She Sent Me Nudes of My Husband novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Seventh Anniversary
A photo of her husband's ringed hand on another woman's hip reaches Leah at the anniversary dinner, and by dawn she has mailed it to all 112 guests.
On our seventh anniversary, the whole restaurant watched me wait for my husband.
Our table was the one by the window, set for two.
My husband's napkin was still folded in its little swan.
His mother had sat down across from me at half past seven.
"I was at a dinner across the street, and I saw your table from the sidewalk," she said. "I just had a feeling."
She ordered me a second glass of red and sent the cake back to the kitchen to wait.
"He's closing a big deal tonight, sweetheart. My son has never missed an anniversary."
That was true. He had made all six.
Her name is Adele, and she had been kind to me for seven years.
Adele took a roll of stamps out of her purse and set it beside my bread plate.
"The cardinal ones. For your invitations."
The party was two Saturdays away. The cards were stacked on my dining table at home, a hundred and twelve of them, waiting for envelopes.
"Did you do page nine?" she asked. "The foundation people are all mine, and I wrote them out in my own hand. Humor me."
"I'll do every page," I said.
She squeezed my fingers. Her rings were cold.
At twenty to nine, my phone lit up on the tablecloth.
An unknown number. A photograph, and under it one line.
"Happy seventh. He's asleep, so I'm saying it for him."
The picture showed gray sheets and a bare hip.
A man's hand lay spread across it.
On the third finger was a gold band, hammered, with a nick in the rim.
Lukas dropped it off the dock at Lake Erie on our honeymoon. I fished it out with a minnow net while he laughed at me.
Mine was on my hand under the table.
I turned the screen over against the cloth.
Adele hadn't leaned in to look. She only waited, her glass halfway to her mouth.
"Who is it, dear?"
"Wrong number," I said.
"Then don't let a stranger spoil your night." She smiled. "Let me drive you home."
"No, thank you. I'm fine."
I asked the waiter for the check, and I paid it myself.
In the parking lot I sat behind the wheel and pulled the number up in my contacts.
It matched one I already had saved. Delaney Fisk (G's office).
Delaney was Lukas's assistant. She was twenty-seven.
When her father died last winter, I had packed four trays of food and driven them out to the Fisk farmhouse myself.
She had hugged me on the porch and said I was the only one at that company who had ever been kind to her.
I looked at the hand in the picture for a long time.
I did not call Lukas.
I did not call her.
At home, the invitation cards sat in their stack on the dining table.
Seven Years of Lukas and Leah. Saturday, November 7. Marlow Country Club, black tie.
A hundred and twelve guests.
His clients. His mother's hospital board. The pastor. The foundation people on page nine, in Adele's looping hand.
I set the phone down on the stack and said it out loud to the empty room.
"Fine. Let's have a party."
I texted the photo to myself so I would have it, and then I opened the printer app.
My home printer would have taken all night to print a hundred and twelve covers.
So I drove the cards out to the twenty-four-hour print shop on Route 9.
The night clerk was a college kid in a hoodie. He looked at my photo on the screen, and then he looked at me.
"Ma'am, you want this on the front of the invitations?"
"Every card," I said. "Full color, edge to edge."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
He ran them through the machine one at a time, and he did not say anything else.
By four in the morning I was at the dining table with a hundred and twelve glossy covers.
I addressed every envelope by hand.
I wrote out the clients and the pastor and the neighbors.
I wrote page nine in Adele's order, one name after another, thirty-one people I had never met.
Last of all I wrote Adele's own name, and I put her envelope on top of the pile.
I used her cardinal stamps. There were exactly enough.
The garage clock said ten to five when I put on my coat.
Lukas's side of the bed was still made.
The blue mailbox outside the post office on Main Street took them in three handfuls.
The sky was just going gray.
I stood there with my hand on the cold metal and said it to myself in one plain sentence.
I was done being the last to know.
My phone buzzed in my coat pocket.
It was the same number.
"Thank you."
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