I made his favorite breakfast the morning after Christmas. Eggs over easy, sourdough toast, the good coffee from the French press he'd picked out two Christmases ago. I set it on the table and called his name with the right amount of warmth in my voice. Not too much. Just enough.
He came downstairs looking like a man who'd slept well. That told me everything.
'You didn't have to do this,' he said, sitting down, picking up his fork.
'I wanted to.' I smiled and poured his coffee. 'How'd you sleep?'
'Good.' He glanced at his phone before he even took a sip. 'Really good.'
I sat across from him and watched him eat and said nothing about that.
This was the game now. I understood the rules better than he did.
For the next week I was perfect. I asked about his meetings. I laughed at his jokes. I let him kiss my forehead when he came home late—and he was coming home later now, the excuses getting thinner, more recycled. A client dinner. A call that ran long. Traffic, which in Manhattan after nine PM is almost never the real reason.
I nodded at all of it. I touched his arm. I said, 'Of course, don't worry about it.'
And then I went to my desk and opened the encrypted file and I wrote everything down. Time he left. Time he came home. Which pocket his phone was in. Whether he'd showered before dinner. The faint trace of something floral that wasn't my perfume.
I was building a timeline. Brick by brick, quiet and patient, in the hours before dawn when the apartment was still and Eiden was sleeping and the city outside was the only witness.
One evening I found his phone face-up on the kitchen counter while he was in the shower. He'd left it unlocked. I didn't touch it. I photographed the screen from a distance—a message thread, her name, the tail end of something that made my stomach drop—and then I put my phone back in my pocket and finished chopping the vegetables for dinner.
When he came downstairs, I handed him a glass of wine and asked about his day.
'Same old,' he said.
'Mm.' I turned back to the stove. 'Dinner's almost ready.'
The night it happened, I'd almost expected it. He reached for me in the dark the way he used to—or a version of the way he used to, close enough to pass if you weren't paying attention. And I was always paying attention now.
I let him.
Not because I wanted to. Because I needed to know what I was capable of. Whether I could hold the wall up that close. Whether the grief would crack through and ruin everything I was building.
It didn't.
Afterward he lay beside me with that particular stillness of a man who believes he has escaped something. His breathing slowed. His shoulders settled. I stared at the ceiling and felt nothing except a cold, clarifying certainty.
I turned my head toward him in the dark.
'You felt incredible tonight,' I said. Soft. Almost tender. 'Better than Raquel?'
The silence lasted exactly one second.
Then I watched the color leave his face. I watched his mouth open and close. I watched him become, in real time, a man who does not know which version of himself to reach for.
'Vienna—' He sat up. 'That's not—I don't know what you think—'
'Goodnight, Colson.' I rolled over and closed my eyes.
He didn't sleep. I could feel it. He lay there rigid and calculating for a long time, trying to figure out what I knew and how much. Eventually he got up and went to the bathroom and I heard him on his phone, voice low, the shower running as cover.
I lay still and let him think he was being careful.
I'd found the PI firm through a lawyer I trusted—not Catherine yet, that would come later. The firm was in Brooklyn, small, no website, the kind of operation that exists entirely on referrals from people who need things done without noise. I met the lead investigator in a coffee shop in Carroll Gardens on a Tuesday morning while Colson thought I was at a postnatal checkup.
I gave her two weeks. She gave me back a dossier that I read at 5:47 AM, alone at my desk, Eiden still asleep down the hall.
Six months of hotel receipts. Company card. The same three properties rotating.
Jewelry. A weekend in the Hamptons. A bag I recognized from a photo Raquel had posted in October—I'd seen it and thought nothing of it at the time.
And then the wire transfers. $4.7 million. A shell company. Registered under Raquel's cousin's name.
I set the report down. Picked up my coffee. Drank it.
Then I called the PI back.
'Keep going,' I said. 'I need every thread before I pull.'
I touched my mother's bracelet. Outside, the city was just starting to wake up. Gray winter light pressing against the glass.
I opened the encrypted file and kept writing.
