Chapter 3

I came home from work late one Tuesday. The house was quiet, the dining table set for two, but Mark's chair was empty. I had made his favorite, osso buco.

"Did Mr. Johnson call?" I asked Maria, our housekeeper.

She wrung her hands. "Yes, Mrs. Miller. He said he was caught up in a meeting and not to wait up for him."

The excuse was plausible, but it felt thin. I ate alone, the rich food tasting like ash in my mouth. I couldn't sleep. I sat in the dark of our living room, the hours ticking by on the grandfather clock in the hall.

He came home just after 2 a.m.

I smelled it before I saw her. A sweet, cloying perfume, a gardenia scent I didn't own. It clung to his suit jacket like a second skin.

He stumbled slightly as he came through the door, and I heard a woman's soft giggle from the driveway.

"Be careful, Mark," a voice whispered from the darkness outside. It was a voice I hadn't heard in eight years. Emily Carter.

"You never deleted my fingerprint from the lock, did you?" she added, her voice a playful tease that cut through the night air and straight into my heart.

The front door clicked shut, leaving me in the dark with the ghost of her voice and the scent of her perfume. He hadn't seen me sitting there. He moved through the hall and up the stairs, his steps heavy.

My world, the stable, carefully constructed world I had spent eight years building, fractured. It wasn't just the perfume or the late hour. It was the fingerprint. It meant this wasn't a new betrayal. It was an old one, resurrected.

I heard him get ready for bed, the familiar sounds now alien and menacing. A few minutes later, his phone buzzed on the nightstand. I heard him murmur something.

"I know, I know. I told her I had a meeting." A pause. "Yes, of course I'll have the guest room ready for you tomorrow. I told Sarah my cousin was visiting."

He was arranging for his ex-girlfriend, his old flame, to stay in our house. Under my roof. He was lying to me, easily and without hesitation.

I sat there in the dark, motionless, as the pieces of his deception fell into place. The late nights, the vague meetings, the sudden "business trips." It was all a lie.

The foundation of our marriage, of my entire life for the past eight years, turned to dust.