I stopped at a bakery downtown and bought the cinnamon pastries he pretended not to love. On the drive home, I imagined finding him asleep in his office with a spreadsheet open beside him.
I pictured him smiling when he saw me.
I pictured us opening a bottle of wine.
I pictured many things.
None of them included hearing a woman laugh inside my bedroom.
I entered the house through the side door.
Grant’s car was in the garage.
Tessa’s red convertible was parked two streets away, partially hidden beneath a row of trees.
I did not notice it until later.
At first, I thought Grant was speaking to someone on the phone.
Then the woman laughed again.
I knew that laugh.
Tessa used it whenever she wanted a room to notice her.
She had married my brother, Mason, four years earlier in a lavish ceremony at our family’s lakefront estate. I had stood beside her in a pale blue bridesmaid dress while she promised to love him through every triumph and every hardship.
Now she was upstairs with my husband.
I climbed the staircase without making a sound.
The bedroom door was open several inches.
Through the narrow space, I saw Grant sitting against our headboard.
Tessa was beside him, wearing one of my robes.
My cream silk robe.
The one Grant had bought me in Paris.
His hand rested on her thigh.
She was holding a glass from the crystal set my grandmother had left me.
They looked comfortable.
Not nervous.
Not ashamed.
Comfortable.
That was the detail that broke something inside me.
This was not their first time.
They had routines.
They had private jokes.
They had already learned how to move around my home as though I were the intruder.
My fingers closed around the bedroom door.
