Page 69 of No One Can Know

“It was difficult. And Nathan had a hard time with coming here, given my history with the place,” Emma said. “We were working through it.”

“I see,” Mehta said. She angled her body in a way that seemed to exclude Chris, making this conversation just between her and Emma. “I get it. Marriage is hard. You fight. Things fester.”

“We didn’t fight. Not really,” Emma corrected, shaking her head. “We talked, that’s all.”

“That’s surprising. Nathan lied to you. Cost you a house, your savings—forced you to move back to a place that’s got to have a lot of terrible memories. You must have resented him for that.”

“I didn’t care about the money. Or the house. And being here… It’s not hard because of Nathan. It’s hard because of me. My past. That isn’t his fault.”

Isn’t. Wasn’t. Tense got slippery at times like these. She remembered once hearing someone in the next room saying,“Did you notice she saiddidn’t? My parentsdidn’thave any enemies. Past tense, right away. She didn’t have to correct herself.”

As if that meant anything.

Mehta sat back in her chair. Her finger tapped against the table,and Emma’s eyes fixed on it. Her father used to do that.Tap, tap, tap. Like a metronome; like a timer, ticking down.

Mehta sat forward, squared up. Next would come the blunt statement made into a question, meant to take Emma off guard and provoke a reaction.

“Were you aware that Nathan was having an affair?”

She had expected the question. But still, she almost laughed.

Did she know her husband was having an affair? Of course she did. It was a miracle that it had taken her as long as it did to find out. She had known he was feeling guilty about something—easy to read even when he was trying not to be—but she hadn’t pried. She couldn’t see what good there could possibly be in knowing the answer.

It was the stupid shared calendar that had done it. He was always on her to put things on it, and she was always telling him that she didn’t reallyhavethings to put on the calendar. Her anemic social life had cratered after her accident, and she hadn’t attempted to resuscitate it. Anytime she had appointments and things, she handled them during the day when he was at work, so she didn’t see why he needed to keep track of them, but she’d dutifully logged in once a week to add things in, sometimes putting in random work deadlines just so that she would havesomethingto add.

One Monday, there it was: a woman’s name and the name of a hotel. Her chronically organized husband had put his romantic rendezvous on the wrong calendar.

And, of course, he’d never disabled his phone tracking. She’d glanced at it once at the time listed on the calendar to confirm where he was. She’d already met Addison—a somewhat severe-looking woman with bright green eyes and aggressively bleached hair who had been awkward the one time Emma had dropped by the office.

Nathan used to sit Emma down to do what he called a “trust audit.” Every corner of their lives an open book to each other. It had started when they first got serious. He would have her log into all of her accounts, and he would hand over his computer for her to do the same—check through private messages and emails, even pull up the call logs on the online portal for their phone plan. He insisted it was a demonstration of how much they trusted each other, how they had nothing to hide. She would page through his Facebook and click a few random emails to satisfy him, but she never understood his reasoning. If they trusted each other, they shouldn’t have to look.

Inevitably, he would find something that made him, in his words, a little uncomfortable. A too-familiar sign-off, an after-hours chat with a work contact about something not work related. He would trot out phrases about professionalism and respect for your partner. She would apologize—and beg off girls’ night with the friends who he felt were a bad influence, cancel the coffee date with the male colleague Nathan found too forward. Then the whole thing would repeat a few months later.

Of course, hehadbeen hiding things. And that day she had done what she hated, snooping through Nathan’s emails and accounts. He had been a little careful, at least. He used a dummy email account, but he’d saved the credentials on the browser.

The emails and phone calls went back months. She didn’t look beyond that. She didn’t want to know how long it had been going on.

She supposed she must have felt numb, but that seemed like too restrained a term for it. She had felt more like she had ceded control of her body completely, handing it over to an operator with no investment in the situation. She forwarded emails to herself, erased the evidence of having done so, and put Nathan’s computer back, all without having what she could identify as a genuine emotion.

She went upstairs. She sat on the end of the bed. She felt like she was pressing her ear to a wall, listening to muffled sounds on the other side. Only it wasn’t the murmur of a conversation but the hideous thrashing of her own emotions. If the wall crumbled even a little bit, there would be nothing to stop the agony.

And what good would it do?

He would leave, or he wouldn’t. He would love this other woman,or he wouldn’t. If she confronted him, it would be a fight. It would be recrimination and sorrow and tears and screaming.

Or she could wait. And when he left her—if he left her—she wouldn’t be surprised. She would have her things in order.

Or he would stay, and wouldn’t it be better then, too, that she hadn’t said anything? Because they could go on as they were, and she could keep it quiet, this horrible thing she knew.

She had so much practice, after all.

So she had waited. She had never checked his secret email account again, or tracked his movements on the phone. She had convinced herself that she was doing what she had to do.

Beside Emma, Chris shifted. He hadn’t said a word yet. They’d gone over this. They had decided on what to say. It didn’t make it easier. “Yes, I was aware of that,” she said.

“Really.” Mehta raised an eyebrow. She might have been expecting shock or a false denial; she seemed taken aback not to get either.

Chris was talking. Taking over. Explaining that she’d been aware of the affair, and how long, everything that she’d told him. She let him drone on, staring at the tabletop.

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