Page 48 of The Wife

Of course. Why did she sound confused? Had it been longer? “Jason told me it was three months.”

“Okay, but you’re saying that you did suspect outside encounters of some kind, but without, let’s say, an emotional affair. Is that a fair representation?”

If this was what it felt like to have someone who was supposedly on our side question me, I could not imagine what it would be like to get cross-examined by the lawyer trying to put my husband behind bars.

“I need to think about this. I don’t want to talk any more right now.”

“That’s fine. I totally understand. But, Angela, please remember: this woman is trying to destroy your husband, which means she’s destroying your family. That’s going to have consequences for both you and Spencer.” At least this time she didn’t hesitate on my son’s name. “Helping Jason helps the two of you, too.”

I heard Jason calling out my own name from downstairs. “Hold on,” I yelled, breaking one of my own house rules. “I’m talking to Olivia.”

“Angela!”

Jason was screaming loud enough for people outside to hear. I asked Olivia to hold on and walked from the bedroom to the top of the stairs. I saw Jason being placed in handcuffs in the threshold of our open front door.

For more than a week, I had been expecting this moment, imagining it about to turn the corner at any second. But Jason hadn’t. His expression was panicked, and his eyes looked up at me, pleading.

“Olivia, they’re here,” I said into the phone. “The police. They’re arresting Jason. He didn’t do this. Please, you have to help him.”

III

Peoplev.Jason Powell

30

What does it mean to know something?

I remember Mr. Gardner, my ninth-grade teacher, asking us that question. He was widely regarded as the school’s smartest, most challenging teacher, which meant that most of us had no idea what he was talking about most of the time.

It was supposed to be a lesson about the importance of choosing words carefully. He began by asking us how many facts we thought we knew to a certainty. A long list grew on the chalkboard: the price of a Snickers bar in the vending machine, the name of our PE teacher, our birthdays. Then he said, “Okay, so what if I told you that the penalty for being wrong about one of these facts was having to spend the entire summer in school? Now how many things do you know?”

We immediately second-guessed our so-called knowledge. Maybe prices were being changed at the machine as we spoke. Maybe Ms. Callaway got married, changed her name, and never told the students. And maybe the hospital was wrong about whether we were born a little before midnight or a little after.

“And if the penalty for an error was losing a limb?” Mr. Gardner asked.

The lesson: we don’t reallyknowanything. Not really.

To know something, he argued, was not the same as to be certain beyond all doubt. And to believe something was definitely not the same as to know it.

With that as a backdrop, I’d say the first time IknewJason cheated was almost exactly two years ago. We had taken a rental in the Hamptons for six full weeks. The cost of renting a small cottage, half a mile from the ocean, was twice what my mother made in a year. That was the bizarro economy of the South Fork these days.

It was a splurge, but Jason assured me we could afford it. He had launched the consulting company and had extra money coming in, on top of the book money we had sunk into the house. We only had one car, of course—the Subaru, before Jason decided we should get the Audi—but that wasn’t a problem. Most days, the three of us were together. To the extent we needed supplementary transportation, the rental house came with bikes. And I could always call my mom in a pinch.

That particular day, I had gone to Susanna’s to help prepare for a dinner party. Jason said he had a meeting at a potential client’s house in Bridgehampton, so Spencer tagged along with Mom on a housecleaning. I was riding my bike home from Susanna’s when I thought I spotted our car parallel-parked on Montauk Highway, in the overflow parking area for Cyril’s. It was postbeach cocktail hour, the time when people popped in for late lunch lobster rolls, predinner raw oysters, and a lot of frozen blender drinks.

I was stopped on my bike—one foot on the gravel, one on a paused pedal—next to my own car, watching my husband talk to a woman I’d never seen before. He was drinking beer from a pint glass, looking exactly like himself, but the woman was more easily readable. She was flirting. She flipped her long hair a lot, licked her glossy lips, maintained good eye contact. She could have given instructions in a magazine. When I saw her touch Jason’s knee, part of me wanted to storm into the crowd, announce my presence, and ask Jason to introduce me to his friend.

I didn’t. I pedaled back to our rented cottage and waited for him to come home. When he finally arrived almost three hours later, he immediately took a shower. I picked up his shirt, dropped so casually on the floor, and held it to my face. It smelled like the beach. That night, when he crawled into bed with me and held my hand, I fiddled with his ring. His tan line was faded.

Was it enough proof that I was willing to spend the rest of summer in school, or lose a limb? No, but all the signs were there. We hadn’t touched each other—not that way—for more than a year. More hours away from home, with vague explanations for his whereabouts. That girl at Cyril’s. He’d clearly taken off his ring. At that point, I “knew,” to the extent that word has meaning. And yet I didn’t say a thing. What Jason’s attorney had called an “unspoken understanding” had been set into motion.

At the time, that’s not how I thought of it. Even as I leaned on the borrowed bicycle in the gravel parking lot, watching him flirt with a stranger, I almost felt closer to him. It was part of the bargain that was now our life together. We were supposed to have a normal marriage, but one half of the couple—me—wasn’t normal, so neither were we.

But I had lived with far more dangerous secrets, and so we went on.

31

Corrine immediately spotted two news vans when she pulled up in front of the special victims unit. A group of people clustered on either side of the walkway leading into the building.

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