Chapter 3: The Woman Who Called First
I didn't sleep that night.
I lay in Bernice's guest room with Nell on my chest and stared at the ceiling and thought about Adam's mother.
Patricia Brewer was not a warm woman.
She sent birthday cards that arrived three days late and always addressed to "Adam's wife." She had attended our wedding with the expression of someone enduring a long flight.
In four years of marriage, she had called me directly exactly twice — once when Adam was in a car accident and she couldn't reach him, and once to tell me that the Christmas gift I had sent was the wrong size.
She had not called when Nell was born.
Not a text.
Not a card.
Nothing.
And now, somehow, she had called Adam to tell him I had been saying things.
I waited until Nell was settled and then I walked to the kitchen doorway where Bernice was washing bottles at the sink.
"Bernice," I said.
"Did you speak to Patricia?
Adam's mother?"
She turned off the tap.
Dried her hands slowly.
"No."
"Did anyone call her from this house?"
"Not from me." She set the towel down.
"Why?"
"Adam said she called him.
Said I've been telling people things about him."
Bernice's face went through something careful.
"Marina.
I need to show you something."
She picked up her own phone from the counter and opened her recent calls.
She turned the screen toward me.
There was a number I didn't recognize — a 412 area code, Pittsburgh — listed four times over the past two weeks.
The most recent call was the morning of March 9.
The morning of my fever.
The morning Adam didn't answer.
"Who is that?" I asked.
"I don't know," Bernice said.
"But whoever it is called me that morning and asked how you were doing.
Said they were a family friend checking in.
I told them you had a fever and that we'd been trying to reach Adam."
My hand found the counter.
"You told a stranger I had a fever and that Adam wasn't answering."
"I thought they were your friend.
They knew your name.
They knew Nell's name."
I took the phone and looked at the number again.
Then I opened my own contacts and scrolled until I found what I was looking for.
My thumb stopped.
The last four digits matched a number I had seen once, saved under a name I had never called.
Savannah Cole.
Work.
I set Bernice's phone on the counter very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands have started to shake and you don't want anyone to notice.
"She was gathering information," I said.
It wasn't a question.
Bernice looked at me steadily.
"What do you want to do?"
I thought about Adam standing in that kitchen with roses.
I thought about Patricia calling him to report that I had been "saying things" — things she had been told by a woman who had spent twenty days in Florida with my husband.
I thought about the way Savannah's voice had sounded on that call.
*Adam, the car's here.* Familiar.
Comfortable.
Like a woman who knew exactly where the car would be waiting.
"I want to know everything," I said.
"Starting with what she said to you on that first call."
Bernice pulled out the chair across from me and sat down.
She folded her hands on the table.
And she began.
Savannah had called four days after Adam left.
She had introduced herself as a colleague and close friend of the family.
She had asked about my recovery in a tone Bernice described as concerned but slightly too specific — asking whether I was managing alone, whether I seemed overwhelmed, whether I had mentioned anything about Adam's travel schedule being a problem.
Bernice had answered carefully, saying only that I was recovering and that Nell was healthy.
The second call came the day I moved into Bernice's guest room.
Savannah had somehow already known I had left the house.
"How?" I asked.
"I don't know," Bernice said.
"Unless someone told her."
We looked at each other across the table.
"Adam," I said.
Bernice didn't answer.
She didn't need to.
My husband had been reporting my movements to the woman he was supposedly only working with.
While I was running a fever in a borrowed guest room, while Bernice was writing his initials in a medical notebook because he wouldn't pick up his phone, Adam had been keeping Savannah informed.
Nell made a small sound from the next room.
I stood up automatically.
"Bernice," I said from the doorway.
"Don't delete those calls."
"I wasn't going to," she said quietly.
I went to check on my daughter.
And for the first time since March 4, I stopped asking myself whether I had been wrong about what was happening.
I hadn't been wrong about anything.
May you like
What I hadn't known yet was that Savannah's calls to Bernice were not the worst of it.
That would come two days later, when Adam walked through the front door of Bernice's house — uninvited, unannounced — and said something that made Bernice step directly between him and me.
