Then I returned home.
Grant arrived that afternoon carrying his laptop bag and wearing the same suit he had worn in my bed.
“How was Boston?” he asked.
“My flight was delayed.”
He kissed my forehead.
“You should rest. You look exhausted.”
I smiled.
“So do you.”
For the next forty-eight hours, I behaved exactly as he expected.
I asked about Bellhaven.
He described a hotel he had never visited.
I asked about the contract.
He invented a disagreement with city officials.
I cooked dinner while he sent messages beneath the table.
That night, while Grant showered, I searched the leather case he carried on business trips.
I found a second phone hidden beneath a false lining.
There were photographs of him and Tessa at hotels, restaurants and rental properties stretching back almost a year.
There were messages about money.
There were references to “the transition.”
There were jokes about me.
Grant had written:
Camille still thinks the treatments are the reason she’s too drained to return.
Tessa had replied:
By the time she wakes up, you’ll control the company and I’ll control Mason.
I read those words three times.
Then I found wire-transfer confirmations connected to accounts I did not recognize.
The amounts were enormous.
Grant returned from the shower, and I barely had time to place everything back.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“Headache.”
He gave me an expression of practiced sympathy.
“You push yourself too hard.”
That night, anger made me do something reckless.
Something I would later regret.
In Grant’s private bathroom cabinet, he kept a personal product he carried whenever he planned to meet Tessa. I replaced it with a sealed tube containing an industrial bonding compound taken from a locked workshop on our property.
I told myself no one would be permanently harmed.
I told myself the humiliation would force their secret into the open.
I told myself I deserved one moment in which they experienced a fraction of the pain they had caused.
Those were excuses.
What I did was dangerous.
When the hospital called three nights later, I understood how close anger had brought me to becoming someone I did not recognize.
But the call had also given me an opportunity.
Their affair was no longer hidden.
And I was not going to waste the moment by arriving at the hospital as a devastated wife.
I dressed in a charcoal suit, pulled my hair into a tight knot and placed Dana’s preliminary evidence inside a black leather folder.
By the time I reached Mercy St. Catherine, the surgical team had isolated Grant and Tessa behind a privacy curtain.
A nurse led me through the emergency wing.
