My Husband's Secret in the Tent, He Had Another Fiancée There novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Mosquitoes

Back home Waylon blames a hickey on mosquitoes, and when she hands him divorce papers he calls his mother, who is not surprised.

I did not sleep, and I recorded until my phone said it had one percent left.

Before the sun came up I crawled out of Tent 4 and walked fast toward the parking lot.

The girl from the next tent was already at the gate with a thermos.

"Girl, I'm in Tent 6 and I still heard everything," she said. "Are you going home to do the same thing to your man?"

I looked at her and did not answer.

She scratched her head, puzzled, and let me through.

I drove two hours with the radio off and the sandwiches still in the cooler on the back seat.

At home I took every wedding photo off the walls.

There were eleven of them.

I broke the frames over the edge of the kitchen counter and dropped the glass and the pictures into the trash.

Then I sat at the table with my laptop and filled out the county divorce forms, one box at a time, until they were done.

I printed them at the library on my lunch break, because I did not want them to touch our printer.

Waylon came home the next afternoon.

He walked in whistling, with a duffel on his shoulder.

There was a dark mark on the side of his neck, and his collar had not quite covered it.

He saw me looking.

For half a second his face went blank. Then he smiled.

"Mosquitoes," he said. "They were insane out there. They ate me alive last night."

"Uh-huh," I said.

Six years ago I would have believed that.

A month ago I would have gotten the cream out of the cabinet.

He frowned. "What? You don't believe me?"

I watched his face for any small crack.

There was none. He was smooth, and I realized he had always been smooth.

I had believed him over and over, and that was the part I could not forgive myself for.

His phone lit up on the table with a message from a contact saved as "Trail Buddy."

It said: Miss you already. Eat something, you forget when I'm not there.

He turned the phone face down before I could finish reading, but I had finished.

I wondered how long he had kept her under a nickname, and how many times I had watched him smile at that screen and thought he was reading work email.

I took the envelope out from under the placemat and slid it across the table.

"Sign it," I said. "We split everything fifty-fifty, and it's done."

He did not touch it.

"A divorce?" he said. "Where is this coming from? You're doing this over something you imagined?"

His face changed, and he reached across the table and took my arm.

"Wait," he said, and he smiled again. "Are you mad that I wasn't home today? Is that it?"

"Babe, come on. Tomorrow I'll make it up to you. Anything you want."

I pulled my arm out of his hand.

"Sign it," I said.

His eyes went red around the rims, and I watched him decide something.

"Mom and Dad are going to lose it if they hear about this," he said. "You want to put them through that?"

Mom and Dad.

They had thought he was the best man alive for as long as I had known them.

I wondered how much of the perfect husband had been real, and how much of it he had built for them to admire.

I slapped the papers down on the table.

"I don't care who you call," I said. "Sign."

The tears he had started to build went away, and what looked back at me was angry.

"Fine," he said.

He took out his phone and put it on the table between us.

He pressed his mother's name and put her on speaker.

"Mom," he said. "Samantha wants a divorce. She just handed me papers."

I waited for the gasp.

I waited for the shocked silence, the "what are you saying, honey?"

Diane Casto let the line hum for a moment.

Then she said, in the same calm voice she used to ask me to pass the salt:

"Put her on."

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