My blood went cold.
I knew that voice. I’d heard it an hour earlier through the wall of a hotel room.
Chloe.
I pulled the door the rest of the way open.
She wasn’t wearing the big confident smile I remembered from the Christmas party. Her mascara was smeared down both cheeks. Her auburn hair was soaking wet. It had started raining on my drive home, and she wasn’t wearing a coat.
In her hand was a thick brown envelope.
She looked past me into the house.
“Is Brad here?”
“No,” I said.
She swallowed hard.
“Then we need to talk.”
I stepped aside. I don’t know why. I should have slammed the door in her face.
She came in without another word.
We stood in my kitchen. Neither of us spoke for several seconds. The rain was drumming on the window over the sink.
Then her eyes landed on the BEST HUSBAND mug sitting beside the sink.
“Did he drink it?” she said.
I went stiff.
“What?”
“The coffee,” Chloe said. “This morning. Did he drink it?”
My stomach tightened.
“How do you know about the coffee?”
Chloe looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
It took me a second to figure out what it was.
Fear.
Not guilt.
Fear.
“He texted me this morning,” she said. “At seven-twenty. From the car. He said the coffee smelled wrong. He said he didn’t drink it.” She looked at the mug. “He’s been scared that someone’s putting something in his food. In his drinks. For weeks.”
“Who?”
She didn’t answer that.
“I told him,” she whispered. “I already did what he asked me to do. Everything.”
“What did he ask you to do?”
She set the brown envelope down on my kitchen table.
“He asked me to help him leave you,” she said.
The words hit me harder than I expected. Even after the hotel. Even after hearing it through the wall.
I laughed once.
Not because anything was funny. Because sometimes your body doesn’t know what else to do with pain.
“Leave me,” I said.
“He said you’d want a divorce,” Chloe said. “Once he told you. He said he was going to tell you today.”
Today.
The word echoed in my head.
The hotel. The cologne. The blue shirt.
Everything suddenly looked different.
“He wasn’t going to a meeting,” I said.
“No.”
“He was meeting you.”
“Yes.”
“And he was going to come home tonight and tell me he wanted a divorce.”
Chloe looked at me for a long moment.
“That’s what I thought he meant,” she said slowly. “At first.”
Then she whispered, “But that’s not why I came here.”
I looked down at the envelope on the table.
“What is that?”
She didn’t answer right away.
Instead, she said, “Have you ever seen your husband’s medical records?”
A chill crawled up my arms.
“No.”
“Then you should.”
She pushed the envelope across the table toward me.
My fingers were shaking as I opened it.
The first page was a medical report from Brookside Neurology Clinic.
Brad’s name was at the top. Bradley Thomas Hale. DOB 03/14/1982.
The date was April thirteenth. Six months ago. The morning after he came home with the cut on his forehead.
I read the first few lines.
Patient presents following motor vehicle collision. Loss of consciousness at scene, approximately four minutes. Diagnosis: moderate traumatic brain injury with post-concussive syndrome. Anterograde and retrograde memory deficits noted.
I stopped reading.
I read it again.
I couldn’t understand what I was looking at.
“What is this?” I said.
Chloe sat down across from me at the kitchen table.
“Brad’s been seeing a specialist,” she said. “Dr. Abernathy at Brookside. For six months. Every other Thursday.”
“For what?”
She looked at me.
“Memory loss,” she said.
I stared at her.
“No.”
“He’s been forgetting things, Emily.”
“Everyone forgets things.”
“Not like this.”
She reached into her purse and pulled out another sheet of paper. A list, written in her own neat handwriting.
“He forgot your anniversary in May,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“He forgot where he parked his car three times in August. I had to come get him once.”
My mouth went dry.
“He forgot a meeting with the Hendersons and told them he got stuck in traffic.” She slid another page across. “He forgot he’d already fired Eric.”
