Chapter 1: The Engagement Dress
I’m seven months pregnant with our first baby. A girl.
Tyler and I got married four years ago this month. Tyler is charming, and always one step ahead of the apology.
In the spring he started mentioning a coworker named Sienna. “Sienna is so funny.” “Sienna is so good with clients.” People have coworkers.
Then one night, out of nowhere, while he was loading the dishwasher, he said, “She’s married, by the way. Her husband’s name is Julian.”
I hadn’t asked. Now I know why he said it. You only explain the thing you’re afraid somebody will notice.
Last Wednesday, Tyler was in the shower when his phone lit up on the nightstand, eight inches from my face. I was lying on my side, the only way I can lie down anymore.
A message from Sienna: “Julian’s asking questions.”
I know his passcode. It’s our wedding date, “so I never forget,” he told me once. He never changed it.
I sat on the edge of the bed and read for an hour. The shower ran the whole time.
Lunches that weren’t lunches. “Client lunch at 12, back by 3. Putting it on the company card.” Hotel names near the highway. And jokes about me. My ankles. How I fall asleep on the couch by nine.
“She’s basically a roommate now,” he wrote in August. I was building the crib alone in the next room that night.
The last messages were Tyler’s, sent that afternoon.
“Anniversary dinner at my place Saturday. Bring Julian. He’ll relax.”
A minute later: “Wear the red dress. She won’t notice.”
I only own one red dress.
Deep-red satin, off the shoulder, a thin belt that ties at the waist. My mom found it with me in a little shop the week before Tyler proposed. She took in the waist herself, at her kitchen table, with pins in her mouth.
I wore it the night he asked me, on the roof of the restaurant where we had our first date. Our engagement photo hangs on our dining room wall: me in that dress, laughing so hard my eyes are shut.
Mom passed two years ago. The dress hasn’t fit me since spring. It was waiting in a garment bag at the back of our closet, for after the baby.
I put down his phone and opened the closet.
The garment bag was there. I unzipped it.
The hanger was empty.
That’s what “she won’t notice” meant. Not the affair. The dress. He’d taken my mother’s last gift to me off its hanger and handed it to his girlfriend, and he was sure I’d never look.
I photographed every page of the thread with my own phone. Then I zipped the empty bag shut, hung it back exactly where it was, and put his phone on the nightstand at the same angle.
When the water shut off, I was sitting up against the headboard with a book open on my belly.
“What do you want to do for our anniversary?” I asked.
He looked surprised. Then pleased, like the universe had just handed him something.
“Actually,” he said, “dinner here. Wes and Kate, Gabe and Renee. And I was going to invite Sienna and her husband. Good for work.”
He’d already invited them. I’d read it.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll make my mom’s roast chicken.”
