Chapter 7: The Second Phone
I waited until Mason was asleep.
Tyler had driven us home from the airport in near silence.
Mason had talked the whole way — about the plane, about the landing, about whether his dad could teach him to fly someday — and Tyler had answered every question with the patience he always showed Mason, the one part of him I had never had reason to doubt.
I sat in the passenger seat and watched the highway and said almost nothing.
After Mason was in bed, Tyler came downstairs and found me at the kitchen table with my laptop open and the email from Carol pulled up on my phone beside it.
He saw the phone in my hand.
He saw my face.
"Sit down," I said.
He sat.
I set the phone on the table and turned it so he could read the email.
He didn't reach for it.
"Tyler.
Read it."
He read it.
I watched his eyes move across the screen.
I watched him reach the part about Renata.
I watched him reach the part about the second phone.
He set the phone down.
"Who is Carol?" I asked.
"She's a flight attendant."
"I know what she is.
How well does she know you?"
"We've worked together.
That's all."
"She knows about the second phone."
He was quiet.
"Do you still have it?"
He looked at the table.
"Tyler.
Do you still have the second phone?"
"Yes."
The word landed in the kitchen like something dropped.
"Where is it?"
"Jenna—"
"Where is it?"
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of his chair, and set a phone on the table.
Small.
Black.
The kind you can buy at a gas station.
I looked at it.
I didn't touch it.
"How many people have that number?"
He pressed his lips together.
"A few."
"Sophie?"
"Yes."
"Renata?"
He closed his eyes briefly.
"Yes."
"Anyone else?"
Silence.
"Anyone else, Tyler."
"There was someone before Renata.
It was brief.
It was over before Renata."
I sat back in my chair.
Three.
Three women, across what — two years?
Three?
And a phone he had kept specifically so that none of it would touch the life we had built in this house, the life that included the little boy sleeping upstairs with his headphones on his nightstand and his drawing of his dad on the wall above his bed.
*BEST PILOT EVER.* In giant, crooked letters.
"I want to ask you something," I said.
"And I want you to actually answer it."
He nodded.
"Did you ever intend to stop?
Or was this just — the life you decided you wanted?
Two lives.
This one and that one."
He was quiet for a long time.
"I told myself I was going to end it," he said finally.
"Each time."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"And Sophie.
The announcement on the plane.
What was that?"
He exhaled.
"I was going to tell her the truth this weekend.
I thought — I thought if I did something public, something that committed me, I'd have to follow through.
I'd have to tell her everything and end it properly."
I stared at him.
"You made a public declaration to your girlfriend on a plane full of strangers as a way to force yourself to break up with her?"
He heard how it sounded.
His jaw tightened.
"And you sent me a text telling me not to make it harder," I said.
"In case I happened to be on that flight.
Which I was.
With our son."
"I didn't know you were—"
"Stop saying that." My voice finally cracked, just slightly, at the edges.
"It doesn't matter whether you knew.
You built a situation where that text was necessary.
You built a situation where our son could have watched his father do that.
You made those choices, Tyler.
Every single one of them."
He put his face in his hands.
The second phone sat on the table between us.
After a moment I reached over and picked it up.
"I'm going to need the passwords," I said.
"For both phones.
And I'm going to need the name of the woman before Renata."
He looked up.
May you like
"And then," I said, "I'm going to call my sister.
And you're going to sleep somewhere else tonight."
