line. “A cop called—a woman—while I was in Philly. I told her I wasn’t talking without a lawyer. I was ready to call Colin if she pressed it, but she didn’t. I assumed she was dotting her i’s because Rachel blew it out of proportion. Now this.”

I told him again I’d been trying to call him all morning. “Where have you been?”

“The dean’s office. His secretary was dialing my cell before I’d left the television studio. I felt like a child being hauled into the damn principal’s office. He said the university’s initiating its own investigation. If they try to use this to fuck with me, it could derail everything.”

I knew he didn’t literally meaneverything.He would still have me and Spencer, and he’d told me how hard it was to revoke a professor’s tenure. Jason was referring to everything else that was important to him right now—his newfound role as a public intellectual, his plans for the future.

His voice trailed off. I had seen my husband go from the dean’s beloved academic wunderkind to an outsider in a handful of years. After theWall Street Journalreported that Jason got a seven-figure deal for his book, his colleagues accused him of being a sellout. They liked him better when he published heavily footnoted articles that no one read.

“Jason, are you sure there isn’t something else I should know?” I shut my eyes, afraid of the answer. Maybe there was a flirtation. A moment between an admiring young student and her attractive professor. I pictured all the girls daydreaming about Professor Harrison Ford inRaiders of the Lost Ark, “love you” etched on a set of eyelids.

I fell for Jason at about the same age. Why wouldn’t they?

He answered immediately. “I swear on my mother’s grave, Angela, nothing happened. It was—damn it, when she walked into my office, I was changing clothes. She must have thought—”

I held my free hand to my face. “Jesus, Jason.”

“What? I ran at lunch and had taken a shower. It’s not like I was naked. I was tucking in my shirt, I think. I was almost done when she walked in or I would have told her to come back later. This girl’s crazy. And damn it, I want a fucking cigarette.”

“Don’t even.” When Jason asked Spencer what he wanted for his thirteenth birthday, Spencer had asked his father to quit smoking.I want you to live forever, Dad.Jason resisted at first, joking that he liked the look on strangers’ faces when they saw him light up after a long run. But he finally quit on New Year’s, successfully substituting gum for the cigarettes he’d taken up while finishing his PhD dissertation.

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