My Power Showed Me His Cheating An Hour Earlier novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: When You Know

I didn't tell him that night.

I said, "Okay," and fished his tie out of the lasagna, and he drove me back to Maggie's without the radio on.

Then I didn't touch him for four days.

Not his hand. Not his sleeve. Not his fingers when he passed me a clipboard.

He noticed. He notices everything.

He didn't say a word about it.

On Thursday we did a wedding at a boathouse on Kelly Drive. I set two hundred white roses, and he ran the whole day from the dock with his earpiece in.

At the end of the night the bride hugged me and cried on my shoulder.

Her hour ago was her new husband in a coat closet, telling her she was the bravest person he'd ever met.

I let go of her smiling.

Wells was coiling cable on the dock.

I stood next to him and didn't touch him.

"You're doing it on purpose," he said, without looking up.

"Doing what?"

"Walking around me like I'm a wet floor."

"I'm finding something out."

"Without the thing."

"Without the thing," I said.

He nodded once and went back to his cable.

On the Fourth of July, Maggie made me come to Wells's roof.

He lived on the top floor of a brick row house on Thompson Street. You got to the roof up a ladder and through a hatch, and Maggie went up it with a cooler on her shoulder.

The roof was flat and tarred, with the whole city spread out to the south.

Wells had hung white string lights along the chimney. He'd carried up four lawn chairs, a card table and a bucket of ice.

There was a little jar of white ranunculus on the card table.

The big Italian kind. The mistake-shipment kind.

"You bought more," I said.

"Mags bought them."

"I did not," Maggie said. "Eat a hot dog."

The kids ran in circles until the first fireworks went up over the river, and then they lay on a blanket and screamed at every single one.

By ten, the youngest was asleep on Maggie's chest.

Maggie stood up with her, very carefully.

"I'm going," she said. "The middle one's going to fall off this roof if I don't. Wells, help me with the ladder."

He took the sleeping kid down the ladder.

Then he came back up.

The hatch banged shut behind him.

Just us now, and the string lights, and the last fireworks breaking green and gold over the Ben Franklin Bridge.

I was standing at the low wall at the edge.

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