He had started showering later on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had come home twice smelling not like his own soap, but like the bright, citrusy kind hotels stocked in sleek little bottles. One Thursday in September, I had found glitter on the cuff of his jacket and told myself it was from an event. Two months before that, he had bought a sapphire pendant from a jeweler on Madison, then told me the stone was set wrong and he returned it.
At the time, I barely looked up from the baby registry when he said it.
Now I wrote it down.
By midnight, I had pages.
By one in the morning, I had emailed an old colleague named Dennis, who used to joke that I could smell fraud before the coffee finished brewing. He wrote back at 6:14 a.m. with one line.
You need a PI and a bulldog lawyer. Calling now.
The private investigator’s name was Doug Mercer. No relation to the lawyer I would meet later, which I only note because for a weird twenty-four hours I thought the universe might have developed a sense of narrative style.