The private investigator’s report was precise and ugly. Dates. Photographs. Locations. Grant entering hotels with Vivian. Grant leaving restaurants and touching the small of her back. Grant kissing her in a parking garage three months before Colleen’s due date. One picture showed them laughing. Grant looked younger in it than he had at the funeral, as though deceit were keeping him well-rested.
The screenshots were worse.
Grant: Once the babies are born and everything settles, we’ll be free.
Vivian: She suspects something.
Grant: She always signs whatever I put in front of her.
Dorothy went still.
Whatever I put in front of her.
She looked at the separate phone bill and saw hundreds of calls and messages to Vivian’s number across two years.
Not a mistake.
Not a lapse.
An entire second life.
By the time Dorothy started the car, she knew exactly where she was going.
Emmett Calloway lived in a brick colonial with a porch swing and a porch light that never turned off because his wife believed darkness invited accidents. He opened the door in slippers and reading glasses, looked at Dorothy’s face, then at the manila envelope in her hand, and stepped aside without asking a single question.