Chapter 6: The Name in the Pocket
I didn't call the attorney that night.
I made dinner.
I set the table.
When Carter came in and sat down, we talked about ordinary things — whether the gutters needed cleaning, whether our oldest was ready to move up a reading level at school.
It was almost normal.
It was the kind of almost-normal that I had been accepting for years without examining it too closely.
After dinner I washed up.
Carter dried.
We stood at the sink side by side the way we had a thousand times, and I thought: *this is either a marriage worth saving or a very convincing performance of one.* I couldn't tell which.
He went to bed at ten.
I said I'd be up soon.
I sat at the kitchen table with the piece of paper from Renee and my phone and I did what I should have done months ago.
I searched Diane Marsh's name.
She wasn't hard to find.
LinkedIn profile, professional headshot, listed as a senior project manager at a consulting firm — not Carter's company, but a firm his company contracted with regularly.
The kind of arrangement where two people would work closely together for months at a time and no one would think twice about it.
She was forty-three.
Divorced.
No children listed.
I looked at her photo for a long moment.
Then I closed the browser.
I wasn't going to build a case on LinkedIn.
I needed something real.
The next morning, Monday, Carter went to work as usual.
Kissed me on the cheek.
Said he'd try to be home by seven.
The kids came back from my mother's at noon — all six of them, loud and sunburned and full of stories about the garden and the cookies they'd baked.
I held the baby for a long time and breathed in the smell of his hair.
My mother stayed for tea.
She sat at the table while I got the older ones settled, and when it was just the two of us she looked at me carefully.
"You seem different," she said.
"Different how?"
"Steadier." She wrapped her hands around her cup.
"Like you've made a decision about something."
"I haven't made any decisions yet."
"No," she said.
"But you're going to."
I didn't argue with her.
She knew me better than that.
After she left I put the baby down for a nap, got the older children set up with a film, and sat at the kitchen table with a notepad.
I wrote down everything I knew as facts — not feelings, not interpretations, just facts.
The notification.
The name.
The message preview.
The way Carter had refused to show me his phone.
The way he'd left rather than answer a direct question.
The way his apology had addressed his behavior but never the original question.
It was a short list.
But it was a clear one.
I called the number on Renee's piece of paper.
The attorney's name was Patrick Hale.
His assistant answered and I explained that I was a friend of Renee's sister and that I needed a consultation — not urgent, but soon.
She gave me an appointment for Thursday morning.
I wrote it in my calendar under *dentist.*
That evening Carter came home at six-thirty, earlier than he'd said.
He brought flowers — not a grand gesture, just a small bunch of yellow ones from the petrol station near the motorway, the kind he used to bring in the early years when he'd done something thoughtless and wanted to smooth it over without naming what it was.
He handed them to me at the door.
"Peace offering," he said, and smiled.
I took them.
"Thank you."
"I've been thinking about what you said.
About checking in.
About whether we're aligned." He followed me to the kitchen while I found a vase.
"I think you're right that we've drifted.
I want to fix that."
"What does fixing it look like to you?" I asked.
"More time together.
Date nights.
I could take the kids on Saturday mornings so you get a real break." He leaned against the counter.
"I know I've been checked out.
I want to do better."
I filled the vase and put the flowers in it.
"That would be good," I said.
He seemed relieved.
He kissed my temple and went to find the children.
I stood at the sink and looked at the yellow flowers.
They were already starting to wilt at the edges.
Petrol station flowers always did.
Thursday was four days away.
I could be a wife for four more days.
May you like
I had done harder things than that.
What I hadn't counted on was what happened Tuesday night — when Carter's phone rang at eleven-fifteen, and he took it to the garage to answer it, and came back twenty minutes later with mud on his shoes and a story about a work call that didn't hold together no matter how I turned it.
