Chapter 1 - My Mother in His Arms
“Mom?”
Diane jumped away from Noah so fast her purse knocked against the fruit bowl.
For one second, nobody moved.
I stood in the kitchen doorway staring at my husband and my mother, trying to make what I had seen fit inside the house we lived in.
“You hugged me upstairs,” I said.
My voice sounded strange.
I pointed toward the stairs.
“Five minutes ago.”
Noah started toward me.
“Claire—”
Then I saw Mom’s purse on the counter beside the dinner plates, and I remembered what she had asked me upstairs.
Are you two okay?
The same question she had asked three weeks earlier when I finally told her the thing I could not bring myself to tell my husband.
Mom began to cry.
“I was worried about you.”
I grabbed a plate and smashed it into the sink.
The crash scared me almost as much as it scared them.
“Stop worrying about me!”
Noah took another step.
“DON’T.”
Mom reached out.
I backed away from her farther than I had from him.
Three weeks earlier, I had sat in her car outside a grocery store and told her I thought Noah was hiding money from me. I told her about the late nights, the hotel receipt in his coat, and the $186,000 transfer I had seen on a statement he quickly closed when I walked into his office.
I had also told her something worse.
“I met with a divorce attorney,” I said now.
Noah’s face changed.
Mom closed her eyes.
That was answer enough.
“You told him.”
“Claire, I was trying to—”
“You told him.”
Noah looked at Diane.
“What else did you tell her?”
I turned on him.
“What else?”
He dragged a hand over his face.
“Your mother wasn’t hugging me because we’re having an affair.”
Mom whispered, “Noah, don’t.”
He looked at me.
“She was begging me not to show you what’s in her purse.”
Diane grabbed for it.
I got there first.
Inside was my private note from the divorce attorney.
A flash drive with Noah’s name written across it.
And a blue accounting ledger I had last seen in my father’s locked desk the week he died.
Noah pointed at the ledger.
“That’s what I’ve been looking for for six months.”
I stared at my mother.
May you like
She stopped crying.
And for the first time that night, she looked afraid.
