"I know you're angry."
"Angry?"
My voice rose before I could stop it.
"You have been lying to me for more than a year, and you think the problem is that I'm angry?"
He took a step forward.
"I love you."
I looked at him.
The words that once would have comforted me now felt almost insulting.
"How can you say that while admitting you've been sleeping with other women?"
He looked as though I had struck him.
"I never stopped loving you."
"Then what exactly have you been doing?"
He had no answer.
For several minutes, we stood in the kitchen while the ordinary sounds of the neighborhood continued outside. A delivery truck passed. Someone closed a garage door. A dog barked twice.
The world was behaving as though nothing had happened.
My world had changed completely.
Then my phone buzzed again.
This time, the message contained an address.
A small coffee shop downtown.
Underneath it was a sentence.
Come alone at 6 p.m. If you want the whole truth.
I read it twice.
Marcus moved toward me.
"Don't go."
I looked up.
"Why?"
"Because whoever is doing this is trying to destroy us."
I stared at him.
"You already destroyed the trust between us."
"That's not fair."
The words came out of his mouth before he could stop them.
For a moment, I simply looked at him.
Not fair.
He had lied about where he was going. He had kissed another woman while telling me he was working late. He had apparently maintained several secret relationships while I organized our household and believed we were building a life together.
And now he was worried that the person exposing his lies was being unfair.
"Do you know who sent the messages?" I asked.
"No."
"Do you know why they want me to go to this coffee shop?"
"No."
"Then how do you know they're trying to destroy us?"
He opened his mouth.
I waited.
Finally, he looked away.
That was when I realized he wasn't afraid that I would discover a lie.
He was afraid that I would discover the entire structure of them.
I picked up my phone.
"I'm going."
"Emma, please."
"I'll be back when I'm ready."
"What if something happens?"
I looked at him for a long moment.
"You had eighteen months to worry about what might happen. You chose to keep going."
Then I walked upstairs, changed my clothes, and left him standing in the kitchen.
For the first time in eleven years, I didn't tell my husband where I was going or when I would return.
I didn't owe him a report.
Not anymore.
Seven Women Were Waiting for Me
At six o'clock, I walked into the coffee shop.
It was a narrow place on a side street, with wooden tables, hanging plants, and large windows that looked onto the pavement. A few customers sat with laptops. A barista was wiping down the counter.
At first, I saw only two women at a table near the back.
Then I noticed the others.
Seven women sat around two tables pushed together.
They stopped talking when I entered.
For a second, I thought I might have walked into the wrong place.
Then one woman stood.
It was Olivia.
She looked different from the woman in the video. Her hair was tied back, and her face was pale. She wore no makeup that I could see. Her hands trembled slightly as she reached for the back of a chair.
"Emma?"
I nodded.
She swallowed.
"I'm sorry."
I didn't answer.
I had imagined confronting the woman in the video. I had imagined anger, accusations, perhaps a bitter exchange in which she would defend herself and I would demand to know what she thought she was doing.
But standing in front of her, I felt something more complicated.
She looked frightened.
Not because I might attack her, but because she knew she had participated in something that had caused another person pain.
A second woman stood beside Olivia.
"My name is Tessa," she said. "Thank you for coming."
I looked around the table.
"What's going on?"
Tessa glanced at the other women.
"We're going to tell you everything we know. But before we start, I want you to understand something. We didn't arrange this because we wanted to humiliate you."
I thought of the lingerie on my car.
"The driveway was a strange way to show that."
She lowered her eyes.
"You're right."
Olivia spoke quietly.
"That wasn't my idea."
"Whose idea was it?"
No one answered immediately.
I pulled out a chair and sat down.
"Start at the beginning."
Tessa placed her phone on the table.
She had prepared a folder of screenshots, photographs, and documents. There were dates, names, message histories, and notes comparing different versions of Marcus's schedule.
The first screenshot showed a message from Marcus.
I wish I could spend more time with you, but work and family make everything complicated.
Another read:
My wife and I have been living separate lives for a long time.
A third:
The divorce is basically a formality at this point.
I stared at the screen.
"He's never filed for divorce," I said.
"We know," Tessa replied.
"He's never even discussed divorce with me."
"I know."
She said it gently, but the words still hurt.
The women had discovered one another accidentally, Tessa explained. One had seen a photograph on social media. Another recognized Marcus in the background of a picture posted by someone else. A conversation that began with a question eventually revealed that several of them were dating the same man.
At first, each had assumed there was some misunderstanding.
Marcus had told Olivia that his marriage was strained and that he and I were discussing separation.
He had told another woman, Rachel, that we were staying together only because selling the house would be financially complicated.
He had told Tessa that we were effectively separated, even though we shared a bedroom, ate dinner together, and attended family gatherings as a married couple.
Another woman had been told that Marcus and I had already agreed to an open marriage.
I stared at her.
"An open marriage?"