Now I Watch Her Love Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wipe
Hannah finds a stranger's makeup wipe in Dylan's car, tucks it back and is warm to his mistress all night; at home he finds a card in her handwriting naming the hotel and the day.
My wife pulled a used makeup wipe out of the gap beside the passenger seat of my Mercedes.
We were parked outside my father's club, and his birthday guests were walking past the windshield.
Hannah held the wipe up between two fingers.
It was folded in half, with a smear of foundation across it that was not her shade.
"Dylan, there's trash in your car," she said.
My mouth opened.
Nothing came out of it.
Bailey Corrigan had sat in that seat three days earlier, and I had told her to check it before she got out.
Hannah looked at the wipe a moment longer.
Then she pushed it back into the gap, exactly where it had been.
"You can throw that out yourself," she said. "It's your car."
She flipped down the visor and fixed her lipstick with her right hand, the one that wore her wedding ring.
She had moved the ring there the March before last.
I had decided her fingers were swollen.
"Did you remember my father's card?" she asked.
"It's in my jacket."
My voice came out normal, and that scared me more than the wipe did.
I had been sleeping with Bailey for twenty-two months.
She ran marketing at Thorsby Motors, the dealership my father owned and I managed, and she was good at everything, including not getting caught.
So I said nothing.
Hannah had said nothing either, and I took that as permission.
Thirty people sat at the long table in the Garden Room, mostly salesmen and their wives.
Bailey met us at the door with a clipboard and a navy dress.
"Hannah!" she said, and hugged her. "I put you by the window. You hate sitting near the kitchen."
"I do," Hannah said. "How did you know?"
"You told me at the Christmas party."
"Did I? You're the only one who listens to me."
Bailey laughed and squeezed her arm, and Hannah squeezed back.
I stood there holding a gift bag and sweating through my shirt.
At the table my phone buzzed beside my plate.
The screen lit up with a message from Bailey: She's looking at me. Is she mad?
Hannah reached across without looking at it.
She turned the phone face down with one finger and slid it an inch toward me.
"Eat," she said. "You skipped lunch."
She smiled at me and kept her hand flat on the tablecloth until I picked up my fork.
My father, Russell Thorsby, stood for his toast in the middle of the salad.
"Sixty-three years old," he said. "Forty of them selling cars. To family, and to my son and his wife, who have put up with me for eight years."
Everyone drank.
Hannah lifted her glass toward the far end of the table.
"And to Bailey," she said, "who actually runs the place."
The whole table laughed and cheered.
Bailey waved her off, red to the ears, and mouthed, "Stop."
I looked at my wife and could not find anything in her face.
Not anger, not a flinch.
She looked back at me kindly, and from a long way off.
I drove us home in the dark with the wipe sitting in the gap between our seats.
Neither of us mentioned it.
At the front door Hannah patted her coat pockets.
"I left my bag in your car," she said. "I'll get it."
She went down to the garage in her heels.
She was gone about four minutes.
When she came back up she had her bag on her shoulder, and she said goodnight in the hallway.
Then she went into the studio, which used to be the nursery, and I heard the lock turn.
I lay awake until one in the morning.
At one I went down to the garage in my socks.
I wanted to throw the wipe away before she thought of it again.
I opened the passenger door and put my hand into the gap.
The wipe was gone.
In its place was an index card, folded once, in my wife's neat blue handwriting.
Tuesdays at the Residence Inn on Dorothy Lane.
Thursdays in her car behind the Rosemont.
Don't text me that you're sorry.
Come to breakfast at seven and tell me yourself.
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