Page 38 of The Note

“I know I sounded confident and everything on the phone, but that’s how I get when I’m overcompensating. I’m legit scared right now.”

“I get it.” He pointed to the handle of her roller bag. “Can I take this now?”

*

Once they were on Newtown Lane, he told her that instead of him asking a bunch of questions, he’d like to hear from her about the trip with David.

“Starting from when?”

“Whenever you think you should start.”

“Well, we came down Friday morning from Providence. We drove onto a ferry and then I think another two short ferries. Got here midafternoon. Had lunch at the hotel. Um, I kept calling it ‘Gansevoort,’ but it’s not that. You probably know already.”

“Gurney’s, I think?”

He saw her nod in his periphery. “That’s it. Then we drove out to Montauk village and walked around. Looked at a few shops. I bought a T-shirt for my niece. Then we went back to the hotel. Weboth had work emails to deal with since we’d been offline all day, so we sat out on the deck, enjoying the view of the ocean.”

“And David seemed normal during all of this? No reason to be upset or nervous about anything?”

She shook her head. “No, it was all fine. Then we went to a different town called Sag Harbor. I’ve never been to the Hamptons and had read that there are a lot of nice little shops in that area, and I knew our dinner reservation was there—at a place called Page. And all of that was fine, too. But then after dinner, we came back to our car and there was something on the windshield. At first, David thought it was a parking ticket and got really annoyed because we hadn’t seen a meter or anything. But as we got closer, I realized it looked more like a napkin tucked under the wiper. It was on my side of the car, so I was the one who removed it. It was a handwritten note.”

“And what did it say?” Carter asked, hitting mute to silence his dash-top radio.

Christine hesitated a beat before answering. “It said ‘He’s cheating. He always does.’”

He could see why she had paused. A scorned woman who had already admitted having a heated argument with her missing boyfriend the last time she saw him makes for a pretty good primary suspect. “And then?” he prompted.

“I walked back over to his side of the car and just held it up so he could read it too. He kind ofsquinted at first like he didn’t even get it and then he started laughing and grabbed the note and balled it up. He seemed surprised when I didn’t find it so funny. So I said, ‘Well?’ And he kind of scoffed, so I said, ‘Are you?’ He totally denied it, saying I couldn’t possibly think someone would tell me he was cheating with an anonymous note. I wanted to believe him, but honestly, why would someone make that up? Which is what I said to Dave. He said it was probably some stupid TikTok thing. People messing with strangers to start fights and record them. I wasn’t sure what to believe, but I figured it was best either way not to make a public scene on the sidewalk. People record everything nowadays for spectacle.”

“What happened to the napkin?”

She pursed her lips, trying to remember. “He tossed it in a trash can down the street.”

“So then what happened?”

Christine looked down, her fingers nervously fiddling with the cell phone in her lap. “I pretended to let the issue drop. We had a couple of drinks at the hotel bar. We went back to the room. We had … like I said, I pretended everything was normal.”

“I assume you mean sex.”

“Yes. And afterward, I fell asleep. By the time I woke up on Saturday, he was already awake and at the hotel gym. I tried to get into his phone while he was in the shower, but it was locked.Then we went to brunch … I don’t know what it was called. It was at an inn that looked like a big house. It was really nice.”

“There was a charge on his card for Topping Rose?”

“Yes, that’s the place. The whole time we were there, I was looking at him, trying to tell myself it was all in my head. I pictured some bored teenagers leaving notes on cars, trying to stir people up for shits and giggles. My mom told me when she worked at the mall in the eighties, she and her friends would superglue quarters to the tile floor and then hide behind the cashier’s desk to watch people bend over and then freak out because they knew they’d been punked. I really, really wanted him to be telling me the truth,” she said, sounding genuinely hurt. “But my suspicions kept eating at me.”

Whether she intended to or not, Christine was dragging out the details of what happened. Maybe she was trying to win his favor by coming across as likable. Or maybe she was replaying her thoughts because part of her regretted whatever she might have really done to her boyfriend.

“And you didn’t let it drop,” he said.

“No. When he dozed off for a nap in the hotel after we went to the beach, I held up his phone to his face. I wasn’t sure it would work since his eyes were closed, but it did.”

“It depends on the settings,” Carter said. He hadchanged his own after growing tired of his phone refusing to unlock if he was wearing sunglasses.

“I looked at his texts first. Then his photographs. No suspicious messages. No nudes. I scrolled through his apps. No Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, or whatever. I really was ready to stop worrying. And then I opened his Instagram. I don’t do much social media for myself because I think of it as work, so I never noticed how many women he was following. Lots of flirty messages going back months. Women he met at bars. In airports. Old classmates from high school. Seemed like a third of them were married. And it was clear from the direct messages that he was doing more than following some of these women. There were messages about meeting up for drinks, had fun last night, that kind of thing. My guess is he may also have been texting these women too, but then deleting the messages so I wouldn’t see them.”

So far, everything Christine had told him was consistent with what he’d heard about David from his friend Simon.

“So what did you do after you discovered all the Instagram activity?”

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