Chapter 4
Chapter 4 - What the Mornings Looked Like
Two days later, Melissa's phone buzzed on my kitchen counter while I was making coffee.
It was her, texting her own number.
She said she was nervous the phone was missing.
She asked if we could meet.
She said she understood if I said no.
I thought about not answering for about an hour.
Then I texted her back the name of a park near the library, in the afternoon, in the open, where there would be other people and benches and no front doors.
She got there first.
She was smaller than I remembered from the anniversary dinner last year.
She was in jeans and a plain gray sweatshirt, no robe, no makeup, and her hair pulled back the way you pull it back when you've been crying and you're tired of putting yourself together for other people.
She didn't pretend to be innocent.
She sat down on the other end of the bench and folded her hands and said, "I'm not going to tell you I didn't know what I was doing."
I said, "Good."
She said Aaron told her we were separated.
She said he told her the deployment was the separation, that it was the thing we were both waiting for, and that I was finishing the paperwork on my side.
She said she believed him for a while because he was careful with his words.
She said he invited her to the house.
Sometimes at six in the morning.
Sometimes on weekends, when he knew I'd be on a rotation with no signal.
She said the first time she wore the robe, he handed it to her because she was cold.
She said after that it stopped being an accident.
She said she is not going to ask me to forgive her.
I told her I wasn't ready to hear an apology, and she nodded like she'd expected that.
I asked her who set the terms of that story.
She said Aaron did.
She said she was the one who kept believing him when he changed the dates, and that was on her.
I watched a man walk his dog past us and I waited until he was out of earshot.
Then she said, "There is one thing I need you to know about the money."
I said, "Don't."
She reached in her purse anyway and pulled out a folded bank statement, creased on three sides like it had been carried around for a week while she decided whether to show it to me.
It was a savings account.
Two names on it: Aaron and Melissa, joint.
Opened in April.
The same April he called me and asked me to switch my deployment pay deposits into "our household account" so we could "save better while I was gone."
The same April he told me the tax refund was delayed.
The account had money in it.
Every month from April through the week I came home.
Some of it was his auto transfer.
Some of it was money I couldn't account for if it wasn't mine.
I sat there in the sun and read the statement three times.
Then I asked her a question I already knew the answer to.
"Did he open it in your name so it wouldn't show up under mine?"
She said, "That's what he told me."
I folded the paper back on its creases.
I put it in my jacket pocket, on the inside, the way I carry a checklist before a mission.
I stood up from the bench.
I told her I didn't forgive her, and I might never, and that was the truth.
I also told her that I wasn't going to burn her down to get to him.
I told her if she kept the statements and didn't spend a dime from that account, and didn't tell Aaron we'd met, she could be a witness instead of another person I had to get past.
She said, "Okay."
She said it quietly, to the ground.
I walked back to my truck and sat in the driver's seat for a while with my hands on the wheel.
The affair was one thing.
The affair was something I could survive.
But this April account told me the affair had a calendar and a budget, and that means it had a plan.
May you like
I started the truck and drove to my bank, and I asked to speak to a manager, and I told the woman behind the glass, "I need a printout of every joint account my name is on, and I need it dated."
Then I called the woman at my unit who handles legal, and I said, "I think I need to file something."
