Chapter 12: Margot's POV

Margot's POV

I drove to Twelfth Street with my coat on over my dinner dress and an envelope on the passenger seat.

The lobby clerk let me up without a word, which told me everything about the camera.

I stood at Nathan's door for a long time.

"Go away, Margot," he said, through the wood.

His voice was level, and that was worse.

I had been standing there rehearsing, and every version began in the wrong place.

It began in March, over a plate of eggs.

Nigel's phone had lit up on our kitchen table in Chicago while he was in the shower.

The message said: Miss you already. Seattle Thursday? D.

Under it was a photo of a woman's hand on a man's knee, in a sales office.

I recognized the watch on his wrist.

I had given it to him on our first anniversary.

I did not scream or throw anything.

I read the thread from the top, standing up.

Then I called a lawyer and filed the papers on a Tuesday.

Nigel cried when the process server came.

He said Justine was nothing, a courtesy to the Seattle office.

I let him keep coming to the house on his Chicago weekends.

I did not forgive him, and I started watching.

That was how I found the deck.

He sent it to Tornquist through a front office, hoping his wife wouldn't be the one to open it.

I opened it.

The unit plans in it were the best small work I'd seen in ten years.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Home She Built With Someone Else from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.