“She printed a hotel bill with your name and your room on it.”
“She printed a vendetta.” I heard him shift. Somewhere down a hallway an ice machine hummed. “Babe. I’m three hundred feet from a clients’ dinner at seven. Farrow’s whole purchasing team is flying in. You want me to send you the reservation? I’ll send you the reservation.”
“Why does she have your room number?”
“Because she’s in contracts. She sees everybody’s travel.” He sighed, and it was the sigh of a man being reasonable at the end of a long day. “The Wexler who? Is that the place out on the highway?”
I did not answer that. I had said the name of the hotel exactly once, thirty seconds earlier, and now he was asking me to explain it.
“Look,” he said. “I love you. Throw it away and I’ll deal with her when I’m home.”
I told him I would throw it away. I put it back in the tote bag instead.
My last reading group ends at three-fifteen and I am usually home by four. That day I did not go into the kitchen. I went into the office we share, the little back room with his desk on the window side and mine against the wall, and I opened the laptop he leaves docked there.
I want to be honest about my reasoning. I told myself I was looking for Corinne Adair’s phone number, so I could call her myself and end it. What I opened was the shared drive, the one with the house insurance scans and the dishwasher warranty, and under a folder called Halvorsen there was a subfolder called Claims.
Fourteen months of expense reports. His name on every form, his employee number, the same block of boxes.
I opened the first one. Mileage, local, $6.72. Parking, $18.00.
I opened the next. Mileage. Parking.
The forty-one pages spread out under the desk lamp, and I went through every one. The total he had been reimbursed came to $11,400, and not one claim in fourteen months had a plane ticket on it. No airfare. No Denver hotel. No rental car, no airport shuttle, nothing with a gate or a seat assignment. Just miles and parking, miles and parking, month after month, for trips he had described to me in detail while I stood at the sink.
I felt calm in a way that frightened me. I went back to the top and started again, slower, reading the receipts stapled to each form instead of the boxes he had typed.
The newest claim was filed three weeks ago. The parking receipt attached to it was a photographed white slip, and the header printed across the top of that slip was not a lot number or a garage code.
Wexler House Garage, 1420 Fenwick Road. In at 6:52 p.m.
I sat back and looked at the clock on his side of the room. Six-forty. Somewhere four miles from that desk, my husband was sitting down to dinner with Farrow’s purchasing team. I printed the claim, folded it, put it in the tote bag with the folio, and then I stayed in the dark office listening to the refrigerator cycle on and off, because I already knew what I meant to do in the morning, and I did not want to be a woman who did it.
I did not go to the Wexler House in the morning.
That is the smaller confession, and I want it out of the way before the bigger ones. I left the house at seven-twenty with the folio in my tote and the printed claim folded inside it. At the light on Fenwick I put my blinker on. Then I turned it off. The building sat back from the road behind a row of bare trees, four floors of brick with a gold W on the sign, and I looked up at the fourth floor for as long as a red light allows.
At school I tested a boy named Elliott for his /s/ and wrote the same note on his sheet twice. At lunch I sat in my car in the staff lot with the engine off and the windows fogging and did not eat.
