Chapter 4: What He Tells Them
Her name was Diane.
She made tea without asking whether I wanted any, which I was grateful for, because I don't think I could have answered a question that ordinary.
She put the cup in front of me and sat back down and we stayed like that for a moment — two women at a kitchen table who had arrived at the same place by very different roads.
"How did you find out?" I asked.
"The first time."
"A woman called the house phone." She wrapped both hands around her own cup.
"Three years ago.
She'd been talking to him for five months.
She thought they were in love.
She'd sent him eight hundred dollars for a plane ticket to come and visit her."
"He took money from her."
"He always does.
Eventually." She looked at me.
"He starts with the companionship.
The photographs.
The daily messages.
He makes them feel seen.
Then, after a few months, there's a problem.
A medical bill, usually.
Or a car.
Something that sounds manageable.
Something a friend might help with."
I thought about every conversation we'd had.
Every morning.
Every evening.
The way he'd asked about my divorce, my daughter, my house.
The way I'd told him, because he'd asked so gently and listened so well.
"He never got that far with me," I said.
"No.
But he would have."
I believed her.
"What happened after the first woman called?"
Diane was quiet for a moment.
"I confronted him.
He cried.
He said it was nothing, that he'd been lonely, that it had never been physical, that he would stop." She turned the cup in her hands.
"I believed him.
We have a son.
Joel was fourteen.
I told myself it was a mistake and that we were going to move past it."
"And the second time?"
"I found the messages myself.
Eight months later.
A different woman, different name he was using, same pattern.
Same dead wife.
Same green mug in the photograph." Her mouth pressed into a thin line.
"He'd taken four hundred dollars from her by the time I found it."
"Did she know?
The second woman — did you tell her?"
"I called her.
She didn't believe me at first.
She thought I was the one lying." She said it without bitterness.
Just fact.
"It took her two weeks to accept it.
She never got her money back."
Upstairs, I could hear Joel moving around.
A door opening and closing.
The low sound of music through a ceiling.
"Why are you still here?" I asked.
I didn't mean it cruelly.
I genuinely wanted to understand.
Diane looked at me for a long moment.
"Because I have a seventeen-year-old son who has watched his father do this, and I am not going to be the thing that also disappears on him." She paused.
"And because I am building something.
Quietly.
Before I go."
I understood that.
The patience of it.
The particular exhaustion of a woman who has decided to be strategic rather than reactive.
"He doesn't know you know," I said.
"About the third time.
About me."
"No."
"And tonight—"
"Tonight I want him to walk through that door and see you sitting at his kitchen table." She met my eyes.
"I want to watch him explain it."
The clock on the wall moved to half past four.
"There's something else," Diane said.
She got up and went to the drawer beside the sink.
She came back with a phone — not her phone, an older one, the screen cracked across one corner.
She set it on the table between us.
"I found this in his car two weeks ago.
He doesn't know I have it."
I looked at the phone.
I didn't touch it.
"There are more women on there," she said.
"At least two I haven't been able to identify.
And there are amounts.
Transfers.
His own records, which is either very arrogant or very stupid."
I looked up at her.
"I've already spoken to a solicitor," she said.
May you like
"But I needed one more thing." She nodded toward the phone.
"I needed someone who was willing to be a witness."
