I built a lookout room so I could watch my husband come home. On opening night, I found him screwing with another woman in it. novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Back Door

Boone begs at the kitchen door and Dani moves her tools to her father's shop; at four in the morning her camera shows Hoyt and Boone hauling a locked box from the clubhouse.

Boone was on our porch at six in the morning with his boots in his hand.

I had not slept.

I stood behind the screen door in my work jeans, with two duffel bags already packed at my feet.

"Dani, let me in," he said. "Please. Just talk to me."

"You've had seven months."

He winced, and I let him see that it landed.

His cut was gone, and his shirt was buttoned wrong.

"It was one time," he said. "Hoyt kept pushing the party, and I had too much, and Lacey was there."

"Lacey was in my chair, Boone."

"I know."

"She was in the chair I picked out of a Boise flea market with a lamp I wired myself."

He rubbed his face with both hands.

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to say how long."

He went quiet.

Behind him, on the road, a pickup slowed and then drove on.

Somebody was watching my porch already.

"Three months," he said at last, to his boots.

I nodded.

Lacey had sworn last night that he told her we were finished, so one of them was lying, or both.

I did not ask which.

I picked up my bags and opened the screen door, and he stepped back off the porch.

"Where are you going?"

"Out."

"This is your house."

"It's in both our names, so you can sleep in it," I said. "I'm taking my tools."

My father's tool chest was in the hall closet, with his name burned into the lid.

Boone carried it to my truck without being asked, because that is the kind of man he was in daylight.

He set it in the bed and stood there with his hands open.

"Hoyt wants you at Sunday dinner tonight," he said. "He says it needs to be said in front of the family. Come, say your piece, and it's over."

"Over how?"

"I don't know. He said he'd handle it."

I got in the truck.

"Dani."

I started the engine.

"Dani, I love you."

I rolled the window down two inches.

"Then you'd have said it to the door, Boone," I said. "Not to the road."

I left him standing there.

My father's shop sits on Route 9, nine miles out of Cutbank, on a lot Boone had always called my hobby.

It has a roll-up door, a drill press and a back room with a cot and a hot plate where my father slept through two winters when money ran thin.

I pulled in and sat with the engine off.

Then I cried, hard, with my forehead on the steering wheel.

When it was done, I went in and swept the floor.

I changed the lock on the roll-up door myself, because there was nothing else I could change.

At noon Lacey texted me.

I didn't know he was still married to you, I swear. He told me you left in March.

I read it standing at my father's bench.

Three weeks of her string lights and her smile, and she had known my name on the day she was hired.

Nobody in that club had ever been a stranger to me.

I blocked her number.

Then I went through every camera feed on my phone, one at a time, out of habit.

I had wired the whole clubhouse myself, with six cameras, and Hoyt had told me to leave the system in the club's office.

I had set up the back-lot camera to record to my own account first, because my father taught me never to hand over the only copy of anything.

Hoyt had never asked about that, and I had never said.

At four that afternoon, nothing on the feed looked wrong.

I turned the phone face down and ate a sandwich standing up.

At nine that night, after a long, bad day of not going to Sunday dinner, I picked my phone up again.

There was a motion alert from the back lot.

It was a clip from four that morning, sent hours late because the shop's signal was bad.

I pressed play.

The lot was dark and gray.

A pickup backed to the rear door, and two men climbed out.

One of them was Boone.

The other one, with his gray ponytail, was Hoyt.

They went in, and a minute later they came out carrying a steel file box between them, with a padlock on it.

They put it in the truck bed under a tarp.

Hoyt said something, and Boone nodded.

Then Hoyt looked straight up at the camera I had put over the door.

He looked at it for a long moment.

He lifted one finger, slowly, and tapped his temple.

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