Chapter 4: What Pauline Had Kept to Herself
I sat at Pauline's kitchen table with both hands wrapped around a mug of tea I hadn't asked for and wouldn't drink, and I waited.
Pauline sat across from me.
She was turning her wedding ring around her finger the way she did when she was choosing her words carefully.
"Before you and Daniel got engaged," she said, "I ran into his ex-girlfriend.
Claire.
You remember I mentioned her once."
"You said they dated for two years and it ended badly."
"I didn't tell you all of it." Pauline looked at the table.
"Claire told me that Dorothy had done something similar to her.
Not a clock.
She didn't know exactly what it was.
But she said that toward the end of her relationship with Daniel, Dorothy seemed to know things she shouldn't have known.
Private things.
Arguments Claire had with her own mother.
A conversation Claire had with her doctor."
I set the mug down.
"Claire thought Dorothy was listening to her."
"Claire thought she was losing her mind," Pauline said.
"That's what she told me.
She said she started to feel like she couldn't trust her own memory.
Like things she'd said in private kept surfacing in conversations where they didn't belong.
She ended the relationship partly because she thought she was becoming paranoid."
"She wasn't paranoid."
"No," Pauline said.
"She wasn't."
I looked at the device on the table between us.
"You didn't tell me any of this before I married him."
"Claire wasn't certain," Pauline said.
"She had no proof.
And I didn't want to—" She stopped.
"You didn't want to what?"
"I didn't want to be the reason you didn't marry someone you loved." Her voice was quiet.
"I thought maybe I was reading too much into it.
I thought maybe Claire was bitter.
I told myself it was probably nothing."
"It wasn't nothing."
"I know." She met my eyes.
"I'm sorry, Christine.
I should have told you.
I've thought about it a hundred times since."
I didn't say anything for a moment.
There was a version of me that wanted to be angry at Pauline, and I could feel it there, present and real.
But underneath it was something that understood exactly how easy it was to dismiss a thing that seemed impossible until you were holding the proof in your own hand.
"Does Claire still live nearby?" I asked.
"About forty minutes north.
I have her number somewhere."
"I want to talk to her."
Pauline nodded.
She got up and found her phone.
While she scrolled, I thought about Dorothy's voice on the call.
The absence of apology.
The complete, settled confidence of someone who had done something and decided long ago that it was justified.
*A woman who trusts her husband doesn't hide money from him.*
She had listened to fourteen months of my life and concluded that I was the problem.
"Here," Pauline said, sliding a piece of paper across the table.
I looked at the number.
"Did Daniel know about Claire?
About what she suspected?"
Pauline sat back down.
"That's the part I don't know."
"But you have a guess."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Claire said that when she tried to bring it up with Daniel — the feeling that things were being listened to — he told her she was being paranoid.
He said it gently.
Kindly, even.
But he said it consistently, every time she raised it, until she stopped raising it."
I thought about Daniel in the doorway.
The crossed arms.
The too-calm voice asking where I'd found it.
*Mom sends me clips sometimes.
When she thinks something is important.*
He had known.
Not just recently.
He had always known.
My phone buzzed on the table.
I looked at the screen.
Daniel: *Please come home.
We can work through this.*
I turned the phone face-down.
"I need a lawyer," I said.
Pauline didn't argue.
She didn't tell me to slow down or think it through or give it a few days.
She just reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
"My friend Rachel handles family law," she said.
"I'll call her tonight."
I nodded.
I picked up the device and turned it over in my fingers.
It was lighter than it looked.
Smaller than a matchbox.
The kind of thing that could sit on a shelf for fourteen months and never once look like what it was.
"I want to know everything it recorded," I said.
"I want to know if there are others."
"Others?"
I looked up at her.
"Dorothy didn't just give me a clock.
She gave Daniel's last girlfriend something too.
I want to know if this is a pattern.
I want to know how many times she's done this."
Pauline's face went still.
"Because if it's a pattern," I said, "then Claire isn't the only one who can speak to it."
My phone lit up again.
This time it wasn't Daniel.
It was a number I didn't recognize.
Local area code.
I stared at it for a moment, then answered.
"Is this Christine?" A woman's voice.
Careful.
Almost hesitant.
"Yes.
Who is this?"
A pause.
"My name is Claire," she said.
May you like
"I think we need to talk.
I've been waiting for this call for almost two years."
