The first thing Daniel Mercer noticed was that Richard Hale had put his expensive watch on the bedside table beside Daniel’s wedding ring dish.
It was an ordinary ceramic dish, chipped at one corner, a gift from Jessica’s mother before she died.
Daniel had repaired the chip with glue because Jessica could not bear to throw it away.
Now a stranger’s silver watch lay across the painted blue flowers as if everything in that room belonged to him.
Richard was buttoning his white shirt.
Jessica was sitting against the headboard with the sheet drawn to her chest.
Their wedding photograph hung on the wall above them, the glass reflecting a strip of afternoon sunshine.
Daniel had spent twenty minutes in his truck outside the house before walking in, trying to imagine the room empty, trying to convince himself Caroline Hale must have misunderstood.
The open bedroom door destroyed that last possibility.
“Your wife chose me, Daniel,” Richard said.
“What exactly are you going to do about it?”
His voice had the easy contempt of a man accustomed to having his anger mistaken for authority.
“Get out of my house.”
Richard looked at Jessica, expecting her to rescue him from the embarrassment.
She did not move.
His expression hardened.
“I pay your wife’s salary,” he said.
“I could ruin both of you before breakfast.”
Daniel had imagined shouting.
He had imagined dragging the man outside, smashing the watch, tearing the photograph from the wall.
Instead he took an invitation from the pocket of his work jacket.
Its cream-colored paper had softened along the fold because he had opened and closed it a dozen times since Caroline pressed it into his hand that morning.
He held it up without stepping closer to the bed.
“Jessica, where did you meet Richard?”
“At the company dinner,” she said, too quickly.
“You know that.”
“That’s what he told you.”
Richard stopped buttoning his shirt.
Jessica looked from the invitation to her husband’s face.
“Caroline showed me the original invitation,” Daniel said.
“The dinner wasn’t arranged by your company.”
He waited for an explanation, but silence spread through the bedroom.
A delivery truck passed outside, rattling the loose pane in the front window.
He had been meaning to fix that pane for months.
He found himself thinking of the ladder in his garage, the spare glazing putty on the shelf, all the little household repairs that had once meant they were building something together.
