in the glow of his phone, a smug smile across his handsome features as he continued to type rapidly, a bottle of whiskey on the side table.
Tess blinked back tears as she turned away, burying herself in her book, forcing the questions down for another day.
Chapter 2
He looked so happy in the photo. Tess sat, staring numbly at the computer screen in front of her where Gabe’s Facebook Messenger sat wide open, the picture of her husband – naked in bed, his arms wrapped around a woman too young to know the difference between lust and love – searing into her retinas. Tess knew that look on his face – she’d seen it time and again after he’d satisfied himself with her body – a smile playing on his lips while she waited for him to come back from the bathroom with a tissue, stuck in the universally awkward situation that lovers often find themselves in.
Tess’s hands trembled as she opened another browser window and slowly typed in the web address of their bank. The accounts popped onto the screen – at least the accounts they shared – and the tightness that had banded her chest eased a bit as she saw that all looked to be normal. The money in the shared account was mainly hers, as it had now been several months since Gabe had quit his job and embarked on a steady regimen of going to the gym twice a day and drinking too much.
Tess hesitated, her eyes flashing back to the picture on the screen in front of her, taking in the smug satisfaction on Gabe’s handsome face, before calmly emptying their shared bank account and moving all the money to hers. She waited, taking one shuddering breath after another, to see if something would happen – anything – but only a blast of wind at the window and a silent house answered. What did she think would happen? Her phone would explode with angry texts or sirens would go off? It wasn’t like she was doing anything illegal. Or immoral.
Her mind flashed to just days before, when she’d lain awake, watching the light from Gabe’s phone blink, flashing repeatedly across the ceiling, incessantly pounding its message into Tess’s brain. Gabe slept on, not a care in the world, while the blinking light refused to be ignored, his phone all but screaming at Tess.
Wake up, you fucking moron.
She’d slid from the covers, the air cool on her clammy skin, and padded around the bed. Tess had hesitated as she stood over Gabe, watching him sleep so peacefully, and wondered again if she was being paranoid. Perhaps she’d been imagining his distance from her lately. Her hand had hovered over the phone for a moment before she’d made up her mind and snatched it from the table. Racing around the bed, Tess had caught her toe on a nightstand as she headed for the bathroom, and unable to control the curse that shot from her mouth, she’d hobbled her way to the bathroom door.
But not in time.
Gabe had been on her in seconds, slamming her into the tiled wall of the bathroom as carelessly as if she were one of his sagging intramural football buddies, wrenching the phone from her hand before she’d had time to recover from the pain that still ratcheted up her leg from her stubbed toe. The crack of her head against the cold tile of the wall echoed the crack in her heart and she watched, astounded, as tears filled Gabe’s eyes. He was crying?
“Oh, baby. Stop this. You know I don’t want you on my phone. We’ve promised to trust each other. Don’t do this.”
He’d gone back to bed then, never asking her if she was okay, his phone tucked beneath his pillow. Asleep in moments, Gabe had acted like nothing had happened the next day.
Now Tess stared at the computer screen, her brain working in overdrive as she tried to process all the ways their lives were intertwined. Opening another browser, she systematically began to change the passwords to all her business accounts, a little zing of power zipping through her at each change she made. Her business email accounts. Zing! Her business vendors. Zing! Her business shared folders. Zing! Her mobile accounts. At that one, Tess paused. Curious, she clicked on Gabe’s phone statement. It didn’t take long to figure out the number that had been lighting up his line for so many months. Methodically, Tess screenshotted the number,