Betrayal Behind the Wheel novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Two Phones

Myra and Gavin compare the motel lot, the phone records and the lies, and agree to say nothing for two days; Myra says Colby told her he cannot have children.

We left through the side gate so nobody would see us leave together.

Myra drove, because she said I was holding my keys like a weapon.

She took me to an all-night diner off the interstate with a cracked neon sign and sticky menus.

A waitress with a pencil behind her ear poured two coffees without asking.

We took the back booth, the one under the broken clock.

Myra wrapped both hands around her mug and did not drink.

"Four months," she said.

"I started checking his phone four months ago."

"Why?"

"He started showering the second he got home."

She tried to laugh, and it came out thin.

"I'm a nurse. I notice when someone washes off something."

"You found the motel."

"I found a lot of things. The motel was the only one with a pin on a map."

She pushed her phone across the table.

The screen showed three weeks of blue dots, all of them stopping in the same four places.

His office, our house, her house, and the Harlan Motor Inn.

"Her house," I said.

"Marissa has never lived anywhere but with you."

"A house on Linden Street. The electric has been in her name since March."

I had never seen that bill.

I paid for the house, the cars and the card, and I had never once looked at her statements.

I took the memory card out of my pocket and set it on the sticky table between our cups.

"What's that?"

"Monday night."

Myra looked at it for a long time.

Then she took the card and slid it into a reader from her purse.

She plugged it into her phone and turned the screen so we could both see.

I did not want to watch it again.

I watched it again.

She did not make a sound while it played.

When Marissa kissed him, Myra pressed her fingers against her lips and held them there.

When the dome light came on and lit his face, she shut her eyes.

When it got to the chin, she set the phone down very gently.

"It's Colby," she said.

"I know."

"I knew. I knew it was him. I think I wanted it to be a stranger."

She turned her face toward the window, and her shoulders moved once.

The waitress came and went without looking at us.

I wanted to say something clever, and I had nothing.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be. You didn't do it."

"I let it happen in my house for seven years."

"You didn't know."

"That's what everybody will say about me."

She turned back and studied my face.

"Gavin. Did you know?"

"No."

"Not even a little?"

"I sat in the front row of a dinosaur recital while it happened."

She let out a short wet laugh, then covered her mouth.

"Sorry."

"It's a little funny."

"It's not."

"It's a little funny," she said. "A tin dinosaur."

We both sat there with our terrible coffee, laughing the way you do at funerals.

When it passed, she wiped her eyes with a napkin.

"What do we do?" she asked.

It was the first time anyone had said we.

I thought about the living room, forty faces and a toast.

"We don't do anything yet."

"Gavin."

"If I walk in tomorrow and hold this up, Marissa cries and Colby says it was one time and Selma calls it a family misunderstanding."

She frowned.

"Why Selma?"

"Because she's my mother and she controls everything, and she'll decide what is true before I finish talking."

I turned the card over.

"I want to know exactly what I'm dealing with first."

"Meaning what?"

I said the thing I had not let myself say in the car.

"The clip has one word that bothers me. He said, Mother will be so pleased."

Myra went still.

"Whose mother?"

"I don't know. His. Hers."

"Marissa's mother has been dead since before you met."

We looked at each other.

"I need forty-eight hours," I said. "Before either of us says a word to either of them."

"And you'll tell me what you find."

"Everything."

"Then I'll keep my face straight," Myra said. "I'm an excellent liar at work. I tell people they're going to be fine."

She picked up her phone again and scrolled to the family photos.

She had taken one at the Fourth of July picnic, and it showed all of us on the lawn.

Colby, Marissa, me with my arm around Milly's shoulder.

Milly had her chin tipped up, laughing at the sun.

Myra stared at the picture and her whole face changed.

"Gavin."

"What?"

"Look at her chin."

I looked, and I had looked at that chin a thousand times.

I had kissed it.

I had wiped chocolate off it.

It was small and square, with a tiny dent in the middle.

Myra zoomed in until the dent filled the screen.

Then she opened the photo of her husband, taken the same day, and set the two side by side.

They were the same dent.

Her voice was very quiet.

"He told me he can't have children."

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